Wordsworth and Coleridge - a study of poets

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Name: - Yesha Bhatt M.

Course: - M.A. English

Semester: - 2

Batch: - 2015-2017

Enrolment no:- PG15101003

Submitted to: - Smt. S.B.Gardi Dept. of English MKBU

Email id: - yeshab68@gmail.com

Paper no: - 5 The Romantic Literature

Topic: - Wordsworth and Coleridge a study of poets

v An Introduction of The Romantic Age :

                  The first half of the nineteenth century records the triumph of Romanticism in literature and democracy in government. The chief subject of romantic literature was the essential nobleness of common men and the value of the individual. In the period there were so many writers and poets were presenting their individual point of views and viewing the world with their own perspective. It was an age of poetry and poets of the age were William Wordsworth, Samuel Tailor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Walter Scott, George Gordon Byron and many more poets has given their contribution in the poetry of the age. Here is the introduction of two major poets of Romantic Age.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

    Life :

            Wordsworth was born in 1770 at Cockermouth, Cumberland, and spent his seventeen years in Cumberland Hills; his mother died when he was eight years old and after six years his father has also died, and the orphan has taken in charge by relatives, in school he used learn with flowers and hills rather than classes; in 1787 he went to Cambridge. It was the time of stress and storm with his revolutionary experience in university and in his life it was like a period of uncertainty. He started writing from 1797 to 1799 a very short period but very important in his life and for the romantic period, and from 1799 he has taken retirement from his work of writing and spent time in between the nature at northern lake region where he was born, he was very close to the nature which experience has reflected in all his poetry.

I heard among the solitary hills

Low breathings coming after me, and sounds

Of undistinguishable motion.

 He goes out into the woods at night and what he experienced he has presented in the poetry it is like a mental photograph. On the death of Southey, he was made poet laureate, against his own inclination.

       The Poetry of Wordsworth :

               Wordsworth has in favour of simple poetic diction but he himself has not followed his own rule, his poetries are easy to read but not to understand, reader could get the pleasure but not the hidden meaning. As in his poem “Lucy”:

A violet by a mossy stone,

Half hidden from the eye;

Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.

                 Wordsworth was strongly believed that man and nature should be portrayed as they are. He is not always melodious, but he is seldom graceful. He is absolutely without humour.

                   After his longer works his first good book as per critics was Selections with short poems, after reading these poems we come to know that Wordsworth is the greatest nature poet that ever has been produced by our literature. No other poet has found such beauty in nature as Wordsworth has described. He had a strong belief that all nature is the reflection of the living God, all his contemporary writers like Cowper, Burns, Keats, and Tennyson were providing the out ward aspects of nature in varying degrees but Wordsworth gives you her very life, and the experience of man with the nature. While reading his poetry the reader could feel the touch of nature, the experience of wonderland and memory of our own childhood.

            Wordsworth’s philosophy toward human life is very simple that man is not apart from nature, but is the very “life of her life.” Wordsworth has connected birth with nature and he expressed this gladness with poetry that the child comes straight from the Creator of nature:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,

But trailing cloud of glory do we come

From God, who is our home”

              In “Intimations of Immorality from recollections of Early Childhood” and in “The Retreat” he has summed up his childhood and philosophy; In “Tintern Abbey”, “The Rainbow”, “Ode to Duty” and “Intimation of Immorality” it is plain teaching; In “Michael,” “The Solitary Reaper,” “to a Highland Girl,” “Stepping Westward,” he tries to suggests the joy and sorrow not of princes or kings but of a common life. He has described his whole life in “The Prelude” and “The Recluse” is the treat to nature.   

Samuel Taylor Coleridge(1772-1834)

      Life :

                Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the youngest of thirteen children. He was an extra precocious child, who could read at the age of threes, and before he was five, he had read the Bible and the Arabian Nights. From three to six he has attended “dame” school and from six to nine he was attending his father’s school and in that period his father died. At ten he sent to London for school education. At nineteen Coleridge, who had read more books than old professor he entered Cambridge as a charity student. He left the university without taking the degree. After that he has joined Southey and they were working together for the regeneration of the human society. Then he studied in Germany; worked as a private secretary later he went to Rome for study and then he started The Friend a paper devoted to truth and liberty.

                 In early life he suffered from neuralgia, and to ease the pain began to use opiates, the result was very bad he became a slave to the drug habit; after fifteen years of pain and struggle and despair, he gave up and put himself in the charge of physician and Carlyle who visited him at this time called him “a king of men” he later gave his contribution in Lyrical Ballads in 1798. He died in 1834, and was buried in Highgate Church.

      Works of Coleridge :

                  In the poetry of Coleridge we find note of sympathy, and humanity. He has three divisions of his works, the poetic, the critical and the philosophical. He had a strong influence of Blake’s poetry. Coleridge was very much attracted with the concept of supernatural, he was able to make familiar world unfamiliar, as he himself noted in his “Day Dreams” that,

“My eyes make pictures when they are shut”

It seems very similar to Blake’s songs of innocence, bbut the difference between both is very important that Blake is only a dreamer while Coleridge is dreamer as well as a profound scholar. Strong suggestions of Blake can be seen such poetries like “A Day Dreamer,” “The Devil’s Thoughts,” “The Suicide’s Argument,” and “The Wanderings of Cain.”

                  His later poems there is his imagination with thought and study, as it could be noticed in “Kubla Khan,” “Christabel,” and “The Rime of The Ancient Mariner.” Coleridge’s more controversial and unfinished poem id Kubla Khan, the poem has a verbal dream pictures,

The sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea

                 He was interrupted after fifty-four lines were written, and he never finished the poem. Christabel is also planned as the story of a pure young girl and till the poem ends it has so many elements which convert it from a simple story to a very mysterious and horror supernatural reading. The masterpiece of Coleridge is “The Rime of The Ancient Mariner” he has presented this poem in Lyrical Ballads, he has made the reader aware with the supernatural imagination he has presented totally an imaginative journey which cannot be true and reader also know that but though it seems real, it gives us a sense of reality if we connect the incidence with each other, the poem has a very good meter, rime and melody. Coleridge has a very clear pattern of poetry that he never describes things but makes suggestions, brief suggestions and always right, it supports with the imagination of the reader.

                     Coleridge has written also a short poems, and there is a wide variety, that are, “Ode to France,” “Youth and Age,” “Dejection,” “Love Poems,” “ fears in Solitude,” “Religious Musings,” “Work Without Hope,” and “Hymn Before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni.” Coleridge also translated a poem from Latin, “The Virgin’s Cradle Hymn” and “Wallenstein” is its best example.

                     Coleridge’s prose works are also important; the first and remarkable one is Biographia Literaria, or Sketches of My Literary Life and Options, his collected Lectures on Shakespeare (1849), and Aids to Reflection (1825) both are very important on the literary point of view. His lectures has been stood for two centuries as the rules of literary criticism of Shakespeare, it could be applied to all the literary works. Coleridge had a belief that only a profound philosopher could be a perfect poet, as he has the philosophic perspective in his poetries. He has introduced the idealistic philosophy of Germany to England. In his works he has presented the view of Religion and aspect of Philosopher. The life of Coleridge was full of struggle though he has lived with his imagination and supernatural realms.

                     Wordsworth and Coleridge both have given a very important contribution to the literary world. Contemporary literature has also an influence of both. The introduction of nature by Wordsworth and supernatural world by Coleridge is still fresh as blossomed flower.

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