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What makes Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetry romantic?
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetry is considered Romantic due to its emphasis on emotion, nature, and the supernatural. Romanticism favored the dignity of the common person and viewed nature as a sacred, redemptive force. Coleridge's works, like "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan," incorporate exotic settings, supernatural themes, and simple language. He, along with Wordsworth, sought to redefine poetry, focusing on individual creativity and the sublime, characteristic of the Romantic movement.
The Romantic poets pushed back against the measured, even prose of the Neoclassical poets and against themes borrowed from the Classical period that focused on great men. They wanted to show the dignity and worth of the common person and to express emotion. They also thought God showed himself through nature and that nature was therefore a sacred place of solace and redemption. They reacted against Enlightenment rationalism, trying to incorporate fairy-tale, whimsy, the exotic, and the supernatural in their work. They also tried to use the simple language of the ordinary person. They perceived the artist as a lone genius with a special imagination that set him apart from the rest of humanity.
Coleridge exemplified these Romantic characteristics in his poetry. In a poem such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , the mariner is an ordinary man who learns that nature is God's sacred creation and so...
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must be treated with special reverence. The poem also incorporates supernatural themes. In "Frost at Midnight" Coleridge celebrates the birth of his son, his own childhood, and the common person, writing:
I dreamtOf my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rangFrom morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day . . .
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch Smokes in the sun-thaw . . .
First, it is useful to distinguish between the popular 21st century use of
"romantic", meaning pertaining to a certain idealized view of sexual
relationships, and the literary term "romanticism" which refers to a specific
movement in British and European literature in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries. A description of Coleridge as a "Romantic" poet refers to his
belonging to this literary movement rather than the suitability of his poetry
for Valentine's Day cards.
He is typically Romantic in his use of Gothic, exotic, or legendary themes in
his work, such as the Orientalism of "Kubla Khan" or the ballad quality of the
"Ancient Mariner". As both poet and literary theorist, he shared the typically
Romantic concern with the individual creative intellect, and artistic form as
expressive rather than conventional. He was interested in art as a striving
towards the sublime.