Romanticism, Coleridge

Coleridge, "The Eolian Harp" (409); "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" (425)

Dates (not to scale):

Blake                   1757...................................................................................................1827
Wordsworth              1770 ........................................................................................................1850
Coleridge                     1772 ................................................................................................1834
Byron                                        1788 .....................................................................1824
Shelley                                             1792 .........................................................1822
Keats                                                    1795 .................................................1821

Coleridge - Wu's headnote:

Christ's Hospital, London, 1782
Cambridge, 1791
Pantisocracy, engaged to Sara Fricker, 1794
Meets Wordsworth, 1795
To Nether Stowey, 1797-8
Writes "conversation poems," "supernatural poems," 1795-98 (Biographia 448)
To Germany with Wordsworths, Sept 1798

Review: Coleridge (Geographic Chronology Romanticism CD.)
-- Coleridge and Wordsworth in Somerset

Conversation
poems: "Eolian Harp" (1795), "This Lime-Tree Bower" (1797), "The Nightingale" (1798), "Frost at Midnight" (1798), "Dejection: An Ode" (1802), "To William Wordsworth" (1807)
-- as if to an addressee (Sara, Hartley…)
-- subjective focus, usually on a problem, may be resolved by end
-- style ranges from informal to high rhetoric (informal: precedent see Cowper, The Task)

"Eolian Harp", 1834 version (409). Set at Clevedon.

poem as problem and answer? --

social vs. solitary
temporal vs. timeless
alienation vs. participation
mortality vs. immortality
mundane vs. transcendent
stasis vs. progress
passive vs. active
particularize vs. generalize
reality vs. daydream
mechanic vs. organic

Students: discuss (with quotation) argument of poem in light of one or more contrasts (not all contrasts have a valence)

Overview of key moments:

-- evening, dusk facilitates imagination, feeling
-- "lute," eolian harp, principle of creativity in the universe (passive vs. active?); daydreaming mode of thought (explicitly: cf. 39-44)
-- "one life" (27) - pantheistic, animism (transcendent vs. mundane)
-- "animated nature" (45)
-- Sara's reproof (50)
-- "unregenerate mind" (56): original sin? vs. Rousseau, born innocent
-- marriage (65), one of the Christian sacraments, overcomes original sin

-- cf. early MS lines, "mechanized matter" (follower of Hartley)
-- Wordsworth against, Two-Part Prelude, II, 260 etc.(272).

>> connectedness of mind to universe:
cf. Wordsworth, e.g., "Lines Written in Early Spring," 216;
Two-Part Prelude "mind of man," I, 67 (264)
-- "Ye powers of earth," I, 186;
-- "active universe," I, 298 (273); "one great mind," I, 304;
-- "one life," I, 465 (275)

A "Greater Romantic lyric" (Abrams),
http://www.laits.utexas.edu/farrell/documents/Greater%20rom%20Lyric.pdf

Phases of consciousness model (for this and other poems, e.g., Keats "Nightingale"):

Reality - daydream/memory - transcendence - [return]

"This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" (425)

Nether Stowey, Quantocks, Alfoxton Glen: geography represent states of consciousness, feeling, etc.

Students: Argument of poem? Reminder:

social vs. solitary
temporal vs. timeless
alienation vs. participation
mortality vs. immortality
mundane vs. transcendent
stasis vs. progress
passive vs. active
particularize vs. generalize
reality vs. daydream
mechanic vs. organic

 

Phases of consciousness model:

Reality - daydream/memory - transcendence - [return]

-- Self-regeneration; role of empathy


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Document created January 17th 2008 / updated September 22nd 2008