By Lechi Eke
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was a lay preacher, a dissenting pamphleteer at the beginning of the French Revolution and the man who started the Romantic literary school with William Wordsworth through their joint publication of a book of poetry (Lyrical Ballads) in 1798 England.
Coleridge’s works and his friends’ brought about a reformation of English values. The scope and influence of his thinking about literature, and his innovative verse, a natural voice (that shunned the rhetorical excesses of the poetry of sensibility of his time which was so Enlightenment school) which eschewed devices such as conventional similes, literary embroidery and stale poetic diction, brought about new ways of approaching poetry. Coleridge criticized the literary taste of his peers, and feared a continued desecration of literature by people who had no taste for it. I wonder what he would say today.
He inspired fledgling writers of his age and attracted the patronage of the rising middle class (remember that one of the innovations of the Romantic poets, so Wordsworth, was writing for the common man as against the target of the Enlightenment writers which was the court, the noble) who read him and his contemporaries joyfully.
His poems, especially the early ones had been oracular making men like Wordsworth and Southey to initially hesitate on his works. Yet he never stopped writing.
He published a volume of poetry titled Poems on Various Subjects in 1796 which included four poems from Charles Lamb (his fellow student at Christ’s Hospital, a charity school in London), collaboration with Robert Southey and a work suggested by Robert Favell who was their (Coleridge and Southey) mutual friend.
In this 1796 collection of poetry are such poems as: Religious Musings, Monody on the Death of Chatterton and an early version of the poem, The Eolian Harp entitled Effusion 35. In 1797, Coleridge released a second edition of the same collection of poetry as mentioned earlier, but this time, it included an appendix of works from Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd (a younger poet and student of Coleridge).
Sonnets from Various Authors had already been published in early 1796. Meanwhile, while in school, Coleridge had won a prize for a poem and also had collaborated on a play with Robert Southey titled The Fall of Robespierre.
Coleridge and Southey were great friends; both, pioneers of the Romantic literary movement in England, so were the first generation Romantic poets and fellow Lake Poets although Coleridge had different views about nature.
They married two sisters: Sara and Edith Fricker. Coleridge married Sara and had four children by her, even though he disliked her later and separated from her. Who wouldn’t? It is on record that Sara had a jealous streak and once poured boiling milk on her hubby’s foot necessitating him to stay home while his friends (Wordsworth, Dorothy, his sister and Charles Lamb) went on a long walk. That was when he composed the poem, This Lime Tree Bower My Prison); Southey married Edith.
The girls had an older sister, Mary, who married a poet too, Robert Lovell who became good friends with Coleridge and Southey, and joined them in the commune-like society they formed called Pantisocracy which was short lived. Although, Lovell died in 1796 but not before he introduced Coleridge and Southey to their future patron, Joseph Cottler.
Coleridge Health
Coleridge was unhealthy throughout his life. He had bouts of anxiety and depression. His biographers speculated that he had bipolar disorder because of his many illnesses and rheumatic fevers. He became addicted to the opium-rich laudanum drug used for his treatment.
Coleridge End
Coleridge had marital problems, diverse ailments, opium dependency from prescribed drugs for his many illnesses, uncertainty in his poetic powers and his relationship with Wordsworth whom he had been squatting with probably after separating from his wife. All these maladies inspired him to compose one of his last poems, Dejection: an Ode. He died 25 July 1834 of heart failure suspected to have been opium-induced.
Influences
Coleridge was highly influenced by philosophers like William Godwin (Mary Shelley’s father), especially his writings on Political Justice (during his Pantisocratic period), also, David Hartley’s Observation on Man. Coleridge gleaned the psychology found in his poem Frost at Midnight from Hartley’s Observation on Man.
In Hartley’s psychology, he argues that impressions are nothing but sensory events which give men ideas as they observe the similarities and differences presented by these impressions. When the observer connects these similarities and differences in sensory events, then he can create links which can call up memories of the ideas. If you seem confused by this psychology, you are not alone (chuckle).
S. T. Coleridge was also highly influenced by German philosophical transcendental idealists like Immanuel Kant and literary critics like Gotthold Lessing.
Early Life
He came from a large family of more than ten children from two wives; he was the tenth from his mother and the last of the vicar, John Coleridge’s children. He had a childhood of isolation, self-absorption with a feeling of unworthiness and anomy. He acquired his formal education from Christ’s Hospital, London and Cambridge University, although he never graduated.
Coleridge was surrounded by books as he was growing up, and he read avidly. His imagination was nourished and enlarged by books, and his father’s tales of the universe, including the stars and the planets.
When his father died in 1781, he was sent off to Christ’s Hospital, a London grammar school where he came under the tutelage of Rev. James Bowyer and was tutored in Hebrew, Latin and Greek and they were made to write English compositions. The clergyman drilled them in classical Literature and traditional English works by Shakespeare and Milton.
Bowyer tutored them on sound sense, clear reference in phrase, metaphor and imagery. Coleridge wrote that he “took no pleasure in boyish sports” and had read “incessantly” and played by himself.
His early life was revealed further in his autobiographical letter to Thomas Poole where he wrote that “At six years old I remember to have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe and Phillip Quarll…” He also said he had read the Arabian Nights Entertainments, and was deeply impressed by one of the tales.
In 1800, Coleridge had followed Wordsworth (they met and became friends in 1795) to the Lakes and got an abode at Greta Hall. Although lumped together with other Lakes residents as a Lake Poet, Coleridge’s views of the landscape were once, not in tandem with Wordsworth’s and others. He viewed the landscapes then as “Gothic elements” and thereby identifying the area as having “potential as psychological horror than a place of solace.”
In 1804, Coleridge, very depressed about his health and Wordsworth’s rejection of his poem, Christabel for the Lyrical Ballads, travelled to Malta, and later Italy and other parts of Europe. This made me realize that these guys were just human. Writers worry about the quality of their writing all the time. Musicians too; I read how Rod Stewart used to worry over his music preferring Stevie Wonder’s. And I prefer Rod Stewart’s music to Stevie Wonder’s although he’s a black brother (smiles)). Incidentally, one of Coleridge’s famous poems is Christabel!
It was in the Lakes District near Wordsworth that Coleridge wrote his famous poem Kubla Khan which he claimed came from opium induced dream. He told how he was on a walk to Porlock and on his way, he took his opium-rich drug and fell into a drugged stupor and the events narrated in the poem came to him. Curiously, the events were interrupted by the arrival of a person from Porlock. This incident has featured widely in modern day sci-fi. He also wrote the first part of the poem, Christabel at the LakesDistrict as well as the famous allegorical sea-faring poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
His Works
Coleridge’s identity as the poet of supernaturalism stems from his use of supernatural elements mainly in three of his poems: Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a haunting ballad which contains the famous lines: “Water, water everywhere, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink…”then his dream-like Kubla Khan, and his unfinished Christabel.
From his confinement in his garden after his jealous wife poured boiling milk on his foot excluding him from taking a walk with his friends, Coleridge wrote the poem This Lime Tree Bower My Prison. In this poem, he celebrates Nature as being hospitable to human response and Sensation as adequate to human needs. Nature according to the poem provides a great resource against isolation. The poem concludes with the idea that nature brings companionship which gives joy.
The Romantic poet also showed his disgust for materialism and indifference to nature in his poem, The World is too much with Us.
Coleridge is famous for his collaborative works with Wordsworth which sprung off the Romantic literary movement plus all the other works described above. He was also well known for his major prose work, Biographia Literaria, as well as his critical work on Shakespeare especially his lecture on Hamlet.
Works by Coleridge are highly influential, including his introduction into English culture, the German idealist philosophy. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases including suspension of belief.
In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge narrates how serious school was under his Literature teacher. He learnt from him that “Poetry had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science, and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes.”
His Achievements
In his 30th year, Coleridge renounced poetic vocation and defined and defended the art as a practising critic. He promoted Wordsworth verse which became a landmark of English literary response which is in agreement with epistemology and metaphysics. He imported fresh ideas from Germany which are the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich von Schelling. His discussion of imagination became a fixture of institutional criticism. His occasional notations on language embellished seminal foundation and development of Cambridge English in the 1920s. It was Coleridge who made a distinction between culture and civilization which paved the way for the critique of the utilitarian state. His late theological writings provided the Church of England materials for reformation. Coleridge was pioneer for many things including the modern English culture.
Khubla Khan
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1816)
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Were blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! As holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the cavern measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
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 honeydew had fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
