Analyse with textual references the
aspects of Romanticism that you find in the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Answer:
If not the greatest,
Coleridge is at least the most representative of all English romantic poets. He
represents in his work almost all the triumphs and perils of the romantic
spirit. He is the "most complete representative" of the English romantic
poetry of the early nineteenth century as he captures, unlike any other
romantic poet, almost all the salient traits of romanticism. A teeming
imagination, love of the Middle Ages, supernaturalism, humanitarianism, love of
nature, metrical artistry, and a peculiar agony and melancholy-all these
romantic features find ample expression in his work.
His really good poetry does not extent beyond twenty pages, but in them breathes the romantic spirit in all its fullness. He wrote very little, but whatever he wrote well should be engraved in letters of gold and bound in titles of silver. The least prolific of the English romantic poets, he was the most representative of all. According to Bowra, Coleridge's poems "of all English Romantic masterpieces are the most unusual and the most Romantic." Says Vaughan: "Of all that is the purest and most ethereal in the romantic spirit, his poetry is the most finished, the supreme embodiment." No doubt, there are a few (but very few) elements in the romantic spirit which appear in his work rather faintly yet considered as a whole his works are the most exquisite products and representatives of the spirit of the age. Well does Saintsbury call him "the high priest of Romanticism."
Coleridge's Imagination:
The
Romantic Movement can be correctly interpreted as the revolt of imagination
against reason, intellect, and prosaic realism. The romantics believed, as
Bowra puts it, that the creative imagination should be closely connected with a
peculiar insight into an unseen order behind visible things. Their effort was,
in Samuel C. Chew's words, "to live constantly in the world of the
imagination above and beyond the sensuous, phenomenal world." 