samuel taylor coleridge 1772 1834

1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772�1834) English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher, whose Lyrical Ballads, written with Wordsworth, started the English Romantic movement. Although Coleridge's poetic achievement was small in quantity, his metaphysical anxiety, anticipating modern existentialism, has gained him reputation as an authentic visionary. In Cambridge Coleridge met the radical, future poet laureate Robert Southey (1774-1843) in 1794. Coleridge moved with him to Bristol to establish a community, but the plan failed. In 1795 he married the sister of Southey's fianc�e Sara Fricker, whom he did not really love.

3. Rime of the Ancient Mariner This 625-line ballad is among his essential works. It tells of a sailor who kills an albatross and for that crime against nature endures terrible punishments. The ship upon which the Mariner serves is trapped in a frozen sea. An albatross comes to the aid of the ship, it saves everyone, and stays with the ship until the Mariner shoots it with his crossbow.

4. Rime of the Ancient Mariner The motiveless malignity leads to punishment: And now there came both mist and show, And it grew wondrous cold; And ice, mast high, came floating by, As green as emerald. After a ghost ship passes the crew begin to die but the mariner is eventually rescued. He knows his penance will continue and he is only a machine for dictating always the one story.

5. Coleridge and Kant Disenchanted with the political developments in France, he visited Germany in 1798-99 with the Wordsworths, and became interested in the works of Immanuel Kant. He studied philosophy at G�ttingen University and mastered German. In 1799 Coleridge fell in love with Sara Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworth's future wife, to whom he devoted his work Dejection: An Ode (1802). During these years Coleridge also began to compile his Notebooks, daily meditations of his life. Suffering from neuralgic and rheumatic pains, Coleridge had became addicted to opium, freely prescribed by physicians. In 1804 he sailed to Malta in search of better health. He worked two years as secretary to the governor of Malta, and later traveled through Sicily and Italy, returning then to England.

6. Kubla Khan Or, a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment. From 1808 to 1818 he he gave several lectures, chiefly in London, and was considered the greatest of Shakespearean critics. �Kubla Khan� was inspired by a dream. In the summer of 1797 the author had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton. He had taken anodyne and after three hours sleep he woke up with a clear image of the poem. Disturbed by a visitor, he lost the vision, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images. Modern scholarship is skeptical of this story, but it reflects Coleridge's problems to manage practical life and finish his ideas.

7. The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [Lord Byron], and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits. In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: ``Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.'' Coleridge's note

8. Coleridge's note The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved.

9. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

10. Kubla Khan Kublai Khan (1215-1294) was the fifth of the Mongol great khans and the founder of the Y�an Dynasty in China (1279-1368). He is best known in the West as the Cublai Kaan of Marco Polo. Kublai founded what was intended to be his brother's new capital but became in effect his own summer residence, the town of Kaiping. It later was named Shang-tu or 'Upper Capital' and was immortalised as the Xanadu of Coleridge's poem.

11. The Form of �Kubla Khan� The chant-like, musical incantations of "Kubla Khan" result from Coleridge's masterful use of iambic tetrameter and alternating rhyme schemes. The first stanza is written in tetrameter with a rhyme scheme of ABAABCCDEDE, alternating between staggered rhymes and couplets. The second stanza expands into tetrameter and follows roughly the same rhyming pattern, also expanded-- ABAABCCDDFFGGHIIHJJ. The third stanza tightens into tetrameter and rhymes ABABCC. The fourth stanza continues the tetrameter of the third and rhymes ABCCBDEDEFGFFFGHHG.

12. Stanza 1 In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree :Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to manDown to a sunless sea.

13. Stanza 1 (conti.) So twice five miles of fertile groundWith walls and towers were girdled round :And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;And here were forests ancient as the hills,Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

14. In "Kubla Khan," Samuel Taylor Coleridge employs a superficially loose and disjointed construction which is actually carefully designed to trigger associations of imagery that produce mental echoes of juxtaposed impressions. The lack of a consistent rhyme scheme, the uneven division of stanzas, and the use of iambic meter with a varying number of feet all contribute to a sense of disorientation, which in turn facilitates the process of mental echoing. The most important element of this effect, however, are the images themselves:

15. Stanza 2

17. Stanza 2 (conti.)

18. Stanza 3

19. Stanza 4 It is thought that the final stanza of the poem, thematizing the idea of the lost vision through the figure of the "damsel with a dulcimer" and the milk of Paradise, was written post-interruption. The mysterious person from Porlock is one of the most notorious and enigmatic figures in Coleridge's biography; no one knows who he was or why he disturbed the poet or what he wanted or, indeed, whether any of Coleridge's story is actually true. But the person from Porlock has become a metaphor for the malicious interruptions the world throws in the way of inspiration and genius, and "Kubla Khan," strange and ambiguous as it is, has become what is perhaps the definitive statement on the obstruction and thwarting of the visionary genius.

20. Stanza 4

21. And all who heard should see them there,And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !His flashing eyes, his floating hair !Weave a circle round him thrice,And close your eyes with holy dread,For he on honey-dew hath fed,And drunk the milk of Paradise. Stanza 4

22. Bitter Life In 1810 Coleridge's friendship with Wordsworth came to crisis, and the two poets never fully returned to the relationship they had earlier. During the following years Coleridge lived in London, on the verge of suicide. After a physical and spiritual crisis at Greyhound Inn, Bath, he submitted himself to a series of medical r�gimes to free himself from opium. He found a permanent harbor in Highgate in the household of Dr. James Gillman, and enjoyed almost legendary reputation among the younger Romantics. During this time he rarely left the house.

23. The End of his Life In 1816 the unfinished poems �Christabel� and �Kubla Khan� were published, and next year appeared Sibylline Leaves. After 1817 Coleridge devoted himself to theological and politico-sociological works - his final position was that of a Romantic conservative and Christian radical. He also contributed to several magazines, among them Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Coleridge was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1824. He died in Highgate, near Londonon July 25, 1834.

24. Wordsworth & Coleridge Wordsworth is clearly more entitled than Coleridge to be considered the leader in creating and also in expounding a new kind of poetry. Until Coleridge met Wordsworth, which was probably in 1795, he wrote in the manner which had been fashionable since the death of Milton, employing without hesitation all those poetic licenses which constituted what he later termed `Gaudyverse,' in contempt. If one reads Coleridge's early poems in chronological order, one will perceive that Gaudyverse persists till about the middle of 1795, and then quickly yields to the natural style which Wordsworth was practicing.

25. Coleridge�s Conversation Poems Coleridge's shorter, meditative "conversation poems," proved to be the most influential of his work. Conversation poems are poems in which the speaker addresses his lines to a listener within the poem, generally a listener who has little voice of his own. These include both quiet poems like This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison and Frost at Midnight and also strongly emotional poems like Dejection and The Pains of Sleep. Wordsworth immediately adopted the model of these poems, and used it to compose several of his major poems. Via Wordsworth, the conversation poem became a standard vehicle for English poetic expression, and perhaps the most common approach among modern poets.