Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Broadview Press Publisher's Blog

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Possible Lines of Approach
Notes on Approaching Particular Works
The “Conversation” Poems
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Christabel
“Kubla Khan; Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment”
Selected Prose
Questions for Discussion
Critical Viewpoints/Reception History
Possible Lines of Approach
Coleridge and Wordsworth as collaborators
• Focus on Lyrical Ballads: The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere was the first poem in
Lyrical Ballads, so it is often read alongside Wordsworth’s contributions to the
volume, in particular some of those dealing with the boundary between life and
death (“The Thorn,” “We are Seven”). Christabel was originally intended for the
1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads but Wordsworth rejected it as incomplete (he
replaced it with “Michael”).
• Wordsworth’s poems may also be read alongside Coleridge’s “Conversation”
poems. For example, evidence of collaboration may be traced between the three
Coleridge poems, “The Eolian Harp,” “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” and
“Frost at Midnight,” and Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.”
Coleridge and politics (role in revolutionary milieu of youth)
• Coleridge’s poetry may be read alongside his religious and political lectures and
journalism. The “Conversation” poems may be read as political commentary,
especially since most of them were written during his more radical youth. “Kubla
Khan” might be used to raise questions about the use of slave labor (to build the
pleasure dome) and even revolution (“Ancestral voices prophesying war!”). The
guilty voyage in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner could evoke the slave trade.
Coleridge and women writers
• Ann Radcliffe’s gothic romances, particularly The Mysteries of Udolpho, might
usefully be read alongside The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel.
Comparisons might be made to similar evasions about what exactly lies beneath a
veil (Emily St. Aubert pulls back a curtain and Geraldine bares her breast). In
Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, Lady Delacour reveals a cancerous blight on her breast
and side, in an image that supplies a more specific idea of what Geraldine’s
unspeakable breast-baring might have evoked in the minds of readers.
• Mary Robinson’s poem “To the Poet Coleridge” demonstrates that Robinson was
conversant with the yet-unpublished “Kubla Khan”; “The Haunted Beach” echoes
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in many ways.

Coleridge, opium, Romantic imagination, and orientalism
• In the Broadview Anthology of British Literature, see the Contexts section on India
and the Orient as interpreted/fetishized by the English; “Kubla Khan” as an opium
dream; De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
Coleridge and the gothic
• Focus on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner shares many similarities with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (isolation,
frozen wastes, compulsion to relate tale, etc.) as well as with many other gothic
romances and poems (see the specific section on The Rime); Christabel may be
read alongside many gothic novels (Radcliffe, Dacre) and probed for questions of
sexual anxieties, spirit companions, vulnerable heroines, and uncaring patriarchs.
Coleridge and the literary fragment
• Focus on “Kubla Khan” and Christabel not just as incomplete works but as
deliberately fragmentary and elusive ones. The Crewe manuscript of “Kubla Khan”
demonstrates that Coleridge made revisions (so it is not merely the transcript of a
dream). One might also place the poems in the romantic tradition of the “found
manuscript” (e.g., Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified
Sinner).
Coleridge and Romantic literary criticism
• Focus on reading Biographia Literaria alongside Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical
Ballads, Keats’s letters, and Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry.
Notes on Approaching Particular Works
The “Conversation” Poems
Form: “The Eolian Harp,” ‘Fears in Solitude,” “Frost at Midnight,” “This Lime-Tree
Bower My Prison”: blank verse.
“Dejection: An Ode”: an irregular ode. Stanzas are in iambic meter with varying line
lengths (from trimeter to pentameter). The rhymes range between bracketed rhymes
(abba) and couplets (cc), with some exceptions.
Background/Approaches: The term “Conversation Poems” was borrowed from the
subtitle of “The Nightingale. A Conversation Poem.” George McLean Harper was the
first to use the term in 1928; he also described them as “poems of friendship,” as they all
addressed a friend. “Conversation” poems included in the Broadview Anthology of British
Literature are “The Eolian Harp,” “Fears in Solitude,” “Frost at Midnight,” “This Lime-
Tree Bower My Prison,” and “Dejection: An Ode.” Although its form distances it
somewhat from the other conversation poems, “Dejection” is, in the influential view of
M.H. Abrams, part of a larger movement that displaced the traditional ode in favor of the

long lyric poem. “Dejection” may also be seen as one of the first in a line of important
Romantic odes.
The “conversation” poems are often taught together, as they share a similar mood and
structure. Students might be asked to describe why the poems are linked together. The
speaker is usually in a particularized outdoor setting, and he voices his meditations (often
to a silent human auditor). After describing the landscape, the speaker often loses himself
in memory and feeling, which remain connected to the outdoor setting. At the end of the
poem, the reflections have led to an insight or resolution, and the speaker returns to the
natural setting. “Dejection” is sometimes considered to have evolved out of the
“conversation” poems.
Although they are private (and notoriously one-sided) conversations, the conversation
poems may be read as commentaries on Coleridge’s early political views and the debates
of the late 1790s. Students unfamiliar with the era’s politics may be interested to know
that “Fears in Solitude” and “Frost at Midnight” were originally published together with
“France: An Ode” in a volume that was put forward as a defense of Coleridge’s public
standing as a radical. He was attacked as being a “Jacobin,” a term usually used
pejoratively to connote atheism, immorality, and opposition to existing social institutions.
(See Coleridge’s essay, “Once a Jacobin, Always a Jacobin,” in the Contexts section on
The Napoleonic Era and the French Revolution posted on the anthology website). In the
conversation poems, Coleridge’s images of domestic bliss may be seen as an attempt to
counteract attempts to associate him with social disorder. They also provide a contrast to
the images of war and strife evoked in “Fears in Solitude.”
In “Frost at Midnight” in particular, the sins of imperialism and the heartlessness of war
are addressed. The poem dates from 1798, which was in some ways the year during
which Coleridge retreated from his radical dissenting politics (in part because he was
offered an annuity by Thomas and Josiah Wedgwood). But at this time, the Tory
government still very much considered him a marked man. When he was living in Nether
Stowey, he and Wordsworth were reputedly watched by a spy in Pitt’s government—a
fact that lends resonance to Frost’s “secret ministry.”
“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” takes the form of a public letter to his friend Charles
Lamb. Coleridge signed the poem ES TE SEE (for his initials, STC, in Greek letters, and
signifying “He hath stood”). Students may be asked to trace how Coleridge’s political
views shifted and how they stayed the same.
The Eolian harp is an important image that will likely require some explanation,
especially as it relates to the poet and Coleridge’s understanding of the primary and
secondary imagination. On the one hand, the poet may be viewed as akin to the harp as
an “intellectual breeze” passes through it; on the other hand, Coleridge was wary of the
image of the harp because it implied a certain passivity on the part of the poet. The earlier
“Eolian Harp” may be compared with the recurrence of the harp image in “Dejection: An
Ode,” in which the harp strings “better far were mute” (7). In the later poem, Coleridge
specifies that mere outward speculation is not enough: “I may not hope from outward

forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.” The intersection of
nature, inner thought, and godly inspiration may be traced through the conversation
poems in ways that illuminate many of Coleridge’s other works.
Coleridge’s political views and his views on poetry also both relate to his strong religious
views, which may also be traced through the poetry. An interesting case is “The Eolian
Harp,” in which the speaker gets carried away with poetic fancy and is chided by “Sara,”
whose religious views are more orthodox.
Connections: The conversation poems inspired Wordsworth. “Tintern Abbey” works
well when read with Coleridge’s meditative work. “Dejection: An Ode” is considered one
of the first Romantic odes, and might be compared with Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations
of Immortality.” Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals may be consulted for evidence of
friendship and collaboration between the two men. Also, sections of Wordsworth’s
Preface and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria discuss their literary connections, though
their accounts do not altogether agree.
Coleridge was inspired by some of the eighteenth-century poets. The nearest model for
Coleridge’s blank verse is Cowper’s The Task (Coleridge praised the poem as “the divine
chit-chat of Cowper”). Thomson’s The Seasons was another source of inspiration.
Coleridge’s political musings as expressed in the conversation poems may be compared
with contemporary discussions of the French Revolution, Jacobinism, and the rights of
man. (See the Contexts section on The Napoleonic Era and the French Revolution, and in
particular Coleridge’s contributions.)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Form: Narrative poem in seven parts, generally in variations of the ballad stanza
(quatrains of alternating tetrameter/trimeter, in abcb). Some stanzas stretch out this ballad
stanza to as many as nine lines, generally repeating the pattern of one of the ballad lines
for emphasis. (Example: lines 45-50, describing a storm, are aaabcb.)
Double narrative: The frame narrative is set outside a church where a wedding is taking
place. The Mariner detains the Wedding-Guest and recounts the inset narrative of his
guilt-ridden voyage to the South Pole and back again, and his continued quest for
forgiveness.
Backgrounds/Approaches: Beginning study with an oral reading of The Ancient
Mariner may lead into a discussion of the mesmerizing aural power of the poem (and of
the narrative power of the Mariner’s tale). Students might be interested to know that
Coleridge was himself a renowned speaker, known later in life as the Sage of Highgate
and compared in later reviews to his fictional mariner.
The excerpt included from the original Rime of the Ancyent Marinere published in
Lyrical Ballads (1798) makes more explicit the poem’s self-consciously literary

medievalizing quality. The excerpt might usefully be compared with the revised 1817
version, printed in full, for which Coleridge modernized the spelling, added the epigraph
by Thomas Burnet, and supplied the controversial marginal glosses. Students might be
asked to compare the story as reported in the glosses with the impressions they derived
from the poem itself. For example, the marginal gloss accompanying lines 127-34 states
quite decisively what sort of spirit has followed the ship, whereas the poem is less
certain, describing the Spirit as something appearing to “some in dreams.” Furthermore,
the prose does not always explain the poetry at all; the gloss accompanying lines 167-70
asks a question: “And horror follows. For can it be a ship that comes onward without
word or tide?” Students might be asked to probe the contradictions between the glosses
and the poems. If they serve only to complicate analysis, why are they there? This might
lead into a discussion of how Coleridge works to destabilize meaning in so many of his
poems, in particular Christabel and “Kubla Khan.”
Another way to approach the poem is through the angle of the contested moral. As
reported by Coleridge himself (see Broadview Anthology of British Literature, p. 345),
Anna Laetitia Barbauld admired the poem but thought it had two faults: “it was
improbable, and had no moral.” Coleridge states that the poem had “too much” moral,
and should have been “a work of pure imagination,” yet his comments do not really
resolve the question. On the one hand, the poem may readily be absorbed as an allegory
of sin and redemption: the Albatross drops from the Mariner’s neck at the moment that he
blesses the water-snakes. The moral in this case would be: “He prayeth best, who loveth
best / All things great and small; / For the dear God who loveth us, / He made and loveth
all” (614-17). On the other hand, generations of readers and critics have been dissatisfied
with this explanation. Why, if the Mariner has been forgiven, is he compelled to continue
to tell his tale? Why can the Hermit not shrive him? If the moral is satisfactory, why does
the Wedding-Guest rise “A sadder and a wiser man / … the morrow morn” (624)? Many
readers are more struck with the nightmarish guilt and isolation of the Mariner’s voyage
than with any moral the poem offers.
Coleridge’s own comments on the origins and aims of the poem may be found in the In
Context section that follows the poem (an excerpt from Chapter 14 of Biographia
Literaria) on pages 314-15. See also the larger discussions of the “esemplastic” qualities
of the imagination and the origins of Lyrical Ballads from Chapters 13 and 14 of
Biographia Literaria (pp. 337-41). Some of Coleridge’s comments about his
collaboration with Wordsworth might lead into a discussion of Lyrical Ballads and the
poetry of Romanticism more broadly. In particular, in Chapter 14 Coleridge describes
how both his “supernatural” poems and Wordsworth’s “charm of novelty” poems were
connected in Lyrical Ballads. While it is Wordsworth who is described as trying to
“excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from
the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and wonders of the world before
us,” Coleridge, too, does something of this in Ancient Mariner, especially when the
Mariner blesses the water-snakes unawares. Wordsworth’s “The Thorn” (pp. 195-199),
also from Lyrical Ballads, might be an interesting intertext as it also combines an
appreciation of nature, human emotion, and the supernatural.

A discussion of the Ancient Mariner’s double narrative raises central questions about the
poem: Why does the Mariner become gripped with a “strange power of speech” when he
sees certain faces? Why does the Mariner choose to detain this particular Wedding-
Guest? What is the significance of the fact that the tale is narrated outside a church while
a wedding is taking place but the Mariner declared that he would rather go to pray in the
church than attend the wedding feast?
The poem’s compelling but problematic Christian symbolism also deserves discussion.
The poem is full of references to Christianity (it takes place outside a church, the
albatross is hailed as “a Christian soul” and hung around the Mariner’s neck “instead of a
cross,” “Mary Queen” sends sleep and rain to the Mariner, etc.); however, another set of
images (ghosts, Death and Life-in-Death playing dice for the Mariner’s soul) compete
with the idea of Christian belief in a benevolent god. The Mariner himself cannot seem to
decide which set of symbols to follow, leading to a breakdown of the poem’s allegorical
possibilities and its moral.
Connections: It has been suggested that the guilt evoked in The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner relates to the Middle Passage of the slave trade. Although slavery is not
explicitly mentioned in the poem, many connections may be made. See the Contexts
section on The Abolition of Slavery (pp. 504-25), and in particular Coleridge’s own
comments on slavery in “On the Slave Trade” (p. 516).
Gustave Doré’s 1876 illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are available
online at http://dore.artpassions.net/.
Ancient Mariner fits logically into a larger discussion of Gothicism and exile. Works that
might be looked at alongside the poem include Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto;
Matthew Lewis’s The Monk; Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer; Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein; Byron’s Manfred; Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound; Wordsworth’s “The
Thorn”; and Mary Robinson’s “The Haunted Beach.” The gothic elements in Coleridge’s
unfinished poem Christabel link it to this cluster as well.
Christabel
Form: Narrative poem in two parts (unfinished) in accentual meter—an irregular number
of syllables with four accents per line. See Coleridge’s preface to the poem (p. 317).
Backgrounds/Approaches: In an earlier draft of the poem, Coleridge had supplied
marginal annotations on the text (similar to his glosses for Ancient Mariner). Students
might be asked to consider what they think of the fact that Coleridge had labeled
Geraldine as a “witch.” The gloss to Ancient Mariner is itself problematic, complicating
rather than explaining the poem at key moments; therefore, Coleridge’s “witch” might be
seen as suspect. On the other hand, Geraldine fits the pattern of many famous femmes
fatales.

Christabel is a poem in which women figure as protagonists, but their unfathomability
here leads to questions about female figures in other poems by Coleridge (Life-in-Death,
the Abyssinian maid, the woman wailing for her demon lover), especially in relation to
the figure of the poet. The relationship between Christabel and Geraldine is a complex
one, and the fact that Coleridge labeled Geraldine as a “witch” in an earlier draft does not
help readers to cast Geraldine as an exclusively evil figure. Students might be asked to
study the poem for moments when the two women are not cast as opposites but as split
selves, doubles. For example, when Bard Bracy describes his dream, he links the bird
explicitly to Christabel: “That gentle bird, whom thou dost love, / And call’st by thy own
daughter’s name” (534-35). The snake in this typology is clearly Geraldine. Yet Sir
Leoline, after hearing the dream, ascribes the image of the “beauteous dove” not to his
daughter but to Geraldine (571). Furthermore, when Christabel sees Geraldine’s eyes turn
into snake’s eyes, it is Christabel who makes “a hissing sound” (593). Students might be
asked whether Christabel really does turn bad at the end of the poem, and might consider
whether Geraldine really is who she says she is.
The two women may also be seen as lovers, whose love is somehow forbidden and
unspeakable. Christabel goes outside the castle to pray for her lover and returns to the
castle by carrying Geraldine over the threshold, like a bride. However, the homoeroticism
of the poem, like Geraldine’s bared breast, seems to be something “to dream of, not to
tell” (253). Students may be asked to consider how female sexuality, in particular lesbian
sexuality, has been “created” as an unspeakable horror.
Geraldine cannot be altogether disconnected from Christabel’s mother, who died “the
hour [Christabel] was born” (197). In Christabel’s chamber, Geraldine seems to be
waging a battle with Christabel’s mother’s ghost: “Off, wandering mother!” she declares.
“I have power to make thee flee” (205-6). Later that night, she begins to replace the
mother: “And lo! The worker of these harms, / That holds the maiden in her arms, /
Seems to slumber still and mild, / As a mother with her child” (298-301). Later still,
Geraldine begins to replace both daughter and mother as she bewitches Sir Leoline.
While students might attribute the poem’s difficulties of interpretation to the fact that
Coleridge did not complete it, they should be alerted to moments in the text where the
narrator explicitly frustrates the reader’s attempts at understanding. The gothic
conventions used evoke certain expectations, but the narrative voice asks more questions
than it provides answers for, and the answers are not satisfying. For example, “Is the
night chilly and dark? / The night is chilly but not dark” (14-15).
Connections: In his preface to the poem, Coleridge addresses the issue of plagiarism (or
literary borrowing). Although he began the poem in 1797 (adding part 2 in 1800 and the
conclusion to part 2 in 1802), he did not publish it until 1816, long after the initial
“vision” of the poem was “whole” in his mind. His comments about borrowing in the
preface connect to his statements about different types of readers (p. 329) and literary
borrowing (p. 345). His description of inspiration as “fountains” in the preface connects it
to “Kubla Khan,” with its subterranean river and fountains issuing forth. The “celebrated
poets” inspired by Christabel prior to its publication include Sir Walter Scott and Byron.

Scott, hearing the “striking fragment” recited, saw that its irregular structure allowed its
author to “adapt the sound to the sense.” In his notes to The Lay of the Last Minstrel he
acknowledges his indebtedness to Coleridge. Lord Byron (the Turkish poems), Keats’s
Lamia, The Eve of Saint Agnes, and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” also share intersecting
themes and imagery.
Christabel would fit nicely into a discussion of the gothic, in particular the female gothic.
For example, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho shares concerns about
patriarchal power, undisclosed mysteries behind veils, and vulnerable heroines wandering
around castles. Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, like Christabel, contains a demon-lover, a
femme fatale heroine, and representations of female sexuality and desire.
Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is an obvious source of femme fatale inspiration (Duessa,
Florimel). “Sir Cauline” from Percy’s Reliques contains a character called Christabel.
Geraldine alludes to Burger’s “Lenore” in her account of her midnight ride.
Hazlitt’s review of the poem in the Examiner, discussed below, gives a sense of how the
poem was perceived as disturbing when it first appeared.
“Kubla Khan; Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment”
Form: Mostly iambic, with varying line lengths.
Backgrounds/Approaches: Students might be alerted to the oddities and inconsistencies
in Coleridge’s note on the poem. If he is sick, why is he staying in a lonely farmhouse (a
farmhouse 25 miles from Nether Stowey, where he lived during the time “Kubla Khan”
was written)? Who prescribed the anodyne (opium)? Why was he reading Purchas his
Pilgrimage? It would have been a rare book in 1797, unlikely to be found in a lonely
farmhouse. The last editions, published in the early seventeenth century, would have been
large, folio versions. Who was the man from Porlock?
Students might also be interested to know that in his note Coleridge misquotes Purchas,
who actually wrote: “In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately palace, encompassing
sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meadowes, pleasant
Springs, delightfull Streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, in the midst
thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure.” The Crewe manuscript of the poem, written in
Coleridge’s handwriting, bears even more resemblance to Purchas than the 1816 version.
Changes Coleridge made to the manuscript demonstrate that he was conscious of meter
and sound when composing the poem so “instantly and eagerly.” For example, he
changes the 2-syllable “Xamdu” or “Xaindu” used by Purchas to the 3-syllable Xanadu.
(In the Crewe manuscript he even stresses the pronunciation by spelling it “Xannadú”).
A note on the Crewe manuscript tells a different story than Coleridge’s published note:
“This fragment, with a good deal more, not recoverable, composed in a sort of Reverie
brought on by two grains of Opium, taken to check a dysentery, at a Farm House between
Porlock & Linton, a quarter of a mile from Culborne Church, in the fall of the year,

1797.” Students might be asked to comment on the differences between Coleridge’s
initial record of the circumstances of the poem’s composition and his later note.
The poem could also be approached as a poem about poetic creation or the operation of
the imagination in general. The “caverns measureless to man” invite comparison with
Coleridge’s definition of the primary imagination as the “living Power and prime Agent
of all human Perception and as a repetition in the finite mind of the infinite I AM” (337).
The river running through the caves finds moments of inspiration but, like the poet
himself, yields “fragments.” Some scholars maintain that Kubla Khan stands in for the
poet, and that the pleasure dome is the poem. Others focus on the end of the poem, noting
that in it, the poet seems to be explaining the state of inspiration needed to be able to
finish the poem.
Connections: Students might be asked to consider Coleridge’s poem in the context of
Orientalism. The Contexts section on India and the Orient, found in the Broadview
Anthology of British Literature, provides insights into how the “Orient” became
associated in the Occidental imagination as “exotic” and “Other.” Students might be
asked to consider the poem in light of Sir William Jones’s impressions of an imagined
Asia versus his actual observations upon arriving (pp. 348-49); Burke’s assumption that
despotism is the rule in Asia (pp. 349-51); and Elizabeth Hamilton’s description of
India’s two religions (pp. 352-54). Both Jones and Hamilton speak of “unmeasurable”
spaces and “remote” origins of Asia, which recalls the poem’s “measureless” caverns.
Furthermore, the documents detailing conflicts between British and Asian rule could be
linked to Kubla hearing “Ancestral voices prophesying war.”
A link might also be made between the poem’s engagement with Orientalism and the fact
that it was inspired by opium. Another text concerned with opium is De Quincey’s
Confessions of an English Opium Eater. A much later text that engages with the effects
of opium on the mind is Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone.
William Hazlitt’s essay on “Mr. Coleridge” (pp. 419-26) describes the poet using images
similar to those in “Kubla Khan.” He notes that work comes out of Coleridge’s hands
“like an illuminated Missal, sparkling in its defects” (p. 420), an apt description of some
of the poet’s fragments.
Selected Prose
Backgrounds/Approaches: The public lectures presented between 1808 and 1819
(especially those on Shakespeare) were improvised from jottings on scraps of paper and
annotated volumes Coleridge brought into the lecture hall. Notes composed by listening
readers enabled the lectures to be pieced together later.
Biographia Literaria received a hostile contemporary reception, summed up in Byron’s
mocking dismissal in Canto I of Don Juan: “Explaining metaphysics to the nation / I
wish he would explain his explanation.” The work, which combines biography, literary
criticism, philosophy, religion, and poetry, is viewed (like much of Coleridge’s work) as

illiant, yet immensely confusing, a piece of background information that might comfort
students!
The excerpts provided might be used to lead into a discussion of Coleridge’s views of
what constitutes literary value and genius. Students might be asked what kind of reader
Coleridge seems most to value in his “Definition of Poetry” (p. 329). Coleridge was
known not only for being extraordinarily well read, but also for extensive literary
borrowing (verging on plagiarism). See Coleridge’s “On Borrowing” (p. 345). See also
Hazlitt’s comments on Coleridge’s scholarship (p. 421).
Coleridge’s comments on Shakespeare’s plots and genius might also be usefully related
to Coleridge’s own poetry. His comments about how Shakespeare manages an
improbable situation in King Lear might be connected to his comments in Biographia
Literaria on what constitutes a “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which
constitutes poetic faith” (p. 338). The questions Coleridge raises about Shakespeare’s
genius might also be applied to his own works, particularly the fragments Christabel and
“Kubla Khan,” which he publishes as “incomplete” but which might be said to possess
the “organic form” he so values in Shakespeare.
His comments about Nature as the “prime genial artist” (p. 331) might be compared with
similar reflections in “The Eolian Harp.”
Comments in “Mechanic vs. Organic Form” about the difference between “living power”
and “lifeless mechanism” (p. 330-31) could be related to Coleridge’s famous definitions
of imagination and fancy in Biographia Literaria (p. 337).
Connections: Interesting connections might be made between Coleridge’s understanding
of genius (in his prose works) and Hazlitt’s comments about Coleridge’s own genius in
his essay on Coleridge in The Spirit of the Age; or Contemporary Portraits (pp. 419-26).
Coleridge’s prose works (especially Biographia Literaria) and his definition of poetry
may usefully be read alongside other Romantic commentary, such as Wordsworth’s
Preface, Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, and Keats’s letters.
Questions for Discussion
1. Why does Coleridge contrast his domestic happiness with the threat of war in
“Fears in Solitude”?
2. Does Sara’s “mild reproof” check the speaker of “The Eolian Harp”? How might
this reproof be compared to the “coy maid half yielding to her lover” mentioned
earlier in the poem?
3. Is the universe in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Christian, pagan, or both?

4. Is the moral of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner satisfactory or problematic? Why?
Why not?
5. How might the albatross (in the Rime) be compared to Christabel (who is described
as a dove)?
6. In what ways (other than incompleteness) does Coleridge frustrate the reader’s
attempts to understand Christabel?
7. Does Christabel sin? If so, how? If not, why not?
8. Does the incompleteness of “Kubla Khan” and Christabel add to or detract from
their dreamlike qualities? How?
9. How might “Kubla Khan” be read as a poem about artistic creation? How might it
be read as an illustration of Coleridge’s views on the imagination?
10. How does Coleridge’s definition of poetic genius correspond to Hazlitt’s
description of Coleridge’s talents in “Mr. Coleridge”? How do they differ?
11. In what ways do Wordsworth and Coleridge agree about the aims of poetry? In
what ways do they differ?
Critical Viewpoints / Reception History
During his life and after his death, friends and critics have been torn between an intense
admiration for Coleridge’s genius and some dismay over the fragmentary nature of so
much of his literary output. Wordsworth said that he was “wonderful”; Thomas Arnold
called him a “great man” despite “all his faults”; Hazlitt noted that his “tangential” mind
produced work that “sparkl[ed] in its defects.” As Rosemary Ashton notes:
Everyone agreed that Coleridge’s works did not amount to a full and true
expression of his intellectual and imaginative powers. But opinion was
divided—it still is—over whether his achievement is nevertheless to be accounted
a great one, or whether his prose writings contain such a mass of chaotic thinking
and his poetry verse of such variable quality that he is a writer whose works
ultimately fail to satisfy the reader. What holds good for an opinion of his works
applies also to an observation of his life. Coleridge wrote as he
lived—compulsively, brilliantly, confusingly, contradictorily. Responses to his
person are bound to be connected and bound to be problematic. 1
1 Rosemary Ashton, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996),
3.

Early criticism of his work picked up on both his genius and his flaws. The Critical
Review (discussing Poems on Various Subjects, 1796) complains that Coleridge takes too
many liberties in coining words, yet acknowledges:
Mr. Coleridge’s blemishes are such as are incident to young men of luxuriant
imaginations, which time and experience will, we doubt not, enable him to
correct. His beauties are those of a very superior genius. 2
Coleridge may be referring to the latter review in his remarks in Biographia Literaria
(see pp. 331-32 of the Broadview Anthology of British Literature).
Reviews of Coleridge’s poems that address the French Revolution tended to coincide
with the political leanings of the journal in question. For example, the Critical Review
declared of The Fall of Robespierre (1794), which Coleridge wrote with Southey, that the
work “affords ample testimony, that the writer is a genuine votary of the Muse, and
several parts of it will afford much pleasure to those who can relish the beauties of
poetry.” 3
A later review of Fears in Solitude (1798) acknowledges Coleridge’s growing reputation,
but objects to Coleridge’s political views as expressed in the poetry (which were shifting
toward the right):
The present publication has all the characteristic excellencies of his former ones.
The opinions expressed are not indeed the same: without being a ministerialist,
Mr. Coleridge has become an alarmist. 4
The more even-handed Monthly Review praises Coleridge for his patriotism and
compassion:
Mr. Coleridge seems solicitous to consecrate his lyre to truth, virtue, and
humanity. . . . [T]hough, as we learn from his own confession, he has been
deemed the enemy of his country, yet, if we may judge from these specimens, no
one can be more desirous of promoting all that is important to its security and
felicity. 5
In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge notes that criticism of his work tended to dwell on
“strained and elaborate diction.” He refers in particular to reviews of Lyrical Ballads
(1798) from The Critical Review and The Monthly Review (see Coleridge’s comment
about these reviews on p. 332 of the Broadview Anthology). The Critical Review states:
In a very different style of poetry, is The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere; a ballad
(says the advertisement) “professedly written in imitation of the style as well as
2 Donald H. Reiman, The Romantics Reviewed, Part A, vol. I (New York: Garland, 1972), 303.
3 The Romantics Reviewed, Part A, vol. 1, 301.
4 The Romantics Reviewed, Part A, vol. I, 311.
5 The Romantics Reviewed, Part A, vol. II, 710-11.

the spirit of the elder poets.” We are tolerably conversant with the early English
poets; and can discover no resemblance whatever, except in antiquated spelling
and a few obsolete words. This piece appears to us perfectly original in style as
well as in story. Many of the stanzas are laboriously beautiful; but in connection
they are absurd or unintelligible. 6
Dr. Charles Burney’s review in The Monthly Review observes of the Ancient Mariner:
The author’s first piece, the Rime of the ancyent marinere, in imitation of the style
as well as of the spirit of the elder poets, is the strangest story of a cock and bull
that we ever saw on paper: yet, though it seems a rhapsody of unintelligible
wildness and incoherence, (of which we do not perceive the drift, unless the joke
lies in depriving the wedding guest of his share of the feast,) there are in it
poetical touches of an exquisite kind. 7
The reception of Christabel; Kubla Khan, A Vision; and The Pains of Sleep (1816) was
largely negative. William Hazlitt’s review from The Examiner expresses some of the
contemporary discomfort with Christabel, in particular the moment when Geraldine bares
her breast. He states, “There is something disgusting at the bottom of his subject.”
However, Hazlitt does not altogether ignore the poem’s power: “In parts of Christabel
there is a great deal of beauty, both of thought, imagery, and versification; but the effect
of the general story is dim, obscure, and visionary.” (See The Romantics Reviewed, Part
A, vol. 2, 530-31.) A more positive review, from The Critical Review, was likely penned
by one of Coleridge’s acquaintances who had read Christabel in manuscript form “two or
three years ago.” (See The Romantics Reviewed, Part A, vol. 1, 317-20.)
Some important assessments of Coleridge (the man and his work) may be found in the
following texts, written by men who knew the poet personally:
William Hazlitt, “My First Acquaintance with Poets”:
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/hazlittw/poet.htm
James Gillman (Coleridge’s friend and physician), The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1838 – 1 vol published): http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8957
Charles Lamb, “Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago,” from Essays of Elia:
http://www.4literature.net/Charles_Lamb/Essays/
Thomas De Quincey, “Samuel Taylor Coleridge” (1832-35 – Tait’s Magazine)
After his death, Coleridge’s philosophical ideas lived on through the teachings of Julius
Hare, a tutor at Trinity College, Cambridge, who influenced a number of students,
including John Sterling and Frederick Denison Maurice, members of the Cambridge Club
who became known as the Apostles (a group that also included Arthur Henry Hallam).
6 The Romantics Reviewed, Part A, vol. I, 308.
7 The Romantics Reviewed, Part A, vol. II, 714.

His supernatural poetry in particular inspired authors such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth
Gaskell, and George Eliot. As John Beer points out, however,
In the first generation of Coleridge’s readers it was the moral and religious
elements in his thought that provoked most interest, nevertheless, even those who
said how much they owed to his doctrines were often unfortunately imprecise
about the exact nature of the debt and confused about his moral example. The
availability of texts for study at least simplified the position for some religious
thinkers, since it became possible to discuss what Coleridge was saying based on
its merits, without reference to the failings of the man himself. On this basis
Coleridge’s writings enjoyed a long afterlife of their own in the world of English
and American theology. 8
Victorian religious thinking was comforted and guided by Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection
in the Formation of a Manly Character. John Sterling, who played an important role in
the founding of the Broad Church movement, considered Aids to Reflection essential
reading. The High Church may also have been influenced by Coleridge’s religious
thinking, though such connections are less apparent. In his review of Church and State,
John Stuart Mill compared Jeremy Bentham with Coleridge, calling Coleridge one of the
“two great seminal minds of England in their age.” However, after the publication of
Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Coleridge’s religious thinking, which defended
the permanence of the natural world, came to be viewed with skepticism.
Another interesting Victorian assessment of Coleridge is Walter Pater’s “Coleridge’s
Writings” (1866). To Pater, Coleridge was engaged in a struggle to “apprehend the
absolute” that anticipated the strivings and the failings of the Victorian age, especially
after Darwin’s theories had exploded such notions. “But on Coleridge lies the whole
weight of the sad reflection that has since come into the world, with which for us the air
is full, which the ‘children in the marketplace’ repeat to each other.”
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/display/displayprose.cfm?prosenum=1
Additional important appraisals of Coleridge can be found in Leslie Stephen’s
charismatic essay, “Coleridge,” in Hours in a Library (1879); E. M. Forster’s “Silas
Tomkyn Comberbache” (1934); and Virginia Woolf’s “Coleridge” in The Death of the
Moth (1942).
The 1895 publication of a selection of Coleridge’s letters and unpublished notebooks,
assembled by his grandson, allowed scholars to form a more complex assessment of the
poet and critic. While important mid-century scholarship by critics such as M. H. Abrams
focused on Coleridge’s poetic innovation and imagination, more recent criticism has
veered toward understanding Coleridge’s political views, expressed in both poetry and
prose, his treatment of women, and his religious writings. For an overview of Coleridge
criticism, several bibliographies are available:
8 John Beer, “Coleridge’s Afterlife,” Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. Lucy Newlyn (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2002), 232.

• Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide, edited by Michael
O’Neill, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism and
Scholarship, Walter B. Crawford, (Boston: G. K. Hall & Company, 1996)
• The Poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism,
1935-1970, Mary Lee Taylor Milton, (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Selective Bibliography of Criticism, 1935-1977,
compiled by Jefferson D. Caskey and Melinda M. Stapper, (Westport: Greenwood
Press, 1979)
One of Coleridge’s oldest and truest friends Charles Lamb summed up Coleridge’s merits
best when he described him to Wordsworth in 1816 as “an Arch angel a little damaged.”
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Anna Lepine of the University of
Ottawa for the preparation of the draft material.