Coleridge's Poetry (SparkNotes Literature Guide)

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Coleridge's Poetry (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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• Language: English
• Publisher: SparkNotes
• Release date: Aug 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781411474512

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Cover of SparkNotes Guide to Coleridge’s Poetry by SparkNotes Editors

Coleridge’s Poetry

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

© 2003, 2007 by Spark Publishing

This Spark Publishing edition 2014 by SparkNotes LLC, an Affiliate of Barnes & Noble

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Contents

Context

Analysis

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Parts I-IV

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Parts V-VII

Frost at Midnight

The Nightingale

Kubla Khan

Dejection: An Ode

Study Questions

Review & Resources

Context

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devon in

1772

. His father, a clergyman, moved his family to London when Coleridge was young, and it was there that Coleridge attended school (as he would later recall in poems such as Frost at Midnight). He later attended Cambridge but left without completing his studies. During the politically charged atmosphere of the late eighteenth century—the French Revolution had sent shockwaves through Europe, and England and France were at war—Coleridge made a name for himself both as a political radical and as an important young poet; along with his friends Robert Southey and William Wordsworth, he became one of the most important writers in England. Collaborating with Wordsworth on the revolutionary Lyrical Ballads of

1798

, Coleridge helped to inaugurate the Romantic era in England; as Wordsworth explained it in the

1802

preface to the third edition of the work, the idea of poetry underlying Lyrical Ballads turned the established conventions of poetry upside down: Privileging natural speech over poetic ornament, simply stated themes over elaborate symbolism, emotion over abstract thought, and the experience of natural beauty over urban sophistication, the book paved the way for two generations of poets, and stands as one of the milestones of European literature.

While Coleridge made important contributions to Lyrical Ballads, it was much more Wordsworth’s project than Coleridge’s; thus, while it is possible to understand Wordsworth’s poetic output in light of his preface to the

1802

edition of the volume, the preface’s ideas should not be used to analyze Coleridge’s work. Insofar as Wordsworth was the poet of nature, the purity of childhood, and memory, Coleridge became the poet of imagination, exploring the relationships between nature and the mind as it exists as a separate entity. Poems such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan demonstrate Coleridge’s talent for concocting bizarre, unsettling stories full of fantastic imagery and magic; in poems such as Frost at Midnight and Dejection: An Ode, he