Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
Selected Poems
British
Romanticism
Coleridge is the first critic of the Romantic literary movement in England. His father was a school-master and a vicar, and Coleridge grew up in a household full of books, which he read voraciously. His father’s fascination with astronomy created in the young man a vision of the vastness of the world, a vision that would later inform his own work. His character and literary style were formed when he was an adolescent student at Christ’s Hospital school in London; there, he immersed himself in the classics and English poets such as Shakespeare and Milton. From the English poets, he drew the significance of sound and imagery. Coleridge saw poetry as a means of enjoyment and science as a means to scientific truth; according to Coleridge, however, the best poetry uses metaphor and imagery to express truth. He is responsible for bringing the ideas of Immanuel Kant and human understanding to the literary circles of England. He also introduces an innovative supernatural context in much of his poetry, which requires that his audience release their grip on reason. He collaborated with William Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads, a foundational book of verse for the Romantic period. In his Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge introduces the concept of a “willing suspension of disbelief”:
In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
The suspension of disbelief or poetic faith is necessary for the enjoyment of two of Coleridge’s famous poems, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) and “Kubla Khan” (1817).
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Coleridge’s poem is written in tight rhyme and meter, yet his subject is otherworldly. In the poem, he introduces the psychological concept of mesmerizing with the Mariner’s “glittering eye.” The concept of the eye that can mesmerize, or hold the mind of its object captive, is one he borrowed from the German physician Frank Mesmer, who proposed that all living creatures have “animal magnetism.” Coleridge’s verse is indeed haunting and mesmerizing throughout the poem, holding both the Wedding Guest and the poem’s audience captive to the tragic story of the sole survivor of a fateful voyage. The poem, full of metaphor and symbolism, introduces the Romantic era to the disturbing sensations that disturb the human imagination.
Kubla Kahn; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment
Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn” appeared in his imagination in the waking moments of an opium-induced sleep; the poem represents the poet’s fascination with the human imagination and the vastness of nature, the unconscious and fantasy. This poem, though not Coleridge’s most prized work, has stimulated scholarly conversation for its potent and vivid imagery and language, and foreshadows the work of poets like William Blake and the American poet Edgar Allan Poe.
Consider while reading:
- Discuss the significance of the Wedding Guest being kept from a celebration.
- What is the significance of the albatross around the neck of the Mariner?
- How does Coleridge depict the voyage as the life of every human being?
- Choose and discuss an image from “Kubla Khan.”
Written by Karen Dodson