MAJOR WORKS

Lyrical Ballads

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Christabel

Kubla Khan

Biographia Literaria

LIFE

S.T. Coleridge was born in 1772, the youngest of ten children. After his father’s death he was sent away to a London charity school. At Cambridge he met the radical poet Robert Southey. Together they planned to establish a utiopian community in New England. Coleridge left Cambridge without a degree and almost on an impulse married the sister of Southey’s fiancée. The utopian project was soon abandoned, and the marriage turned out a failure: the couple lived apart for most of their lives.

In 1795 Coleridge met Wordsworth and this encounter produced one of the most creative partnerships in English literature. Coleridge’s talent was fully disclosed during his association with Wordsworth.

Coleridge soon became disillusioned with the political radicalism inspired by the French Revolution and turned his attention to German philosophy. He also translated some works by Schiller into English.

Coleridge suffered all his life from various health problems, and as the only available relief for pain was opium, he became addicted to it.

Later, Coleridge worked as a journalist, gave lectures that established his reputation as a distinguished literary critic.

WORKS

Coleridge’s reputation as a poet is based on a small but magnificent corpus of work. Coleridge turned to the past for mystery and wonder and took his readers into the fantastic world of imagination

Coleridge’s poetry often deals with the mysterious, the supernatural and the extraordinary. He glorifies the spirit of man living in harmony with his natural environment. While Wordsworth looked for the spiritual in everyday objects, Coleridge wanted to give the supernatural a coloring of everyday reality.

The cornerstone of Coleridge’s aesthetics is the imagination. He divides imagination into primary and secondary. Primary is ability to perceive the world as if repeating the eternal process of creation. The secondary imagination is the deliberate effort, the author’s will in creating poetry. Imagination gives life to lifeless objects, enlivens the world. It is contrasted with Fancy, which is controlled by the will.

Art for Coleridge is a natural phenomenon, and like all nature is a personification of God. With the help of imagination the poet partakes in the sacred element; he creates the atmosphere of harmony where reason and spirit as it were merge (fuse). Poet and nature are inseparable and interdependent. The essence of poetry is defined through its aesthetic nature. (“Pleasure, not truth”)

His romantic outlook found expression in his Rhyme of Ancient Mariner. It is noted for the feeling of mystery, and the unknown. The poem reveals influence of the Gothic prose, but Coleridge surpasses his predecessors in the creation of the atmosphere of horror that encompasses the human soul. The sinister fantastic images materialize the frightful visions of human conscience.

Though he is best known today for his poetry, Coleridge also wrote articles and dissertations on philosophy, political analyses and theology. His treatises and lectures made him the most influential English literary critic of the nineteenth century.

Like many of his contemporaries, Southey was a fervent admirer of the French revolution in his youth. In his later years Southey changed his political allegiances: Napoleon wars, tyranny, terror and violence made the poet shift to conservative views. He joined the Tory party and became the butt of many attacks of the radically-minded poets, especially Byron, who claimed Southey sold his ideals for money.

In 1813, Southey becomes poet-laureate on the recommendation of Scott, who’d declined the post himself, thinking Southey a more appropriate candidacy.

Southey wrote a number of lyro-epic tales: The Vision of the Judgment (on the death of George III), Joan of Arch, Roderick, the Last of Goths; he published over a hundred volumes in all, comprising poetry as well as history, biography, criticism/ politics and translation.

Literary recognition came to Southey through the ballad. He transforms the type of lyrical ballad, based on imitation of the folk model. Thus he brought together two important tendencies in English literature: the folk element, coming down to Burns’s poetry and the Gothic tradition with its bizarre fantasy? The atmosphere of the mystic and the inexpressible.

Southey’s ballads are noted for the intensity of conflict and explicit didactic element. The plots and subjects are taken both from folk poetry and various literary sources – Southey was an avid reader.

His ballads describe extraordinary, exceptional happenings, which is typical of Romanticism, they sometimes include the supernatural element, but things are described and assessed from the moral point of view.

During the Romantic period, the ballad became a kind of poeticized history, answering the readers’ interest in the past and in the mysterious. The Battle of Blenheim (1788) is devoted to an episode of the war for the Spanish succession. It is a sharply anti-militarist ballad in which old Kasper describes The Duke of Marlborough’s victory to his grandchildren, Peterkin and Wilhelmine. Southey’s abhorrence of violence and bloodshed is realized in the juxtaposition of the outlook of the children and the old man.

Now tell us what ‘twas all about

Young Peterkin, he cries.

And little Wilhelmine looks up

With wonder-waiting eyes;

“now tell us all about the war

And what they fought each other for”.

The old man unwittingly presents the picture of willful bloodshed, violence, slaughter, repeating insensibly the words of the refrain: it was a famous victory. The children’s perception is very different.

Southey’s considerable poetic influence in English literature is especially visible in the genre of the ballad, which he turned into a productive literary form. Many of his ballads were translated into Russian.

Southey’s prose is written in lucid, pure, vigorous English.

Soon after his death, however, his poetic reputation declined. Now he is chiefly remembered for his association with his greater friends, and still more for his violent quarrel with his opponents, especially Byron.

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