Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridgewas an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases,...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth21 October 1772
Bells, the poor man's only music.
Trochee trips from long to short; From long to long in solemn sort Slow Spondee stalks.
Indignation at literary wrongs I leave to men born under happier stars. I cannot afford it.
Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind.
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. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses , each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination.
O let me be awake, my God! Or let me sleep alway.
The blue and bright-eyed floweret of the brook, Hope's gentle gem, the sweet Forget-me-not.
The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.
But metre itself implies a passion , i.e. a state of excitement, both in the Poet's mind, & is expected in that of the Reader.
Be that blind bard who on the Chian strand, By those deep sounds possessed with inward light, Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssey Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.
I stood in unimaginable trance And agony that cannot be remembered.
I am never very forward in offering spiritual consolation to any one in distress or disease. I believe that such resources, to be of any service, must be self-evolved in the first instance. I am something of the Quaker's mind in this, and am inclined to wait for the spirit.
The Earth with its scarred face is the symbol of the Past; the Air and Heaven, of Futurity.
The man hath penance done, And penance more will do.