SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH (1798 to about 1830)

THE GREAT WRITERS OF 1798-1830. THE CRITICAL REVIEWS.

As we look back to-day over the literature of the last three quarters of the eighteenth century, the progress of the Romantic Movement seems the most conspicuous general fact which it presents. But the movement was to arrive at full maturity only in the work of the great writers of the following quarter century, who were to create the finest body of literature which England had produced since the Elizabethan period. All the greatest of these writers were poets, wholly or in part, and they fall roughly into two groups: first, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Walter Scott; and second, about twenty years younger, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. The beginning of the Romantic triumph is found, by general consent, in the publication in 1798 of the little volume of «Lyrical Ballads» which contained the first significant poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

The poets Wordsworth and Coleridge are of special interest not only from the primary fact that they are among the greatest of English authors, but also secondarily because in spite of their close personal association each expresses one of the two main contrasting or complementary tendencies in the Romantic movement; Coleridge – the delight in wonder and mystery, which he has the power to express with marvelous poetic suggestiveness, and Wordsworth, in an extreme degree, - the belief in the simple and quiet forces, both of human life and of Nature.

Coleridge’s genius suddenly expanded into short-lived but wonderful activity and he wrote most of his few great poems, «The Ancient Mariner», «Kubla Khan», and the First Part of «Christabel». «The Ancient Mariner» was planned by Coleridge and Wordsworth on one of their frequent rambles, and was to have been written in collaboration; but as it proceeded, Wordsworth found his manner so different from that of Coleridge that he withdrew altogether from the undertaking. The final result of the incident, however, was the publication in 1798 of «Lyrical Ballads», which included of Coleridge’s work only this one poem, but of Wordsworth’s several of his most characteristic ones. Coleridge afterwards explained that the plan of the volume contemplated two complementary sorts of poems. He was to present supernatural or romantic characters, yet investing them with human interest and semblance of truth; while Wordsworth was to add the charm of novelty to everyday things and to suggest their kinship to the supernatural, arousing readers from their accustomed blindness to the loveliness and wonders of the world around us. No better description could be given of the poetic spirit and the whole poetic work of the two men. Like some other epoch-marking books, «Lyrical Ballads» attracted little attention. Shortly after its publication Coleridge and the Wordsworths sailed for Germany, where for the greater part of a year Coleridge worked hard, if irregularly, at the language, literature, and philosophy.

As a poet Coleridge’s first great distinction is that he gives wonderfully subtle and appealing expression to the Romantic sense for the strange and the supernatural, and indeed for all that the word «Romance» connotes at the present day. He accomplishes this result partly through his power of suggesting the real unity of the inner and outer worlds, partly through his skill, resting in a large degree on vivid impressionistic description, in making strange scenes appear actual. Almost everyone has felt the weird charm of «The Ancient Mariner», where all the unearthly story centers about a moral and religious idea, and where we are dazzled by a constant succession of pictures.

«Christabel» achieves what Coleridge himself described as the very difficult task of creating witchery by daylight; and «Kubla Khan», worthy, though a brief fragment, to rank with these two, is a marvelous glimpse of fairyland.

In the second place, Coleridge is one of the greatest English masters of exquisite verbal melody, with its tributary devices of alliteration and haunting onomatopoeia. In this respect especially his influence on subsequent English poetry has been incalculable. With a better body and will Coleridge might have been one of the supreme English poets; as it is, he has left a small number of very great poems and has proved one of the most powerful influences on later English poetry.

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