TERM PAPER ON
SAMUEL
TAYLOR COLERIDGE: BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA
SUBMITTED
BY:
KUSUMA.S
1ST M.ECL
LCL051508
ROMANTICISM
The word ‘romantic(ism)’ has a complex and interesting meaning. In the middle
Ages romance denoted the new vernacular language derived from Latin:
Enromancier, Romancar, Romanz meant to compose or translate books in the
vernacular. The romantic period was largely a reaction against the ideology of
the Enlightenment period that dominated much of European philosophy, politics
and art from the mid-17th century until the close of the 18th
century. Enlightenment thinkers value logic, reason and rationality. Romantics
value emption, passion and individuality. So Romanticism appeared in conflict
with the Enlightenment. So Romanticism is a style and movement of art, music
and literature in the late 18th and early 19th century.
The Romantic era was rich in literary criticism and other nonfictional
prose. The romantic period includes the works of two generation of writers. The
First Generation is also known as the Lake Poets, because their attachment to
the Lake district in the North- West of England. The first generation of poets
includes, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Charles
Lamb and Blake. The Second Generation of Poets includes, P.B Shelley, John
Keats and Byron. The major writes of the second romantic generation were
primarily poets. The writers of the first generation with the exception of
Blake, all gained literary reputations during their life time.
Characteristics of the Romantic age and romantic literature:
Ø Spiritual/ supernatural elements.
Ø Nature as teacher
Ø Interest in past history/ ancient
Roman elements
Ø Celebration of simple life
Ø Interest in the rustic life
Ø Interest in the folk traditions
Ø Use of common language
Ø Examination of poet’s inner
feelings.
Towards the end of the 18th century the great intellectual
moral and religious changes which marked the end of the Age of Reason gained
momentum and resulted in the Romantic Movement. Like all great movements, the
Romantic Movement resulted from the preparations of a preceding age. Its
greatness lay in the way in which it drew together the formerly scattered
elements of thought and feeling into a new and significant pattern. The
Romantic Movement added a new dimension to man’s vision of himself and the
world about him, and was, as Coleridge was aware, a magnificent attempt to
reconcile the heart and head.
When ‘Lyrical Ballads’ first appeared in 1798, the word ‘Romantic’ was
no complement. It meant ‘fanciful’, ‘light’ even inconsequential. Wordsworth
and Coleridge would have resisted its applications and twenty years later the
second generation of romantic writers would recognize it only as an element in
a debate among European intellectuals.
S.T.
Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire, in
1772. He was the tenth child of scholarly but unworldly school- master parson.
Shortly after his father’s death in 1781, he was sent to London and next year
admitted to Christ’s Hospital, where is remained until 1792. Lamb was junior to
Coleridge at Christ’s Hospital. Coleridge the poet but where as in theoretical
discussion, Coleridge the philosopher came to the center part.
In 1794, he left the university without taking a degree; but by this
time he had met Southey at Oxford and was absorbed in an idealistic and
unpractical scheme which he called ‘Pantisocracy’. He found time to write a
good deal of poetry, which was eventually brought out in 1796 as ‘Poems on
various subjects’ and well received.
In 1797, began Coleridge’s intimate friendship with Wordsworth,
measured against whom he said he left himself ‘a little man’. Although they
were drawn together by a common interest in political idealism and poetry,
Wordsworth and Coleridge were very different in temperament. Wordsworth finding
Coleridge’s brilliance and range of ideas that prompted him to his greatest
expression and Coleridge drawing strength from Wordsworth’s moral profundity
and stable character. For the next two years Wordsworth and Coleridge were
constantly in each other’s company, invigorating discussions on poetry,
philosophy, politics, above all, there was for Coleridge a sense of belonging
of sharing in the security and joy of warm human friendship. Coleridge himself
knew that ‘when a man is unhappy, he writes damned bad poetry’. It is
significant that the ‘Ancient Mariner’ the first part of ‘Christabel, Kubla
Khan and some of the best conversation poems were written during this period of
precariously achieved happiness.
In 1798, he accompanied the Wordsworth to Germany and soon after their
departure the anonymous ‘Lyrical Ballads’ was published. Coleridge accepts a
position as Unitarian minister of Shrewbury, where he first meets William
Hazlitt.
Coleridge who was scourged with rheumatism and stomach disorders had
since 1796 sporadically sought the relief of opium but the beginning of his
addiction, against which he fought an uneven fight until his death. In 1803,
Coleridge accompanied the Wordsworth on a tour of Scotland, irritated by
Wordsworth and unhappy in himself, he parted from them. In 1816, the year in
which ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ were first published. In 1830, he published
his last work ‘Constitution of Church and State’. When Coleridge’s death
reached him, Wordsworth spoke of Coleridge as ‘the most wonderful man that he
had never known’. Lamb said that ‘Never saw I, his likeness, nor probably the
world can see again’.
Coleridge’s major poems are:
Ø This Lime Tree Bower My Prison
Ø The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner
Ø Fears in Solitude
Ø The Nightingale
Ø Part Of ‘Christabel’
Ø Kubla Khan.
His major prose works are:
Ø Lay Sermons
Ø Essay on National Education and
The Structure of an Organic Society : Biographia Literaria
Ø Treatises on Method
Ø Aides to Reflection
Ø On the Constitution of the Church
and State.
BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA
The ‘Biographia Literaria’ was one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s main
critical studies. In this book, he discussed about the features of writing and
what writing should be considered genius. This work is not written from
Coleridge’s poetic mind, written with the qualities and rhythm of the poetic.
“Biographia Literaria” is not only his great work in the domain of prose, but
one of the most widely appreciated book in the domain of literary criticism in
English language. Coleridge delivers the Biographia Literaria without a second
thought of whether or not there will be any disagreement from his audience. He
also discusses many variables that influenced and inspire writers. Biographia
Literaria, a hastily assembled work, it mixes modes and genres. During the
period from June to September 1815, he focused on the Biographia Literaria.
This book includes autobiography, philosophy, literary theory and
analytical literary criticism. It also includes a memoir of Wordsworth, a study
of his poems and a critic of his theory of poetic diction. In this work he
discussed the elements of writing. It is written with the qualities and rhyme
of the poetic. At the center of Coleridge’s book is his inquiry and defense of
the imagination. There are 24 chapters in the Biographia Literaria.
From Part I: From Chapter I
In this first chapter he tells about motives to the present work-
Reception of the author’s first publication-Discipline of his taste at school-
Effect of contemporary writers on youthful minds- Comparison between the poets
before and since Pope.
In the spring of 1796, he published a small volume of juvenile poems.
First he says that not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return,
with the greatest pleasure possesses the genuine power. Second point he tells
that whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language,
without changing of their significance, either in sense, association or in
feeling, are so far defective I their diction. The faults of a writer which
least able to detect in his own composition. The thoughts of writers could not
have been expressed. The thoughts themselves did not degree of attention
unsuitable to the nature and objects of poetry. The author believed in the
“self sufficing power of absolute Genius” and distinguishes between genius and
talent. He argues that our genius admiration of a great poet is a continuous
undercurrent of feelings.
He makes a great distinction between faults of elder poets and the
false beauty of the moderns. From Donne to Cowley we find most fantastic out of
the way thoughts, but in the form of pure and genuine mother English, latter the
most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. He argues
that our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate over flow of
poetry. The one sacrificed heart to the head, the other both heart and to point
and drapery.
From Chapter IV
In
this chapter he tells that fancy and imagination were two distinct and widely
different things, according to their general belief, either two names with one
meaning, or at furthest, the lower and higher degree of one and the same power.
The most important point to be proved is that the two concepts are perfectly
different from one another, confused under one and the same meaning and synonym
to the other. To this there used the derivative adjective: Milton had a highly
imaginative and Cowley a very fanciful mind.
From Chapter XIII
In
this chapter he tells about two types of imagination: primary and secondary
imagination. Primary imagination is the “living power” of God. It is also the
power of creation in each person. Prime Agent of all human perception as a
repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I
AM. It is an involuntary act of mind. It automatically balances and fuses the
innate capacities and powers of the mind with the external presence of the
objective world that the one receives through the senses. It is at the root of
all poetic activity.
Secondary imagination is the
conscious use of this power. It is still identical with the primary in the kind
of its agency and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation.
It echoes the primary in conjunction with the will and understanding. It
represents a superior occult which could only be associated with artistic
genius. It selects and orders the raw material and reshapes and remodels it
into objects of beauty. Joseph Warton declares that ‘it is a creative and
glowing imagination alone’ that makes a poet.
Fancy in contrast, merely associates fixities and
definite. So fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from
the order of time and space. So Coleridge seems to be saying that one can use
fancy as a kind of power to create memory collages, rearranging what we have
experienced into a new contribution to share to suite our fancy. Fancy was
concerned with the mechanical operations of the mind, those which are
responsible for the passive accumulation of data and shortage of such data in
the memory. For Coleridge, fancy is the attribute of poetic genius, but
imagination is its soul, which transforms all thing one graceful and
intelligent whole. Thus imagination creates new shapes and forms of beauty by
during and unifying the different impression which receives from the external
world. Fancy is not creative, it is a kind of memory, it arbitrarily brings
together images, even when brought together images and even when brought
together to retain their separate and individual properties.
Part II- Chapter XIV
In
this chapter he speaks about the encounter between Wordsworth when they were
neighbours. Their conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of
poetry. The power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence
to the truth of nature and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the
modifying colours of imagination. He tells that the series of poetry might be
composed of two sorts. In first, the incidents and agents were to be at least
supernatural and some situations supposing them real. Real in this sense they
have been to every human being, whatever sources of delusion has at any time
believed him under supernatural agency. The second one is, subjects were to be
chosen from ordinary life. Characters and incidents must be true which find everywhere
in every village.
From
this idea originated the plan of ‘Lyrical Ballads’. In this book agreed
Coleridge’s endeavors should be directed to persons and characters
supernatural. Mr. Wordsworth tells that he proposes himself as his object, to
give the charm of novelty to things of everyday and to excite a feeling thing
to the supernatural by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of
custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before
us. From these views Coleridge wrote “Ancient Mariner”, poem “Dark Ladie” and
“Christabel”. But Mr. Wordsworth’s poems are so much greater than Coleridge’s
compositions. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own
character, in the impassioned lofty and sustained diction which is
characteristic of his genius.
Wordworth’s poems had
been the silly, childish things which really distinguished from the
compositions of other poets merely by meanness of language and inanity of
thoughts. He tells that Mr. Wordsworth in his recent collection has, he find
degraded this prefatory disquisition to the end of his second volume of
“Lyrical Ballads”, to be read or not at the reader’s choice. But he has not
announced any change in his poetic creed. Coleridge explains his ideas first of
a POEM, and secondly, of POETRY itself, in kinds and in essence. Then he tells
that a poem contains the same elements as a prose composition, the difference
therefore must consist in a different combination of them, in consequence of a
different object proposed. The object may be merely to facilitate the
recollection of any given facts or observations by artificial arrangement and
the composition will be a poem merely because it is different from prose by
metre, rhyme or by both conjointly. A
difference of object and contents supplies an additional ground of distinction.
Communication
of pleasure may be the immediate object of a work not metrically composed and
that object may have been in a high degree attained as in novels and romances. He
tells that a poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of
science by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth. Controversy
is not excited in consequence of the disputants meaning to the same word. If a
man chooses to call every composition a poem, which is rhyme, measure or both,
he leaves this opinion uncontroverted.
He
argues that we have to still to seek for a definition of poetry. The writings
of Plato, Bishop Taylor and the Theoria Sacra of Burnet furnish undeniable
proofs that poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre, and even
without the contradistinguishing objects of a poem. Whatever specific import we
attach to the word, poetry there will be found involved in it, as a necessary
consequence that a poem of any length neither can be nor ought to be, all
poetry.
Coleridge
in his own conclusion on the nature of poetry, in the strictest use of the
word, has been in part anticipated in the preceding disquisition on the fancy
and imagination. The poet described in ideal, perfection brings the whole soul
of man into activity with the subordination of its faculties to each other,
according to their relative worth and dignity. Finally he tells that Good sense
is the body of poetic genius, Fancy is Drapery, Motion its Life and Imagination
the Soul that is everywhere and in each; and forms all into one graceful and
intelligent whole.
Wilson, Raymond. A Coleridge
Selection; Chennai: 2004.
Bygrave, Stephan. Samuel Taylor
Coleridge; New Delhi: 2010.
Keach, William. Samuel Taylor
Coleridge: The Complete Poems; New York: 1997.
Wu, Duncan. Romanticism an
Anthology (second edt); USA: 2005.
Leitch, Vincent. B. (Ed). The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism, New York, 2001.
Study of poetry, Kannur university
(guide book)
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