英美文学选读学习笔记 Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was born in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, the son of a clergyman. At the age of nine, his father died. One year later he was sent away to school at Christ's Hospital in London and seldom went back home. He was a lonely, sad and mentally cocious boy, full of dreams in his mind. However, he found the school an excellent one, for it gave him the intellectual nurture he needed, as well as a lifelong friend, Charles Lamb. But the university life at Cambridge bored him. He fell into idleness, had trouble with his instructor, and got into debt. In despair, he betook himself to London and enlisted in the 15th Dragoon, but was discharged after a few months and returned to Cambridge, where he finished his study however, but left without a degree. Inspired by the radical thinkers with their idealism, Coleridge joined Robert Southey in a utopian plan of establishing an ideal democratic community in America, named "Pantisocracy." The plan resulted in nothing but his marriage to Sara Fricker, which turned out to be an unhappy one.

In the spring of 1797, Coleridge met and began his long friendship with William Wordsworth. Falling under Wordsworth's spell, Coleridge's creative energies were awakened and he began to devote himself to poetry writing. In 1798, the two men published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads, which became a landmark in English poetry. Coleridge's poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," was included in the volume. The years 1797 and 1798 were among the most fruitful of Coleridge's life. In addition to "The Ancient Mariner," he wrote  "Kubla Khan," began writing "Christahel," and composed "This Lime-Tree Bower My prison,“ "Frost at Midnight," and "The Nightingale," which are considered to be his best "conversational" poems.

In 1798, he traveled with the Wordsworths to Germany where he spent much of his time studying German philosophy, especially the 18th-century idealism of Immanuel Kant. After he returned to England in 1800, Coleridge settled with his family at Keswick in the Lake District near Wordsworth. By this time Coleridge had become addicted to opium, a drug he used to ease the pain of rheumatism, which gradually destroyed his health, happiness and poetic creativity. In his "Dejection, an Ode," he lamented over his declining spirit of imagination. Coleridge spent two years in Malta in order to restore his health but failed. Back to London, he began to give his famous series of lectures on literature and philosophy; the lectures on Shakespeare were particularly successful. Coleridge quarreled seriously with Wordsworth in 1810. Although they reconciled with each other later on, their friendship had never reached its former intimacy. In 1813, his tragic drama Remorse received popular welcome.  In 1816 Coleridge, still addicted to opium and now estranged from his family, took residence in the London home of an admirer, the physician James Gillman. There he wrote his major prose work, Biographia Literaria (1817), a series of autobiographical notes and dissertations on many subjects, including some brilliantly perceptive literary criticism. The sections in which he exsses his views on the nature of poetry and discusses the works of Wordsworth are especially notable.

Philosophically and critically, Coleridge opposed the limitedly rationalistic trends of the 18th-century thought. He courageously stemmed the tide of the vailing doctrines derived from Hume and Hartley, advocating a more spiritual and religious-intertation of life, based on what he had learnt from Kant and Schelling. He believed that art is the only permanent revelation of the nature of reality. A poet should realize the vague intimations derived from his unconsciousness without sacrificing the vitality of the inspiration. Politically, Coleridge was first an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution. He even designed his "Pantisocracy as a society where everyone would be equal to anyone else. But in his later period, he was a fiery foe of the rights of man, of Jacobinism. He insisted that a government should be based upon the will of the propertied classes only, and should impose itself upon the rest of the community from above.

Coleridge's actual achievement as poet can be spanided into two remarkably spanerse groups: the demonic and the conversational. The demonic group includes his three masterpieces: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Christabel" and “Kubla Khan.” Mysticism and demonism with strong imagination are the distinctive features of this group. The poems are set in a strange territory of the poet's memory and dream, where events are reigned beyond the control of reason. Unifying the group is a magical quest pattern which intends as its goal to reconcile the poet's self-consciousness with a higher order of being associated with spanine forgiveness.

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" told an adventurous story of a sailor. By neglecting the law of hospitality, the mariner cruelly shot an albatross which flew to the ship through thick fog. Then disaster fell onto the ship. The breeze died down; the ship stopped; the hot tropical sun shone all day long. The other sailors died of thirst one after another, while the mariner alone was alive, being tortured all the time with thirst and the horror of death. Only when the mariner finally repented and blessed for the water snake did the spell break and the ship was then able to go back home. The story moves on through a world of wonder, from mysterious face to inevitable close. Each incident stands out clear and vivid; each corresponding change in the soul of the mariner is registered. The whole experience is an ordeal of opssive weariness. The mariner's sin was that in killing the albatross he rejected a social offering, he obliterated something that loved him and resented in a supernatural way the possibility of affection in the world. Of course, the mariner finally recovered from the isolation joyfully; but the joy came only from his own changed attitude and his willingness to look differently on the world. From this poem, we can infer that Coleridge believed the universe as the projection not of reasoned beliefs but of irrational fears and guilty feelings. He had created the kind of universe which his own inexplicable sins and their consequences might have suggested to him. His religious conflicts enforced him to describe the universe in his work as the Christian universe gone mad.

"Christabel" uses a freer version of the ballad form to create an atmosphere of the Gothic horror at once delicate and sinister. The tale is an old one of a serpent disguised as a beautiful lady to victimize an innocent maiden. The standard trappings of Gothic horror -- the remote castle and the wood, the virgin Christabel in peril and the subtly wicked Geraldine -- dramatize a confrontation with evil through disturbing suggestions of the sexual, supernatural and fantastic elements of dream. The moaning of the owl and the crowing of the cock, together with the response of the dog to the regular strokes of the clock, produce the effect of mystery and horror in the dead night. Opposed to the nightmarish are images of religious grace and the spring of love that had gushed from the poet's heart. It has been said that the thing attempted in Christabel is the most difficult in the whole field of romance, and nothing could come nearer the mark. The miraculous element, which lies on the face of “The Ancient Mariner,” is here driven beneath the surface.

"Kubla Khan" was composed in a dream after Coleridge took the opium. The poet was reading about Kubla Khan when he fell asleep. The images of the river, of the magnificent palace and other marvelous scenes deposited in his unconsciousness were exssed into about two or three hundred lines. But when he was writing them down, a stranger interrupted him and the vision was never recaptured. Only 54 lines survived.

Among the conversational group, "Frost at Midnight" is the most important. The poem is an intimate record of his personal thoughts in a midnight solitude on his infant son Hartley. In the surroundings of sea, hill and wood, Coleridge's mind moves backwards and forwards in time and space from the interior of the cottage to nature and from his own boyhood to that imagined for Hartley amid a world of sublime physical and spiritual freedom. "Dejection: An Ode" is also an intimate personal piece in which Coleridge utters his innermost thoughts and sentiments. Generally, the conversational group speaks more directly of an allied theme: the desire to go home, not to the past, but to what Hart Crane beautifully called "an improved infancy." Each of these poems verges upon a kind of vicarious and purgatorial atonement, in which Coleridge must fail or suffer so that someone he loves may succeed or experience joy.

Coleridge is one of the first critics to give close critical attention to language, maintaining that the true end of poetry is to give pleasure "through the medium of beauty." The chapters of great importance in Biographia Literaria are his comments on Wordsworth's theory of poetic style. He sings highly Wordsworth's "purity of language," "deep and subtle thoughts," "perfect truth to nature" and his "imaginative power." But he denies Wordsworth's claim that there is no essential difference between the language of poetry and the language spoken by common people. In analyzing Shakespeare, Coleridge emphasizes the philosophic aspect, reading more into the subject than the text and going deeper into the inner reality than only caring for the outer form.

Coleridge was esteemed by some of his contemporaries and is generally recognized today as a lyrical poet and literary critic of the first rank. His poetic themes range from the supernatural to the domestic. His treatises, lectures, and compelling conversational powers made him one of the most influential English literary critics and philosophers of the 19th century.