Romanticism, Coleridge

Coleridge, "Effusion" ("The Eolian Harp" 601); "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" (613)

Review: Romanticism CD. Coleridge, Geographic Chronology
-- Coleridge and Wordsworth in Somerset

Coleridge - Wu's headnote:

Christ's Hospital, London, 1782 (592)
Cambridge, 1791
Pantisocracy, engaged to Sara Fricker, 1794 (593)
Meets Wordsworth, 1795
To Nether Stowey, 1797-8
Writes "conversation poems," "supernatural poems," 1795-98 (594)
To Germany with Wordsworths, Sept 1798

Conversation poems: "Eolian Harp" (1795), "This Lime-Tree Bower" (1797), "The Nightingale" (1798), "Frost at Midnight" (1798), "Dejection: An Ode" (1802), "To William Wordsworth" (1807)
-- as if to an addressee (Sara, Hartley…)
-- subjective focus, usually on a problem, may be resolved by end
-- style ranges from informal to high rhetoric (informal: precedent see Cowper, e.g. 20-21)

"Eolian Harp", 1834 version (601)

poem as problem and answer? --

social vs. solitary
temporal vs. timeless
alienation vs. participation
mortality vs. immortality
mundane vs. transcendent
stasis vs. progress
passive vs. active
particularize vs. generalize
reality vs. daydream
mechanic vs. organic

Students: discuss (with quotation) argument of poem in light of one or more contrasts (not all contrasts have a valence)

Overview of key moments:

-- evening, dusk facilitates imagination, feeling
-- "lute," eolian harp, principle of creativity in the universe (passive vs. active?); daydreaming mode of thought (explicitly: cf. 39-40)
-- "one life" (26) - pantheistic, animism (transcendent vs. mundane)
-- "animated nature" (44)
-- Sara's reproof (49)
-- "unregenerate mind" (55): original sin? vs. Rousseau, born innocent
-- marriage (64), one of the Christian sacraments, overcomes original sin

1795 version:
Associationist account of mind (Locke, Hartley, vs. Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant)

-- cf. early MS lines, 602n8 "mechanized matter"
-- Wordsworth against, Two-Part Prelude, 466, l. 244 etc.

>> connectedness of mind to universe
-- cf. Wordsworth, e.g., "Lines Written in Early Spring," 374;
-- Two-Part Prelude, 450 "mind of man," l. 67;
452 "Ye powers of earth," l. 187;
467 "active universe," l. 296; "one great mind," l. 302;
471 "one life," l. 460

A "Greater Romantic lyric" (Abrams),
http://www.laits.utexas.edu/farrell/documents/Greater%20rom%20Lyric.pdf

Phases of consciousness model (for this and other poems, e.g., Keats "Nightingale"):

Reality - daydream/memory - transcendence - [return]

"This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" (613)

Nether Stowey, Quantocks, Alfoxton Glen

Students: Argument of poem? Reminder:

social vs. solitary
temporal vs. timeless
alienation vs. participation
mortality vs. immortality
mundane vs. transcendent
stasis vs. progress
passive vs. active
particularize vs. generalize
reality vs. daydream
mechanic vs. organic

Phases of consciousness model:

Reality - daydream/memory - transcendence - [return]

Self-regeneration; role of empathy

return to course page

Document created January 17th 2008