The Act of Love in Coleridge's Conversation Poems

Analysis, observations, and quotations on Biographia Literaria, The Statesman's Manual, Shakespearean Criticism, and On Poesy or Art. I highlight Coleridge's definitions of critical terms (like poetry and imagination) and compare his friendship with Wordsworth to the friendship of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Studies in Romanticism, 2018

European Romantic Review, 2017

Conversation is a distinctive form of communication that balances verbal and nonverbal cues, and these qualities have marked affinities with how Romantic writers conceived of poetry’s unique effects upon readers, listeners, and poets themselves. As an example of these “conversational poetics,” this essay examines how Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who both authored the “conversation poems” and was a notoriously one-sided talker, was fixated on what Romantics would have called “natural signs” in his poetry and personal writings. Far from always having delivered monologues, Coleridge had a talent for multisensory communication. However, this same talent left him vulnerable in his intimate relationships, leading him to withdraw from close, communicative friendships into solipsistic lecturing. As a young poet, though, he had an ambitious concept of sympathy whose achievement sometimes proved too much to bear if he could not regulate it with verse. Examples include an 1803 notebook entry in which Coleridge and Wordsworth exchange a disconcerting “pig look.” This look is contrasted to Geraldine’s “serpent’s eye” in “Christabel.” The essay concludes that poems such as “Christabel” should inform our understanding of what constitutes a conversation poem, especially if we acknowledge Coleridge’s own attitudes toward conversation and the nonverbal components of poetry.

Asian Social Science, 2010

The present paper is an attempt to explore Coleridge's critical potentialities and significant contributions to literary theory and criticism. The first question that will be stressed here is the reasons, conscious and unconscious alike, that have driven a leading romantic poet of his caliber to shift from verse writing to devote his time almost exclusively to criticism, public culture, religion or politics. Of equal interest is the nature of his critical enterprise whether theoretical or practical and its intellectual, epistemological and artistic foundations. The final section is a general view of the impact his critical writings have left on the literary scene and the different reactions writers hold toward his practices.

Littera Aperta 6 (2018), 5-28, 2018

The present study poses an interpretation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp" and William Wordsworth's "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" so as to evince the subject of desire as the ulterior motif of these texts, even though the poetic voices of these works attempt to conceal such a theme. This reading interprets both poems as compositions that share the same thematic line as William Blake's "The Book of Thel" and John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn". Consequently, the close reading of the poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge will be presented.

2014

New studies in the history of emotion are transforming, enriching and extending current humanities scholarship. Emotional responses to literary texts have the potential to constitute an important archive for the history of feeling. The literary reception of medieval texts, especially that of Chaucer, has been mined for its potential to track changes in style and taste within textual communities over time. Using William Reddy’s concept of the emotive utterance, this essay tests a key moment in Chaucer reception: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s discourse about the affective experience of reading Chaucer. Such analysis of the critical archive can help us understand not just the history of Chaucer reception, but also the history of feeling about medieval literature, and the literature of the past.

This paper explores the way in which Coleridge 's relationship with his son is reflected in poetry from different stages of his life. It looks at how certain poems articulate the hopes invested by the father in the infant Hartley and the disillusionment and grief which succeeded them as Hartley matured. I consider the degree to which Hartley was an idealised construction designed to fulfil his father's own aspirations.

2017

In his philosophical writings, Coleridge increasingly developed his thinking about imagination, a symbolizing precursor to contemplation, to a theory of contemplation itself, which for him occurs in its purest form as a manifestation of ‘Reason’. Coleridge is a particularly challenging figure because he was a thinker in process, and something of an omnimath, a Renaissance man of the Romantic era. The dynamic quality of his thinking, the ‘dark fluxion’ pursued but ultimately ‘unfixable by thought’, and his extensive range of interests make essential an approach that is philosophical yet also multi-disciplinary. This is the first collection of essays to be written mainly by philosophers and intellectual historians on Coleridge’s mature philosophy. With a foreword by Baroness Mary Warnock, and original essays on Coleridge and Contemplation by prominent philosophers such as Sir Roger Scruton, David E. Cooper, Michael McGhee, and Andy Hamilton, this volume provides a stimulating collection of insights and explorations into what Britain’s foremost philosopher-poet had to say about the contemplation that he considered to be the highest of the human mental powers. The essays by philosophers are supported by new developments in philosophically minded criticism from Coleridge scholars in English departments, including Jim Mays, Kathleen Wheeler, and James Engell. They approach Coleridge as an energetic yet contemplative thinker concerned with the intuition of ideas and the processes of cultivation in self and society. Other essays, from intellectual historians and theologians, clarify the historical background, and ‘religious musings’, of Coleridge’s thought regarding contemplation.