Introduction chapter I the influence of samuel taylor coleridge as a poet

1.2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a critic and philosopher to English literature.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21st 1772 in the country town of Ottery in England. Samuel’s father the Reverend John Coleridge was a rail respected vicar of the parish and a headmaster of Henry 8’s free Grammar School at Ottery. He was a tenth and youngest child of Ann Bowden and John Coleridge. Samuel considered himself as lonely kid often choosing to stay at home rather than go play ball with his friends. On the death of his father, he was sent to school at Christ’s Hospital School in London, where he stayed there for most of his childhood studying and writing poetry. From 1791 until 1794 Coleridge attended Jesus College Cambridge. In 1792 he won the Browne Gold Medal for the poem that he wrote on slave. Later he met his future wife Sarah Fricker. Their marriage was not a very happy one for the most part, but it did last until his death.
Coleridge met William Wordsworth in 1795 who once proclaimed him as the best poet of the age.
After their joint publication of “Lyrical Ballads” in 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth went to Germany to begin studying German philosophers and critics such as Conte and Fichte which helped them to alter their thoughts regarding philosophy and religion. At the time when he was studying at Christ’s Hospital which was a boarding school in London, he befriended with several boys, including Tom Evans. During 1788 he and other friends visited Tom Evans’ home in London, where he met Tom’s eldest sister, Mary Evans. Coleridge had warm feelings for her. Evans became Coleridge’s first love and inspiration. However, the relationship lasted only a short while and in 1795 on October, she married to Fryer Todd. When Coleridge made plans with friend Robert Southey to emigrate to overseas, Mary wrote to Coleridge a letter of telling him not to leave. This letter brought him the old feelings and memories. His feelings inspired him to write the poem “Sonnet: To my own Heart”.
Coleridge prescribed too laudanum due to attacks of rheumatism and he quickly became addicted to opium. His critically acclaimed poem “Kubla Khan” was actually came from one of Samuel’s opium do streams. Nevertheless, he realized the laudanum was more evil than the diseases it failed to cure. The beginning of the 19th century was a very dark time for Samuel. In the next thirty years things started getting better but he was under the constant care of a doctor and his writing became darker and more gothic. He was a very intelligent writer and a philosopher of his time and when he passed away in 1834, his friends could only think of how the world had just lost an incomparable intellect of the time.⁴
The collection of poems which is called “Lyrical Ballads’ were written by Samuel Taylor and William Wordsworth first published in 1798. It illustrated the beginning of the English Romantism movement in literature. Romantism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism, idealization of nature and the glorification of the past with a strong preference for medieval time. Coleridge’s most famous poem from the collection of “Lyrical Ballads” is “The Rime of Ancient Mariner”. In this poem Coleridge compares two things by contrast and includes them into one situation. In other words, it all begins with the wedding party where an old sailor tells his story to the guests by catching their attentions. The story is about his life experience, when he accidently shoots to the bird albatross which was innocent and gets the rage of the sea and wind. He faces many troubles in the ship, because of committing a crime which turns to the curse for him. Two hundred people pass away from the curse that he called. Later he suffers in unknown land and finds out snakes next to his legs. He assumes them as a creatures of nature, not the pests as he used to think. Then the curse breaks up by making him free from all sufferings. Finally, the ghosts of two hundred people help him to get him home safely.
Coleridge’s attempts to learn this “language” and trace it through the ancient traditions of mankind also led him during this period to return to the visionary interests of his schooldays: as he ransacked works of comparative religion and mythology, he was exploring the possibility that all religions and mythical traditions, with their general agreement on the unity of God and the immortality of the soul, sprang from a universal life consciousness, which was expressed particularly through the phenomena of human genius.
While these speculations were at their most intense, he retired to a lonely farmhouse near Culbone, Somersetshire, and, according to his own account, composed under the influence of laudanum the mysterious poetic fragment known as “Kubla Khan.” The exotic imagery and rhythmic chant of this poem have led many critics to conclude that it should be read as a “meaningless reverie” and enjoyed merely for its vivid and sensuous qualities. An examination of the poem in the light of Coleridge’s psychological and mythological interests, however, suggests that it has, after all, a complex structure of meaning and is basically a poem about the nature of human genius. The first two stanzas show the two sides of what Coleridge elsewhere calls “commanding genius”: its creative aspirations in time of peace as symbolized in the projected pleasure dome and gardens of the first stanza; and its destructive power in time of turbulence as symbolized in the wailing woman, the destructive fountain, and the voices prophesying war of the second stanza. In the final stanza the poet writes of a state of “absolute genius” in which, if inspired by a visionary “Abyssinian maid,” he would become endowed with the creative, divine power of a sun god—an Apollo or Osiris subduing all around him to harmony by the fascination of his spell.
Coleridge was enabled to explore the same range of themes less egotistically in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” composed during the autumn and winter of 1797–98. For this, his most famous poem, he drew upon the ballad form. The main narrative tells how a sailor who has committed a crime against the life principle by slaying an albatross suffers from torments, physical and mental, in which the nature of his crime is made known to him. The underlying life power against which he has transgressed is envisaged as a power corresponding to the influx of the sun’s energy into all living creatures, thereby binding them together in a joyful communion. By killing the bird that hovered near the ship, the mariner has destroyed one of the links in this process. His own consciousness is consequently affected: the sun, previously glorious, is seen as a bloody sun, and the energies of the deep are seen as corrupt.
All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The very deep did rot; O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
Only at night do these energies display a sinister beauty.
About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch’s oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.
After the death of his shipmates, alone and becalmed, devoid of a sense of movement or even of time passing, the mariner is in a hell created by the absence of any link with life. Eventually, however, a chance sight of water snakes flashing like golden fire in the darkness, answered by an outpouring of love from his heart, reinitiates the creative process: he is given a brief vision of the inner unity of the universe, in which all living things hymn their source in an interchange of harmonies. Restored to his native land, he remains haunted by what he has experienced but is at least delivered from nightmare, able to see the ordinary processes of human life with a new sense of their wonder and mercifulness. These last qualities are reflected in the poem’s attractive combination of vividness and sensitivity. The placing of it at the beginning of Lyrical Ballads was evidently intended to provide a context for the sense of wonder in common life that marks many of Wordsworth’s contributions. While this volume was going through the press, Coleridge began a complementary poem, a Gothic ballad entitled “Christabel,” in which he aimed to show how naked energy might be redeemed through contact with a spirit of innocent love.⁵