LIFE OF S.T. COLRIDGE
LIFE OF S.T. COLRIDGE
Unit-30 Coleridge
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772- 1834). Born in 1772, Coleridge was at Jesus College from 179 1 to 1794. In 1797, he married Sarah Fricker. Age of Romantic Revival. His friendship with Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy with whom he had long walks made him the kind of poet that he was. The three influenced one another's thought and sensibility. Another reason for his sudden decadence is his lack of self-confidence, which can partially be attributed to his addiction to narcotics. I 1 i This caused deep frustration in him. He worked by fits and succeeded in flashes, and failed to finish long and ambitious works undertaken by him.
German metaphysics fascinated Coleridge, and turned the poet into a philosopher. This caused no enrichment to his poetry, but the combination of poetic sensibility with philosophical subtlety made him an almost perfect critic. His years of full poetic inspiration were few, two at the most (1 797-98), and hence the quantity of his best work is in inverse proportion to its quality.
Broadly speaking, there are four periods in Coleridge's poetic career.
The earliest period extends from 1794 to 1796 and it includes works like the Song of the Pixies, Lines on an Autumnal Evening and Lewti (1794) and Religious Musings (1795 -96).
Then came the second atld blossoming period (1796 -97) when he wrote Ode to the Departing Year: The Lime Tree Bower:Frost at Midnight, Fears in Solitude, etc, Full blossoming came
in the next phase when he was at the height of his poetic genius. Great poems like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christable-and Kubla Khan were written during this period.
And the fourth and last period came with a decline in inspiration and achievement. Two poems of great merit, of course, were written in this period too: Dejection: an Ode -and Love.
COLERIDGE AS A CRITIC
His Biographia Literaria is a great work. Today Coleridge is better remembered as a critic than as a poet. His Biographia Literaria is a great work in which one gets for the first time solid theories of criticism. The starting point of Coleridge is, of course, Wordsworth's preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Then he proceeds to examine Wordsworth's poems
Despite his romantic sensibility, in his criticism Coleridge is very objective. He does not disregard 'facts' and tries his best to be unprejudiced. Even T.S. Eliot's criticism draws heavily from Coleridge's viewpoint and stand. Owing to this objectivity, . Coleridge can reach the essential depth of any kind of art and discover the harmonizing and sustaining force therein.
There was a feeling and sense of Freedom. ' In Wordsworth it was the freedom of going into Nature and breathing to fill her pure and purifying air. In Coleridge it was the freedom of entering the strange and mysterious zone of the supernatural. Byron and Shelley craved for a new social order based on intellectual freedom, scientific reasoning, and an unprejudiced political system. Keats sang. 'Ever let the fancy pleasure never be at home.'
Coleridge went to France to actively participate in the revolution, but, seeing the bloody and blind turn it took, withdrew from it, though the cardinal ideas that had caused the revolution silently and in~perceptibly crept into the English mind and brought about a change in life, thought and attitude of the English people.
Kubla Khan, Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Broad and basic qualities in Coleridge's poetry are the following:
a. Artistic treatment of the supernatural
b. Medievalism
c. Herman nature and external nature: relationship in reciprocity
d. Creation of a dream-world authenticated by psychoanalysis
e. Imaginative flights
f. Lyricism
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