Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This essay reconsiders the role of subjectivity and spectatorial remove in the experience of the sublime:

'Like a figure on the shore gazing out to sea, the sublime is, to the subject, an incredible spectacle so far removed as to be safe. In that removal is the tendency to confuse the source of sublimity, attributing it to the spectacle, as in William Falconer’s The Shipwreck (1762), rather than to the viewing subject whose terror stems from the forced comprehension of the frailty and inconsequentiality of its existence. Considering the coexistence of pleasure and terror in the experience of the sublime, the subject’s terror must be reconciled with corresponding pleasure, which is evident in the redemption structure of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) where truly sublime experience is not found in the whirling waters of the ocean, but in the meeting of the humbled soul with the divine.'

Toy theatres of the nineteenth century frequently depicted famous actors in specific roles, sometimes providing captions beneath characters stating not just the part being portrayed but also the star performer whose face and bodily manner were being copied. These toy theatres performed a valuable service for actors and theatre managers during the time they were in general circulation. They reinforced an iconography of celebrity that linked star actors with the roles they played, generating excitement around individual performers. They also helped to promote the star system that dominated British theatre through most of the nineteenth century.

Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi is a recently released biopic based on the life of heroic Queen of Jhansi, Rani Lakshmi Bai. The film is directed by Kangana Ranaut who herself has played the role of Rani Lakshmi Bai in the film. The film was released on 25th January 2019 and received worldwide acclaim. Although the movie renders several potential social and political issues, the present paper focuses on an inevitable linkage between ‘history’ and ‘the film’ (as a form of popular culture) that is distortedly safeguarding the historical element of female bravery in the Indian social panorama. Since Lakshmi Bai is a legendary figure in India due to her vital role in the First Freedom Struggle of 1857, so the concepts of feminine courage and bravery are altogether convincing. Her life story can be an inspiration to many, especially to the females because she chooses to fight than to surrender to the firangis (the British) to save her kingdom. The film also implicitly showcases the female heroic tradition of India, which finds rare mention in history books; and which is very selective and shows an affinity towards a particular political ideology. The film is an attempt to focalize the short and valiant life episode of Rani Lakshmi Bai through the means of popular culture. In doing so, the film naturally encompasses some play with the known historical facts as it is generally opined that the first and foremost purpose of any film is entertainment. The purpose of this article is to explore the “distortions” and “play” done in the film with the known historical facts to cater to the taste of the twenty-first-century audience of India. It also studies the message that comes out of the movie from such type of (mis)representation. The paper concludes that as the film is a product of popular culture (though it deals with serious history), the audience is anticipated to suspend their disbelief willingly.

The present study poses an interpretation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp" and William Wordsworth's "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" so as to evince the subject of desire as the ulterior motif of these texts, even though the poetic voices of these works attempt to conceal such a theme. This reading interprets both poems as compositions that share the same thematic line as William Blake's "The Book of Thel" and John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn". Consequently, the close reading of the poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge will be presented.

""Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose includes a generous selection of poems and prose writings, works published by Wordsworth himself being presented under the headings and in the texts of their earliest published volumes. Wordsworth's contributions to the 1798 Lyrical Ballads are included in their entirety, as is the 1805 Prelude, newly edited and annotated. For the first time, The Ruined Cottage and corresponding passages of book 1 of The Excursion are printed en face to reveal Wordsworth's revisionary process.

A general introduction and textual introduction precede the texts, each of which is annotated (with significant textual variants cited in the footnotes), and contextualizing headnotes introduce volumes of poetry and longer poems. Illustrative materials include maps and photographs of manuscript pages and title pages.

"Criticism" collects 28 responses to Wordsworth spanning three centuries by British and American authors. Contributors include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Felicia Hemans, Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th century, and Susan Wolfson, Lucy Newlyn, Stephen Gill, Neil Fraistat, Mary Jacobus, Nicholas Roe, Thomas Pfau, M. H. Abrams, Simon Jarvis, Karen Swann, Michael O’Neill, and Geoffrey Hartman, among others, in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The volume also includes a Chronology, a Biographical and Topographical Register, a Selected Bibliography, and an Index of Titles and First Lines of Poems.""

In October 2012, the professional daredevil Felix Baumgartner performed a nine-minute "space jump" that broke a number of records and was broadcast to millions of viewers on YouTube. I place this stunt within an aesthetic I call the Red Bull sublime, after the energy drink company that sponsors these kinds of events, and, further, show that the sublimity of falling has a history that goes back to Coleridge and Keats.

Winner of the Best Essay Prize for 2017, awarded by the Keats-Shelley Association of America

To most, Charles Darwin's story is simply the birth of the Theory of Evolution. In reality, the story of how Darwin came to this theory, and the many people who would shape his destiny, is itself a story that needs to be told. Like many superhero movies of the 21st century, Darwin has a " back story " , the tale of how Darwin became Darwin. Darwin's story can appeal to many readers on different levels. On the purely academic level the work traces the influence of Alexander von Humboldt, Goethe and Wordsworth, in addition to Erasmus Darwin, on the development of Charles Darwin's theory of natural and sexual selection. On another level is the story of the development of Darwin's imagination and how this enabled his theories to evolve during the Victorian era when it was difficult to express them, yet at the same time in an era which encouraged them. This was a very contradictory time in history indeed. Charles Darwin's Debt to the Romantics is an attempt to mirror Darwin's own narrative, in which, through his imagination, he engages in conversation with the reader on a journey to discover the laws behind the process in which life evolves. These traces in time, moving both backwards into the past and forwards into the future, are like footprints in the sand, some of which get washed away never to be seen again. What drew me to this research was the Romantic notion of the imagination in which the self is so very much a part of Nature. We try very hard to observe nature objectively, but we can never get away from being subjectively part of it at the same time, just through the very act of observing it through our senses or through the act of remembering what we have seen, or think we have seen. And these footprints, or recreated memories of our past, are there for us to see today in fossils or archaeological remains — a mental map of our descent. What makes all of this so Romantic is the almost terrifying or sublime notion that mind has come from matter — that mind evolved and originated from that which was not mind. This is surely one of the greatest mysteries of our very existence — that science, poetry, literature, language, thought and culture have all ultimately evolved from inorganic nature (and this, of course, is only part of the story, as inorganic nature evolved before this).

Coleridge's interest in dreaming and nightmares inform his writing as a poet and his speculation on a range of issues in psychology and metaphysics. It also affords clues to his own troubled inner world. Coleridge originally took opium in its medicinal form but his sustained use created a dependency on it. Coleridge claimed that the poem "Kubla Khan" had come to him under the influence of Opium. His an another poem "The Pains of Sleep" wrote in the midst of long walk alone across Scotland in 1803 during which he was probably suffering from the withdrawal symptoms of opium addiction. In 1953 in "Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan" Elizabeth Schneider noticed that the most of his comparison of the states of dreaming and dramatic illusion was derived from Erasmus Darwinian. Coletidge himself never actually analyzed his own dreams from an interpretative prospective. How we dream is a hope compelling question than what we dream. Coleridge's dream may seem less astonishing than that of his precursor. "Kubla Khan" is a remarkable composition, and the nine line hymn dreamed by Caedmon barely displays any virtues beyond its oneiric origin; but Coleridge was already a poet while Caedmon's vocation was revealed to him. There is, however, a later event, which turns the marvel of the dream that engendered "Kubla Khan" into something nearly unfathomable. If it is true, the story of Coleridge's dream began many centuries before Coleridge and has not yet ended.

Tom Duggett’s Gothic Romanticism is a compellingly ambitious study of the pursuit of a purer and better gothic in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century England. Focusing on Wordsworth and the Lake Poets’ attempt to refine a coarser, more sensational gothic as set forth in the novels of Radcliffe and Scott and in antiquarian curiosities, Duggett weaves sustained analysis of their poetry with thoughtful commentary on medieval architectural imagery and history, the turn to conservative politics, and educational reform. This multileveled investigation demonstrates in engaging prose the centrality of a cultivated rhetoric of a gothic aesthetic in this period while provocatively suggesting its relevance to a post-9/11 era where architecture “has assumed an importance that seemed without precedent.” Gothic Romanticism goes far in detailing such a poetic, cultural, and historical precedent. - MLA

My theme is ‘life-writing’, understood as the shaping of one's life through the contemplation of values, although this activity is mostly unreflective. To become an art so that one's life can be shaped in greater accord with clearly held values, this process must become reflective. These values have an inescapably ethical dimension, because as we necessarily poetize our surrounding world, we contribute to our personal and communal ethos the character that arises from the culturally shaping power of guiding ideals. Even the immoralist cultivates life within an ethos where obscure feelings connect with some thing or other, whereby certain aims will then appear more valuable than others.

To understand how we cannot help but shape our lives according to dimly or clearly intuited values, I compare Coleridge’s primary imagination, the ‘shaping spirit’ ‘necessary for all human perception’ with Kant’s ‘blind though indispensible function of the soul, without which we would have no cognition at all, yet of which we are scarcely ever conscious’. With Coleridge, we find in imagination an impulse to connect profound but obscure presentiments and ideas with our surroundings. This impulse propels great art and everyday aesthetics alike. Whether we pursue merely what attracts us, or seek value beyond this, all lives are freely shaped, without excuses, as the existentialists say, but not always in the most pellucid consciousness. Our choices inevitably engage us in the poetic art of life-writing. Cast in medias res, we necessarily improvise. But this is no argument against lives being moral-aesthetic works, spontaneous compositions in value.

As Marina Warner observes in her introduction to its 2004 Vintage Classics edition, Coleridge’s life-long obsession with themes of enchantment comes to one of its fullest expressions in his 1798 poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In this paper I consider how that theme of enchantment has been interpreted by two of The Rime’s later adaptations, both of them childrens’ books: C.S. Lewis’ 1952 The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and Ted Hughes 1993 The Iron Woman.  My discussion of these three stories, and of the mutating theme of enchantment that runs through them, relies heavily on Hughes’ 1993 essay The Snake in the Oak, in which he offers an empathic critical interpretation of the spiritual crisis that both cut off, and was eloquently mapped within, Coleridge’s 'three great poems'. For Hughes, The Rime’s hallucinatory enchantment is seen as a necessary and curative descent - a visionary encounter which briefly prises loose the dead grip of the protagonist’s – and the author’s – human centred worldview. The mode of enchantment that Hughes presents us with, here, is far from the solipsistic lapse into self-suggestion caricatured in C.S. Lewis’ sermon. Rather, it’s that universally recorded process of involuntary descent which characterises a shamanic calling.

Walter Benjamin says ”All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one". I suggest that Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and Coleridge’s “The Rime of The Ancient Mariner” do both. The poems are not only related to their genre but they also play with it in various ways. With the help of the experimental success of Coleridge and Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads, this paper will argue how the poems of Coleridge and Keats connect, break and play with their genre. Their symbolism and the creation of the sense of mystery will be one of the arguments to be opposed to the accepted “low artistic value” of ballads. While “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and “The Rime of The Ancient Mariner” are in a harmony with their genre in their form, style and subject matters, the poems also have more to show besides the basic characteristics: they are able to break the accepted simplicity of the genre and be considered as “high art” in our minds.

The full text is available here
http://kata.petra.ac.id/index.php/ing/article/view/18847

Death has always permeated human’s thoughts at all levels. This preoccupation with death is manifested in the realm of literature. John Donne is one of the artists whose obsession with death is universally recognized. The contemporary Iranian poet, Sohrab Sepehri in some of his poems employs the subject, too. Unlike Donne, Sepehri is not known as a ‘death poet.’ Although he lives in a turbulent period in the history of Iran, he is not influenced by his immediate condition. While the English poet is inconsistent in his treatment of death, Sepehri is consistent in his treatment of death. Sepehri’s consistency in the treatment of death has something to do with his religious beliefs. The reason behind Sepehri’s consistency in treating death as a positive phenomenon is his familiarity with the Islamic Sufism and eastern mysticisms.

The purpose of this study is to explore how artists are able to expose secular audiences who inhabit the ‘immanent frame’ to the plausibility of transcendence while avoiding the pitfalls of propaganda. To combat the Western church’s unprecedented cultural disdain, it needs a convincing re-articulation of the faith, for which Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age provides essential insights. The arts have a crucial role to play in this, but the church has a poor record of harnessing them well.
This study employed a basic qualitative research design, using semi-structured interviews to gather data. Eight creative professionals from a range of artistic fields were interviewed, focusing on four areas: their personal experiences of secularism; their view of the arts’ potential for communicating transcendence; their creative processes; their navigation of the problems of propaganda.

The literature review focused on four key areas: biblical narratives of a transcendent God’s involvement within the immanent frame; how the arts challenge and change worldviews; the relationship between the arts and the reality of transcendence; how propaganda exploits and abuses the arts.

This study concluded that the arts’ apologetic importance derives from their ability to be truth-bearing outside rationalism. They provide the means for helping people of faith to subvert the norms of prevailing secularism while drawing outsiders to consider a reality beyond closed immanence. Artefacts result from a process of creative exploration driven by an innate curiosity. This penetrates facades and superficiality, with the best of the arts resisting the propagandist’s instinct for assertion and manipulation.

If the church is to harness the arts, it must learn to avoid the propagandist’s easy answers and controlling assertions. At the local church level, this will entail leaders listening to and learning from creative professionals to understand how they work and how they can contribute to the life and witness of the people of God.

In Christabel Coleridge attempts, consciously or subconsciously, to derive inspiration from the numinous narratives of the past and from the revolutionary transgression of the present. The poem’s references to medieval romance both celebrates and critiques English heritage and its cultural institutions, and simultaneously weaves in pagan and folkloric elements that harken back to the pre-Roman druidic culture to inject mysterious and supernatural elements into the work. Concurrent with this historic homage Coleridge sought to infuse transgressive inversions of class, gender roles, sexuality, and political order to participate in the revolutionary zeitgeist of his day. The vampire figure with its blend of archaic mysticism and subversive defiance provided a vehicle for his aesthetic experimentation, and Coleridge inadvertently created a proto-vampire poem that inspired nineteenth century gothic and vampire narratives. However, the very transgressive energy of revolutionary upheaval that Coleridge found inspiring betrayed him and ultimately stifled his creative production. This aesthetic muzzling and Coleridge’s recognition of it contributes to his inability to bring Christabel to completion, and even explains the precipitous decline in both quality and creative energy from Part I to Part II of the existing manuscript. Coleridge provides a crucial early example of the creative potency inherent in tales of vampiric transgression that resonated throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, though his incapacity to reconcile transgressive energy with archaic mysticism illustrates the anxiety involved in fin-de-siècle narratives, an anxiety incidentally that is as much part of the heritage of vampire novels as the vampire itself.

The term ‘double touch’ occurs only once in the published work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a fact which belies the notable philosophical attention it is shown in his notebooks and letters. This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of double touch which examines the concept alongside the work of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This analysis frames double touch as a concept which engages with the lived experience of embodied consciousness and cognition, operating at the threshold between affective sensation and active practical volition. In this capacity, it will be shown how Coleridge makes use of the concept to challenge the deterministic model of human volition put forward by necessitarianism. The overall aim is to show how the concept of double touch functions as a bridge between Coleridge’s epistemic interests in sense experience and his moral philosophical concerns about the notion of human free will.

Coleridge’s religious views changed all through his lonesome life. Despite his reconversion to Anglicanism after an active membership amongst the Unitarians and the Socinians, he was constantly troubled by the thought of the inexplicable entrance of evil in one’s existence and by a piercing sense of guilt for his sins. He sought to find God’s forgiveness and feel His love. Coleridge imbued with such feelings the title characters of some of his works, for instance The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere and Christabel. In both cases no chance is given them to repent of their transgressions. They are denied God’s grace, and are led to the point of no return. Christabel is the story of innocence and purity violated by sin. In a setting of ambiguity, if not disorder, Geraldine twists Christabel’s simplicity and inexperience, offering false protection. Such apparent truths beguile Christabel and introduce her to carnality. Geraldine’s spell brings spiritual destruction and never-ending misery on Christabel and her father, Sir Leoline. Christabel mirrors Coleridge’s views on the doctrine of the Fall. The story itself, the Bible and the author’s consideration of John Milton’s Paradise Lost as a literary mediator are merely a pretext for him to express his theological concerns and spiritual anxieties while giving vent to his heavy-laden vocation as a poet.

The Romantic Period in England can be considered as indicative of 'an age of crises' because the era witnessed several political affairs, ideologies and strategies such as slaver trade, colonialism, American and French Revolutions. These political and social changes all signalled 'chaos' which would dominate European political, cultural, and literary life for the next quarter of a century. Therefore, it was inevitable that Romantic writers were influenced by the political and social events in Europe. They were considerably aware of British expansionism. It would not be incorrect to claim that there is a direct correlation between socio-political revolution and the literary revolution in Britain. No matter what their ideological stance was, some Romantic poets of the era, like S. T. Coleridge, William Cowper, William Blake and Robert Southey, reflected their observations of the colonialist activities in their works. Some other poets of the era, however, like Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, tried to especially avoid subjects concerning European colonialism in their writings. They were concerned with escape from day-today reality, with images and narratives remarkable for their historical or geographical exoticism. This paper will analyse these two reactions of the English Romantic poets; those who directly dealt with colonialism and those who principally presented orientalist and exotic elements in their poems.

This paper examines Coleridge's epistemology and ontology through the lens of autopoietic enaction. I argue that his theory of knowledge stands as an important alternative to Cartesian accounts of the mind, and that theories outlined in Biographia Literaria and "Theory of Life" function recursively.

This article considers "Kubla Khan" and the the Arab dream section from the fifth book The Prelude as precursors to the recently theorized concept of saturated phenomenality. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth insist on the limitedness of their dream subjects even as they magnify their dreamt of landscapes to heights of sublimity. Falke describes the implications that this insistence on smallness has for relating experiences of sublime landscapes to experiences of reading or writing poetry.

To Samuel Taylor Coleridge, tragedy was not solely a literary mode, but a philosophy to interpret the history that unfolded around him. Tragic Coleridge explores the tragic vision of existence that Coleridge derived from Classical drama, Shakespeare, Milton and contemporary German thought. Coleridge viewed the hardships of the Romantic period, like the catastrophes of Greek tragedy, as stages in a process of humanity’s overall purification. Offering new readings of canonical poems, as well as neglected plays and critical works, Chris Murray elaborates Coleridge’s tragic vision in relation to a range of thinkers, from Plato and Aristotle to George Steiner and Raymond Williams. He draws comparisons with the works of Blake, the Shelleys, and Keats to explore the factors that shaped Coleridge’s conception of tragedy, including the origins of sacrifice, developments in Classical scholarship, theories of inspiration and the author’s quest for civic status. With cycles of catastrophe and catharsis everywhere in his works, Coleridge depicted the world as a site of tragic purgation, and wrote himself into it as an embattled sage qualified to mediate the vicissitudes of his age.

Contents:
Introduction: Romantic Tragedy and Tragic Romanticism Coleridge’s Tragic Influences
Hamartia and Suffering in the Poetical Works
The Catastrophes of Real Life
The Tragic ‘Impulse’: Fragments and Forms of Incompletion
The Lear Vocation: Coleridge and Romantic Theatre
The Tragic Sage
Failed Sacrifices and the Un-Tragic Coleridge
Conclusion: ‘The sage, the poet, lives for all mankind’

Romanticism owes its birth to the negative consequences of Industrial Revolution which enthralled the English by shattering the natural atmosphere of the cities. The Romantic Movement is, besides the impacts of Neoclassicism on faith and religious approach of the people, also a reaction to its mentality, which demands the literary corcern to be progressive, critical, rational and based on reason. Neoclassicism situated the imaginative vocation in the lower faculties of mind, which, later on, turns out to be a target board, at which Romantic poets took aim. In this case, Rime of The Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the product of the mentality which is devoted to the powers of imagination and religious wonders. Therefore this research intends to textualize the excerpts taken from the articles written by the different points of view which analyze the poem with a consideration on its relation to the period. This research, which relies on the scholarly articles, clarifies the ways Rime of The Ancient Mariner reflects the Christian and Romantic elements by presenting quotations and citations. In order to conclude a research paper focusing on an analysis of a substancial poem, I have read the poem more than a few times and searched on the internet for scholarly articles written by the authors whose literary background is broadened.

The aim of my essay is to illustrate the functions and representations of Romantic imagination through Kubla Khan, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I shall use Coleridge’s definitions of imagination and its types, as portrayed by himself in his work, Biographia Literaria, particularly in the thirteenth chapter, On the imagination, or esemplastic power (Coleridge).

Coleridge, in his poems, has successfully presented to his readers a “nature and supernatural” blend that is considered very amazing. Coleridge perceives nature something that surrounds man and considers it a privilege to interpret it. “The Rime of The Ancient Mariner” is although composed in romantic tradition, it contains a high imagination of the poet and covers supernatural elements for which it is regarded a masterpiece of supernatural poetry. At the same time, it contains moral lessons for its readers; that whether big or small, no crime can go unpunished. The paper analyzes Coleridge’s treatment of Nature and Supernatural in this poem.

Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" has a very coherent structure. Two movements of the poem are each divided into three sections; in both cases the middle of those three in turn has three subsections and again, the middle of the middle has three subsections. The first movement ends with "A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice," a line which is then repeated at the structural midpoint of the second movement. This structure encompasses both semantics and sound, uniting both in a single coherent mental act. The semantics of the poem’s first movement involves a series of cognitive blends in which the neural self provides one input while Xanadu imagery provides the other. The semantics of the second movement involves manipulating the reality status of successive mental spaces. Underlying the entire poem is a “walk” by core brain mechanisms tracing territorial, sexual, and attachment patterns through the poem’s semantics. Coleridge’s 1816 preface embodies an abstract pattern  that paradoxically asserts and denies the poem’s validity. On the internal evidence, the poem is whole and complete.

This term paper aims to excavate the presence of imagination in Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "To a Skylark" and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan". Here researcher will elaborate more and go deep into the work of art created by these two great poets. In one hand Shelley in "To a Skylark" addressed a skylark (a little bird) that soars up at a great height and sings so sweetly that the world is enchanted and bewitched by its sweetness. Which symbolizes high imagination, eternal happiness and harbinger of peace and progress. With that spirit Shelley goes on expressing his sublime imagination which we will look more into and on the other hand Coleridge in "Kubla Khan or, a vision in a dream. A fragment." goes on diving into the world of hallucination of opium and creates the world of his own by suing the depth of dream and end-up creating landscape that could not exist in reality. But creates perhaps the most fantastical world created ever marking a great height in history of imagination. So here researcher will go through the caves of imagination which was explored by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

La figura de John Milton influyó enormemente la literatura y el pensamiento del siglo XIX. A partir de la figura de Satán en "El Paraíso Perdido" estableció un nuevo orden de héroe romántico y una percepción novedosa del mundo desde la Caída. A partir de su obra, una hermandad de parias, unidos por las líneas de un nuevo pensamiento sobre la Imaginación y por el consumo de opio, trazarán otro camino dentro de la construcción estética del Romanticismo a partir de la creación de lugares comunes en sus obras.