Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• 1.Biography
• 2. Introduction to his
  works

2
Biography

• Born in rural Devonshire in 1772, Coleridge
  inherited his bookish tastes from his father, a
  learned (and eccentric) clergyman.
• Coleridge as a boy lived almost entirely in a
  world of books and ideas.
• After his father's death, he was sent, in 1782,
  to a famous charity school in London, known as
  Christ's Hospital. It was in this school that he
  met Charles Lamb .
• Coleridge next won a scholarship to Cambridge
  University, where he studied at Jesus College .
• Finding himself (through his own imprudence)
  desperately in debt, he rushed off to London and
  enlisted in the Army under the wonderful name of
  Silas Tomkin Comberbach.

3
Biography

• He hated army life and was terrified of the
  cavalry horses so when his brothers contrived to
  have him released, he gladly returned to
  Cambridge.
• Encouraged by the success of the American War of
  Independence andthe French Revolution, Coleridge
  and Southey worked on a harebrained scheme which
  they called Pantisocracy. As the name implies,
  this was to be a Utopian society in which the
  powers of government were to be shared by all.
  The Pantisocracy of Coleridge and Southey came
  to nothing. Throughout his life Coleridge was
  better at drawing up plans than at putting them
  into practice.

4
Introduction to his works

• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• Biographia Literaria
• Kubla Khan

5
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

• The plot of the poem
• The story tells of the unnecessary and
  wanton shooting of an albatross. The Ancient
  Mariner, a chillingly mysterious figure who
  almost forcibly detains a young man on his way to
  a wedding feast to listen to his narrative, tells
  of a storm that carried his ship to the seas of
  the Antarctic. Terrified by the snow and ice,
  utterly isolated from the world of living things,
  the crew is overjoyed when an albatross appears.
  The Ancient Mariner kills the albatross and first
  The Ancient Mariner's shipmates are angry at him
  because of his rash and meaningless act. When the
  fog and mist lift, however, they decide that the
  shooting of the bird has brought them luck and
  they applaud the crime of their companion, thus
  becoming, as it were, his accomplices.
• Racing north toward the equator, the ship is
  becalmed in the sea. Suffering from unbearable
  heat and from thirst, the crew is terrified by
  the approach of a skeleton-ship, carrying Death
  and Life-in-Death. On the skeleton-ship a grisly
  dice game takes place, and Life-in-Death wins.
  The Mariner's shipmates all die, and he is left
  hopelessly alone with his physical agony and his
  consciousness of guilt.
• There comes a moment, however, in his terrible
  loneliness when the glint of moonlight on the
  brightly colored creatures of the deep affects
  the Ancient Mariner. So he thanks God for all
  living things. After his pointless slaughter of
  the albatross, he is once more able to realize
  the sacredness of life.
• Released from the awful punishment that his
  crime brought about, the Mariner returns to his
  native land. The consequences of his evil-doing,
  however, cannot be ignored. It is his fate to
  wander, presumably for all eternity, throughout
  the world, telling and retelling his frightening
  story.

6
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

• Comment on the poem
• It is, perhaps, the finest literary
  ballad in English literature. A literary ballad,
  in contrast to a folk ballad, is one written by a
  known author in conscious imitation of the old
  traditional ballads whose authorship is not
  known. He deliberately uses this form to tell a
  simple story. But when reading it, we discover
  many subtle places, and the musical effect is
  wonderful. The albatross, a sea bird, is an omen
  of luck. A seaman for no reason at all kills it,
  and for this reason the whole ship is punished by
  God and the seaman is punished by his fellow
  seamen. The theme is about sin and its expiation.
  The language is irresistible. A guest is detained
  by the mariner to listen to his tale. The reader,
  like the reluctant guest, is enchanted by the
  tale. Here Coleridge's excellent skill at making
  supernatural things appear real and true to life
  is fully displayed.
• It has been demonstrated that the poem
  reflects Coleridge's amazingly wide reading.
  Materials concerning the polar regions, the
  equatorial regions, guardian spirits, the
  Scriptural story of Cain, legends about the
  Wandering Jew, all came together in his
  imagination and shaped this hauntingly beautiful
  and profoundly moving poem.
• It should be obvious that this is not
  a cautionary tale about being kind to animals. It
  is a psychologically profound study of guilt, of
  remorse, of the nature of evil.

7
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

• Style analysis
• The story of the Ancient Mariner is told
  in the style and meter used in many traditional
  ballads. Most of the stanzas are of four lines,
  alternately of four stresses and three stresses.
  The rhymes also alternate, abab. Variety is
  obtained by introducing occasional six-line
  stanzas. One stanza is nine lines long.

8
Biographia Literaria

• Most of Coleridge's ideas on literature are
  to be found in his Biographia Literaria. Many of
  the specific critical comments in this rambling,
  uneven, and frequently cloudy book are worth
  attention. For example, his remarks on Wordsworth
  show a perceptive understanding of that poet's
  greatness. At the same time he praises
  Wordsworth, and he takes issue with Wordsworth's
  oversimplified views on poetic diction and he
  even shows that Wordsworth does not always follow
  his own stated principles.
• His view on imagination
• He emphasized the relationship of the
  imagination to the entire process of artistic
  creation. He denied that the imagination was the
  mere reshaping of images originally produced by
  sense impressions and thus was able to make a
  more profound contribution to our understanding
  of artistic originality than was made by any
  neoclassical or pre-Romantic theorist.

9
Biographia Literaria

• How to analyze a poem
• Related to his ideas on the imagination
  is his healthy awareness that a poem is an
  organic whole. It is, in other words, like all
  living things, more than the sum of its parts.
  One can, of course, analyze parts of a poem, such
  as the diction, the meter, the rhymes, and the
  like. But true criticism must ultimately go
  beyond analysis and examine the poem in its
  totality.