Wordsworth and Coleridge

William wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge as Lake poets

In English literature the most important Romantic poets wereWordsworth and Coleridge, called the Lake poets  For the Romantics, imagination was fundamental because they thought that poetry was impossible without it.

William wordsworth :

William Wordsworth was born on April 17, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland County, England. Wordsworth was the second of seven children born to Christopher and Anne Cookson Wordsworth. Both parents passed away by the time he was 13. After being raised by different relatives for a time, Wordsworth was sent away to Hawkshead Grammar School in the Lake District. There, he received a prestigious education in literature and the classics while also indulging in the beauty of the English countryside. His environment fostered a love of nature which would later emerge in his poetry.

His literary area:

In 1787, Wordsworth moved on to St. John’s College in Cambridge. Uninterested in the competitive nature of the university, he did not take his studies seriously, and instead began to write poetry. Wordsworth and Coleridge formed a mutually beneficial and inspirational relationship, eventually beginning the English Romantic movement with the publication of their Lyrical Ballads in 1798. The book includes Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" and Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," arguably their two most famous works. In 1798, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Dorothy moved to Germany, where Wordsworth began work on,The Prelude and a group of poems known as the "Lucy Poems." In 1799 Wordsworth returned to the Lake District, where he would live for the remainder of his life. Wordsworth, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, became known as a "Lakeland Poet" because of the area where he lived—renowned for its wild landscapes, charming pastures, and countless lakes.His great autobiographical poem, The Prelude, was published posthumously.

Major works of wordsworth :

☞Lyrical Ballads, (1798) 

☞"Simon Lee" Lyrical Ballads,  (1800) ☞Preface to the Lyrical Ballads  (1807) ☞"Resolution and Independence" ☞"French Revolution" (1810) 

☞Guide to the Lakes (1810) 

☞"To the Cuckoo" 

☞The Excursion (1814) 

☞Laodamia (1815, 1845)

The lucy :

William Wordsworth’s “Lucy Poems” consist of five verses composed between 1798 and 1801. They include,

“Strange fits of passion have I known,” “She dwelt among the untrodden ways,” “I travelled among unknown men,” “Three years she grew in sun and shower,” and “A slumber did my spirit seal.” All but one of the poems, “I travelled among unknown men,” 

were included in the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads.A collection of poems Wordsworth composed with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. While the poems all focus on the same subject, Wordsworth did not intend to present them as a group or in a particular sequence. 

The “Lucy Poems” convey the unrequited love of the speaker for a woman named Lucy. As the poems progress.we learn that she died young and inspired the speaker to write his elegiac verses about her. To this day, the person on whom Lucy was based remains unknown. Some have suggested that Lucy may represent Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy or one of his love interests. However, her description does not match any particular known person from Wordsworth’s life. Scholars now regard Lucy as the poet’s imaginary muse.The embodiment of Wordsworth’s poetic views and life experiences. She represents Romantic ideals of love and loss, nature and the supernatural, joy and pain.

The prelude :

In 1805, as he was reviewing the long creative process that would ultimately result in the posthumous publication of his epic verse The prelude, William Wordsworth observed that the poem originated from an intense and overwhelming feeling that he was,

 “unprepared to treat any more arduous subject”

 than his autobiography. In keeping with such a difficult and time-consuming task of addressing such an arduous subject, there is no such thing as one official version of the poem that is universally accepted as the vision that Wordsworth originally set for himself.

 The expansion into the much longer epic version eventually published is marked by the incorporation of mythic themes and universal concepts that underscore the more individual and personal nature of its autobiographical conceit of a life lived as a circular odyssey that ends back where it started. Wordsworth’s personal journey through his schoolboy youth, education at Cambridge, his famous tour through the Alps and the dashing of the high hopes raised by the rebellious fervor that stimulated the French Revolution are all seamlessly integrated to create a poem truly epic in scope despite the lack of larger than life heroes, gods, and mighty battles.

The Thorn :

William Wordsworth’s “The Thorn” was written in 1789. Wordsworth's inspiration for the setting of the poem, a mountain, came from his own experience of seeing a hawthorn tree on Quantock Hill in Somersetshire.

Wordsworth and Coleridge embraced the common language of the lower and middle classes in order to convey raw human emotions. Most of the poems are dramatic in form, revealing the character of the speaker. The collection as a whole relays the pureness of nature and the need for mankind to return to a simpler time and place, uncorrupted by society. In the prelude to the second volume, Wordsworth pronounces the poets’ desire to

 “choose incidents and situations from common life” recounted through “language really used by men.”

 Indeed, these elements are prevalent in "The Thorn." Narrated by an unreliable speaker who directly addresses the reader in a gossiping tone, the poem relays the story of a destitute woman whose lover abandoned her and left her with child. With abundant references to nature and the supernatural, "The Thorn" illustrates perfectly the way in which society can destroy the individual by first robbing him of his innocence and then condemning him for it.

 “The Thorn” specifically, as a work in which provincial life and pure human emotion are fully embraced through a direct, vernacular style that changed the course of English literature.

Samuel Taylor coleridge:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a English poet writing in the late 18th and early 19th century, often associated with Romanticism. In the context of literary history, Coleridge is often seen as "the most intellectual of the English Romantics" due to his extensive forays into critical writing and lectures on Shakespeare. This is not to say that Coleridge's creative side received short shrift; friends and colleagues knew him as an unrelentingly passionate poet. In a letter to a friend, Dorothy Wordsworth gushed:

 "His eye is large and full, not dark but grey; such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind; it has more of the 'poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling' than I ever witnessed." 

Like in the  Ancient Mariner in his poem, Coleridge's very eyes spoke of his compulsion to tell stories. But Coleridge did not take himself too seriously.

Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772 in Devonshire, England. He was the youngest of 14 children. Coleridge proved to be a brilliant student from early on, and continued to excel at Jesus College, Cambridge. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was first published. The collection was a major landmark in the Romantic movement  in it the two writers exemplified the examination of the mundane, natural, and intensely subjective. Many of the poems were also written in everyday language avoiding the ornamented styles of speech and elaborate rhyme schemes favored by poets of earlier periods. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is one exception to this trend as in it Coleridge derived both his rhyme scheme and his diction from Middle English. 

 Most notably, in 1810 Coleridge and Wordsworth suffered a falling out, and never entirely regained their former closeness. Eventually on the verge of suicide, he moved in with a doctor who managed his care for the last eighteen years of his life. While in the doctor's care, Coleridge published the unfinished poems "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan," which became icons of Romantic poetry.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge died on July 25, 1834 at the age of 61. Upon his death, his good friend Charles Lamb claimed he could not grieve for Coleridge, saying: 

"It seemed to me that he long had been on the confines of the next world—that he had a hunger for eternity."

 According to Lamb, Coleridge spent his life striving for the eternal and sublime, so that death was for him the fulfillment of his deepest desire, rather than a dreaded end.

Arts by coleridge :

☞Answer to a child's Question  (1817)

☞Christabel (1816)

☞This Lime Tree Bower My Prisom(1797)

☞Frost at Midnight(1798)

☞Ne Plus Ultra(1834)

☞What is Epigram?(1802)

☞Love (1826)

☞Kubla Khan(1816)

☞The Rime of the Ancient Mariner(1978)

☞Work without Hope(1825)

The Aeolain Harp:

The seminal work in Coleridge’s canon .This work is a poem that was written in 1795. It was published in 1796. This is essentially a "conversation poem".

This poem explores the possibilities of Coleridge’s marriage and what it could bring in his life. However, this poem must not be confused with a love poem. It is a traditional romantic poem that explores the theme of man’s union with nature.

This deals with the duality of “order and wildness”. The central idea and a recurrent motif is the harp, that represents a multitude of ideas. This poem also explores the idea of divinity in nature. It was essentially one of Coleridge’s most celebrated poems and was loved by critics and readers alike.

Coleridge's poem :

In 1798, Coleridge and longtime friend William Wordsworth anonymously published Lyrical Ballads, a work which officially began the Romantic movement in English poetry. Though not the first of Colerdige's published works, Lyrical Ballads established Coleridge among the foremost poetic voices in 18th century England. Coleridge often uses a matter-of-fact, conversational style in his poetry, a practice in keeping with the Romantic ideal that poetry should be about and for the average reader. "."

The voice Coleridge uses in his poetry is often somber and melancholy, as can be most clearly seen in "Dejection: An Ode" but which also appears in the first half of "Frost at Midnight." Like most Romantics, Coleridge took a very personal stance in his poetry, writing much of it in response to his own life experiences or his views on current events in which he had an interest. Thus "Dejection: An Ode" reflects upon his own unrequited love, while "France: An Ode" meditates upon his own growing disillusionment with the revolution in France.

Most of Coleridge's poetry is lyric; that is, it has a song-like quality and is quite suited to reading (or even singing) aloud. Coleridge fused this popular writing style with his own experimental poetic forms, as when he based the scheme of "Christabel" not on rhyme, but on the pattern of accented and unaccented syllables.

A prolific writer, Coleridge seems to have seldom been satisfied with his own final products. Much of his most famous published poetry is either fragmentary or heavily rewritten. 

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner :

Coleridge first published his famous ballad, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in 1798 joint effort with his close friend and colleague William Wordsworth. The collection's publication is often seen as the Romantic Movement's true inception. It was published anonymously a move that contradicted its intensely personal and subjective contents. Purportedly, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was to be a joint effort on both poets' parts; Coleridge attributed the shooting of the albatross as well as several lines to Wordsworth. However, the pressures of the genre he was helping to define may have contributed to his ultimate decision to remove much of the archaism from the poem for several revisions in the early years of the 19th century. In the 1817 version of the poem, Coleridge added another layer to the poem in the form of marginal glosses. These explanations not only amplify the allegorical feel of the poem but work in place of the omitted archaisms to establish a nostalgic fictitiously historical mood. They also state directly that spirits and not just nature, are responsible for punishing the Ancient Mariner and his shipmates.

While "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" departed from Romantic stylistic tendencies, it exemplified many of the genre's themes. The most central of these is the subjectivity of experience and the importance of the individual. The poem is told largely from the Ancient Mariner's perspective, despite the minor involvement of a separate narrator, who describes the Ancient Mariner and Wedding Guest's actions. The Ancient Mariner tells his self-centered tale for a self-centered purpose: to allay his agonizing storytelling compulsion. 

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is said to have been inspired by several historical sources.  which he describes how one of his shipmates shot an albatross that he believed had made the wind disappear.