COLERIDGE'S CONTRIBUTION AS A POET

COLERIDGE'S CONTRIBUTION AS A POET

With Wordsworth, Coleridge is the co-founder of the Romantic Movement for his contribution to Lyrical ballads (1978) was numerically small but esthetically sublime. Coleridge produced mainly three types of poetry- personal, political and romantic. Some of his personal poems are- ‘Frost and Midnight’, ‘The Eolian Harp’, ‘An Ode to Dejection’, ‘Youth and Age’, ‘War without Hope’ and ‘This Lime-tree Bower my Prison’. Some of his famous political poems are- ‘France’, ‘An Ode’, ‘Ode on the Departing Year’. His three romantic and supernatural poems are- ‘The Rime of Ancient Mariner’, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘Christable’. For his simple, sensuous and impatient poetry, Coleridge is rightly hailed as the harbinger of romanticism.

Love in liberty, interest in supernatural and the mysterious, his celebration of humanized love for Nature, expression of melancholy and revolutionary zeal- all these romantic qualities make his poetry the purest and the most ethereal of the romantic spirit. His poetry is marked by love for Nature. In ‘Frost at Midnight’, Coleridge refers to a divine nature and the moral and educated influence which he exercises on those who truly love her. In ‘Ode to Dejection’, he informs us that we receive from nature only that which we give her:

   “In our life alone does Nature live:  
    Ours is her wedding garment, Ours her shroud.”    

As a poet of supernatural, he avoids gruesome and terrifying use of supernaturalism and makes it symbolic and suggested. He handles supernaturalism in a psychological manner and gives it supreme strength through a marvelous dream faculty. Coleridge occupied an important place among the Nature poets of England. Like Wordsworth, he was an acute observer of natural scenes but unlike Wordsworth, he described them not directly but through a veil of mystery. He treated nature as an animate, living and having an intelligence of its own.

Coleridge is indeed a romantic poet of gigantic genius. Yet he is beyond doubt, one of the most learned person of his age and has become immortal only by writing half a dozen of very remarkable poems- a unique feature in the history of English Literature.

Biographia Literaria

                Biographia Literaria

'Biographia Literaria' is a philosophical and auto-biographical work by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It is unsystematic and somehow unfinished; yet its greatness can not be denied. Coleridge deals here with his youthful admiration for the sonnets of William Boweles, his early friendship with Wordsworth and his concept of poetic imagination.

In the 13th chapter of 'Biographia Literaria', Coleridge says about fancy- "Fancy has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space." To Coleridge fancy is a mechanical process which receives the elementary images- the fixites and definites which come to it readymade from the sense. And without altering the parts it resembles them in mind.

According to Coleridge, imagination has two forms- primary and secondary. Primary imagination is merely the power of receiving impression of the external world through the senses. It imposes some wort of order on those impressions, reduces them to shape and size, so that mind is able to form clear image of the outside world. The primary imagination is universal, possessed by all.

The seconday imagination, on the other hand, is the peculiar and distinctive attribute of an artist. It is the secondary imagination which makes artistic creation possible. This type of imagination is more active and conscious in this working. It works upon what is perceived by primary imagination. It is an active agent which 'dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to create'. It is the power which harmonizes and reconciles and hence Coleridge calls it a 'magical systhesis power'.