Samuel Taylor Coleridge Analysis

The original verse dramas of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (KOHL-rihj, also KOH-luh-rihj)—The Fall of Robespierre (pb. 1794, with Robert Southey), Remorse (pr., pb. 1813, originally Osorio), and Zapolya (pb. 1817)—are of particular interest to readers of his poetry, as is Wallenstein (1800), his translation of two dramas by Friedrich Schiller. His major prose includes the contents of two periodicals, The Watchman (1796) and The Friend (1809-1810, 1818), two lay Sermons, “The Statesman’s Manual” (1816) and “A Lay Sermon” (1817), the Biographia Literaria (1817), “Treatise on Method,” originally published in The Encyclopaedia Metropolitana (1818), and a series of metaphysical aphorisms, Aids to Reflection (1825). His lectures on politics, religion, literature, and philosophy have been collected in various editions, as have other short essays, unpublished manuscripts, letters, records of conversations, notebooks, and marginalia. These prose works share common interests with his poetry and suggest the philosophical context in which it should be read. Coleridge’s literary criticism is particularly relevant to his poetry.

It is ironic that Samuel Taylor Coleridge has come to be known to the general reader primarily as a poet, for poetry was not his own primary interest and the poems with which his name is most strongly linked—The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Kubla Khan,” and Christabel—were products of a few months in a long literary career. He did not suffer a decline in poetic creativity; he simply turned his attention to political, metaphysical, and theological issues that were best treated in prose. That Coleridge is counted among the major poets of British Romanticism is, for this reason, all the more remarkable. For most poets, the handful of commonly anthologized poems is a scant representation of their output; for Coleridge, it is, in many instances, the sum of his accomplishment. His minor verse is often conventional and uninspired. His major poems, in contrast, speak with singular emotional and intellectual intensity in a surprising range of forms—from the symbolic fantasy of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (which first appeared in Lyrical Ballads) to the autobiographical sincerity of the conversation poems—exerting an influence on subsequent poets far beyond what Coleridge himself anticipated.

Were Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s health problems and remedies in any way beneficial for his literary work?

Consider the Lyrical Ballads as a landmark work of English Romanticism.

Consider the Lyrical Ballads as a source of subsequent conflict and confusion for its two authors.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner stands as a particularly long-running required poem for relatively young students. What qualities of the poem enable it to remain a more successful educational venture than some of the other curricular standbys from its time and from the nineteenth century?

In what ways was Biographica Literaria an original work of literary criticism?

How can Coleridge’s “conversation poems” be so justified? Was it a matter of the poet having a conversation with himself?

What habits or circumstances sometimes prevented Coleridge from completing poems successfully?