Page 37 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Elective English—IV

Notes relationships between the mind and nature as it exists as a distinct unit. Poems such as “The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan” exhibit Samuel’s talent for creating strange,
disturbing tales filled with magic and fantastic imagery; in poems such as “Dejection: An Ode,”
and “Frost at Midnight” he thinks openly on the nature of the mind during its interaction with
the creative source of nature.
Samuel got married in 1795 and spent most of the next decade residing near and travelling with
William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. In 1799, Samuel met Sara Hutchinson and fell in
love with her. Samuel became an opium addict and it is believed that “Kubla Khan” came from
an opium dream. In 1816, Samuel moved in with the surgeon James Gillman in order to protect
his health. During his stay with Gillman, Samuel penned many of his significant non-fiction
works, which included the highly considered Biographia Literaria. Though he continuously wrote
till he took his last breath in 1834, Romanticism was primarily a movement about youth, and
today Samuel is remembered mainly for the poems he penned down in his twenties.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England. He was also a
member of the Lake Poets. Samuel penned down poems like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and
Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, including the
one on Shakespeare, was very influential. Samuel also helped to introduce German idealist
philosophy to an English-speaking culture. He invented several familiar words and phrases,
including the celebrated suspension of disbelief. He was the main influence on Emerson, and
American transcendentalism.
In the canon of English poetry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s place rests on a reasonably small
body of achievement: his contribution to the revolutionary publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1797
and a few poems he wrote in the late 1790s and early 1800s. In contrast to Wordsworth, Samuel’s
work cannot be understood through the lens of the 1802 preface to the second edition of that
book; although it looks like William Wordsworth’s in its romanticism of nature and its stress on
human joy. Samuel’s poems frequently favour sound effects over the simplicity of common
speech. The hypnotic drone of “Kubla Khan” and the intentional archaisms of “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner” do not imitate common speech, producing instead a more strikingly stylised
effect.
Additionally, Samuel’s poems make the phenomena Wordsworth takes for granted, complicated:
the simple unity between nature and the child and the adult’s recombination with nature through
memories of childhood; in poems like “Frost at Midnight,” Samuel specifies the delicateness of
the child’s innocence by linking to his own urban childhood. In poems like “Nightingale,” and
“Dejection: An Ode” Samuel lays emphasis on the beauty of the natural world and the division
between his own mind. Finally, Samuel frequently honours strange stories and unusual imagery
over the ordinary, rustic simplicities. If William denotes the central pillar of early Romanticism,
Samuel is still a significant structural support. Samuel’s stress on imagination, its creation of
fantastic pictures and its independence from the outside world similar to those found in The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner applied a deep influence on later writers such as Shelley; his representation
of feelings of numbness and alienation helped to clearly define the Romantics’ idealised contrast
between the joys of nature and the emptiness of the city where such feelings are felt. The sharp
and sensitive understanding of these feelings also helped to form the stereotype of the suffering.
Romantic genius, a lot of times characterised by drug addiction: this figure of the bright yet
sadly unable to attain his own ideals, the idealist, is the main pose for Samuel in his poetry.
Samuel’s depiction of the mind as it moves, whether in frenzy (“Kubla Khan”) or in silence
(“Frost at Midnight”) also helped to describe the intimate emotionalism of Romanticism; while
most of the poetry is made up of emotion remembered in tranquillity, the origin of Samuel’s
poems frequently looks like emotion recollected in emotion. It is believed that Samuel not only
retains a legitimate intellectual presence throughout his work but also maintains emotional

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