WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827)

The chief aim of Blake’s poetry and art - show others the infinite in everything that they looked at:

To see a World in a grain of sand,And a Heaven in a wild flower,Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,And Eternity in an hour.

(Auguries of Innocence)

Peter Ackroyd on William Blake:

* “the last great religious poet in England”

* “In the visionary imagination of William Blake there is no birth and no death, no beginning and no end, only the perpetual pilgrimage within time towards eternity.”

William Blake – John Milton

- Milton - popular success and a literary and political career apart from his religious and metaphysical poetry

- Blake’s life - a struggle to make ends meet; although he occasionally enjoyed small success as an engraver or as a poet, his work usually failed to make an impact.

- tried and failed to get his work into print- when he took to engraving and publishing it himself, he never managed to sell more than a

handful of copies.- For Blake the world of angels, devils and an Old-Testament-style God was always close at

hand; unlike Milton he was unable to put himself at a literary distance from it → ill-equipped to make a success of himself in his own lifetime.

Blake – literary outsider of the Romantic Age:

- misunderstood and derided by the artistic establishment of his time - condemned for immorality and seditious behaviour - afflicted by borderline madness and persistent visions for the majority of his adult life

Blake’s relationship with his contemporaries and precursors:

- influenced by the Ossianic poems and the revived interest in the ballad - his innovations in the use of rhythms and symbolism separate him sharply from the central

eighteenth-century literary tradition - 1783 Poetic Sketches - he lamented the lack of inspired poetry among many of his

contemporaries and predecessors, appealing rather to earlier figures such as Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare.

REASON vs. VISION

- From an early stage Blake differed from his contemporaries, believing that the world of Bacon, Locke and Newton, far from reassuring its followers by means of scientific truths and rational certainties must ultimately deliver them into a universe of despair and meaninglessness. - Rejecting the analytic mind which weighs one affirmation carefully against another, Blake appealed to a spirit of more generous vision which he believed to be latent in all human beings, but left to sleep along with the imaginative powers which eighteenth-century art discouraged.

Blake – isolated figure

Coming at the beginning of a new period, Blake was to a great extent isolated, and only very precariously in the social context at all, and revealed characteristics of the period that was coming in other ways besides that of testing the conventional values. * felt the significance of childhood experience; * accepted eagerly the glimpses he gained, sometimes in the form of hallucination, of unconscious process; * turned away from his contemporary culture’s dependence on the classical past to his own version of history and pre-history in order to draw on the dynamic resources of what seemed early and primitive; * valued strong emotion, notably anger, as the tool and weapon of a healthy mind.

Life and artistic career

- born on 28 November 1757, Broad Street, London, the son of a hosier; - difficult child, prone to religious visions that would influence him in later life;- obvious talent for both literature and art; - sent to a drawing school, later apprenticed to James Basire, a master engraver, spent his youth and early adulthood sketching and copying the work of older artists - 1779 admitted to the Royal Society, under the stewardship of Joshua Reynolds; - engraver for novels and catalogues;- 1782 married Catherine Boucher;- 1783 Poetical Sketches, his first volume, was published, to no great acclaim;- set up a short-lived print-selling business; - devoting more and more time to his poetical writings;- after his brother Robert died in 1787, Blake claimed to see his ghost: he said that it was Robert’s spirit which suggested to him his technique of printing poems and illustrations together on single plates; - Blake and his wife established a cottage industry, producing illuminated books and manuscripts. * Songs of Innocence (1789) perhaps his best-known work nowadays, and certainly the most successful during his lifetime - followed by a series of increasingly unprofitable ventures, including Songs of Experience (1793) the contrary sequel to Songs of Innocence; - wonder and delight, simplicity and deep compassion (SI) counterbalanced by a note of evil (SE), especially the evil of selfishness, poverty and insensitively rigidified religion– similar (and sometimes parallel) lyrical forms.

PROPHETIC BOOKS

* The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) * Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793)

* The Book of Urizen (1794) * The Book of Los (1795)- Blake’s poetry - not a record of men and women studied and nature observed but a vision registered and affirmed; the idiom is that of a visionary. - The Marriage of Heaven and Hell - published by Blake’s own method of engraving the text and illustrations, and colouring the copies by hand; - it overturns orthodoxies of religion and morality with the startling oracular aphorisms known as the Proverbs of Hell;

THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL

The voice of the Devil.

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors.

1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the

Soul.3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age

2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

3. Energy is Eternal Delight

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.And being restrain'd it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire.The history of this is written in Paradise Lost, & the Governor or Reason is call'd Messiah.And the original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is call'd the Devil or Satan and his children are call'd Sin & Death.But in the Book of Job Milton’s Messiah is call'd Satan.For this history has been adopted by both parties.It indeed appear'd to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devil's account is, that the Messiah fell, & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss.

A Memorable Fancy.

As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity. I collected some of their Proverbs: thinking that as the sayings used in a nation, mark its character, so the Proverbs of Hell, show the nature of Infernal wisdom better than any description of buildings or garments.

PROVERBS OF HELL

* The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.* He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.* A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.* He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.Eternity is in love with the productions of time. * The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure. * The most sublime act is to set another before you.* If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.* Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.* The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.* The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.* The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.* The nakedness of woman is the work of God.* The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man. * What is now proved was once only imagin'd. * One thought fills immensity. * Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth. * The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.* You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. * As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.* To create a little flower is the labour of ages.* Exuberance is Beauty.* Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.* Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.* Where man is not, nature is barren.

Blake’s vision

- mystical insight + passion for freedom + conviction of the sacredness of instinct;- rapturous sense of life’s wonder and delight - harsh criticism of social institutions and human selfishness for their corruption of the spirit and for the cruelty of poverty; - Blake’s vision - combination of an extraordinary innocence and a fierce creative energy, closely related to that strain in his philosophy which determined him to link the beauty and purity of the heavenly with the dynamic power that is too readily associated with Hell. - oppositions between the native goodness of man and the corruption of society, between the full range of imaginative and emotional expressiveness and the inhibiting effects of the rational and the institutional; - sense of man’s nature as being dismembered by conventional religious and social codes;- protest against the separation of the spiritual from the physical, the energetic from the rational , perceptively diagnostic of the human condition; - religion of the imagination which cherishes a human wholeness comprehensive enough to embrace forces that reason and tradition have regarded as irreconcilable;

- individual testing of standards in all directions, revealing the value and dangers of a consistent refusal to accept the ready-made; - individual testing of the wisdom, morality and theology of his time; - his convictions were not far removed from what many other people have believed before and since Blake’s time, though he phrased them in forms that were then a violent challenge to conventional habits of thought.

Blake’s symbolism

- the difficulty of Blake’s writings resides in his invention of a new symbolism by which he gave personification and voice not only to abstract concepts like energy and prophecy, and to natural agencies like the spirit of water or of the earth, but also to forces representative of current thinking and contemporary civilization. - this symbolic scheme reaches labyrinthine proportions in the last great poems in this vein, Milton (1804) and Jerusalem (1804). - Blake’s disciples – fascinated with his occult systems

Blake’s final years

- Blake began to realize that popular success (both artistic and literary) was eluding him → this realization drove him further into unexplored realms. - his work became more and more obscure, and more strongly influenced by his idiosyncratic religious beliefs. - signs of manic extravagance and something very like paranoia from time to time, yet his work, unlike that commonly associated with mental patients, also has a remarkable degree of control. - only able to scrape a living by producing watercolours and occasional engraving for novels, - 1803, Blake allegedly drove a young soldier out of his garden, uttering the words: ‘damn the king; the soldiers are all slaves.’ → put on trial for sedition, but acquitted. - in his final years. Blake began to be appreciated by a younger generation of artists and writers, who set great store by his visions, and who named him ‘The Interpreter’. - he died in 1827, apparently ‘singing of the things he saw in Heaven’, and perhaps beginning to realize his work would live on after his death.

Reception

- critical opinion is divided as to whether his work surpasses that of almost all English writers except the few greatest, or whether his genius suffered, in T.S. Eliot’s words, from the lack of ‘a framework of accepted and traditional ideas which would have prevented him from indulging in a philosophy of his own.’- remarkable posthumous success - very few other people have suffered the same ill-regard and obscurity during their own lifetimes, and yet managed subsequently to enter the canon of English literature;- two hundred years later, Blake emerges as one of the most wide-ranging and challenging of English poets;

- Blake’s resurrection is due to a large extent to his modernity, to his being, like many visionaries, ahead of his time;

- not a Romantic; against the neo-Hellenism and Classicism of his period;

- many of his simpler poems seem to idealise the natural world in a way reminiscent of Wordsworth or Keats;

- not a Nature poet and the city of London always constituted his one favourite setting; - as the Romantic ideal slipped out of vogue, readers came to appreciate the disarming originality

and complexity of Blake’s body of work.

- Songs of Innocence and Experience – seemingly simple, but contain a huge variety of different moods and levels of meaning;- apparently little more than a collection of cradle-songs, written in child-like language, with an emphasis on traditional notions of good and bad; - however, innocence and experience have a great deal in common, - questioning of assumptions about morality and behaviour;- grim social commentary;- disturbing sexual undertones; - prophetic style - persuasive ring of Biblical authority.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)

- at first sight Wordsworth’s achievement might appear diametrically opposed to that of Blake, who was not concerned with making his meanings explicit, preferring often to speak in riddles and so produce writings whose obscurity defied contemporary canons of clarity;

-Wordsworth’s characteristic method was to describe simple incidents, or even commonplace sentiments, and hope to bring out their special significance;

WILLIAM BLAKE vs. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

- closer relationship between the two poets than might at first appear - both had in their childhood enjoyed exceptional visionary powers [the dignifying and validation of childhood and its experiences was an important part of the Romantic programme]

• Blake continued to affirm the importance of visionary powers, maintaining to the end that all human beings possessed them but they were lost by not being cultivated;

• Wordsworth believed that they must necessarily fade and that the art of being properly human consisted in learning how to live with that fact;

CULTURE vs. NATURE• Blake’s London (the tumult of life and of change reminding the artist of social disorder) & the

industrial towns of the North (practical businessmen and factory smoke) vs. Wordsworth’s countryside – solid ground on which to stand; the workings of nature are seen to play an important part in young years, in providing a full human education;

• - the artist who remains in the city is not merely foolish but immoral, he is cutting himself off from all that is best in humanity;

* painting – the landscape becomes mainstream* poetry: The Lake School of Poetry: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey.

• Wordsworth’s poetry – response to ‘the beautiful and permanent forms of nature’ + the dimension of the mythic;

• the countryside seen as the repository of eternal verities, truths of the imagination which will survive in unchanged form.

• view of nature as having palpable moral significance - sets Wordsworth apart not only from other poets who are though of as belonging to the Romantic movement but from earlier poets who praised the beauties of the natural world. It is real mysticism which gives his nature poetry such profound power.

Early writings

• Wordsworth began by writing poetry in modes more readily recognizable by contemporary readers, dealing with familiar themes of sublimity and pathos, each set against an appropriate landscape;

• gradual transition from poems and plays with solitary figures at their centre to a way of writing which did not simply return him to isolation and despair;

- influences: the impact of his sister Dorothy’s direct human feelings & Coleridge’s ideas;

LYRICAL BALLADS - 1798

- joint production: Wordsworth & Coleridge- Coleridge recalled in Biographia Literaria (1817) how the two poets decided to collaborate, the one to deal convincingly with incidents and agents ‘in part at least supernatural’, the other with subjects ‘chosen from ordinary life’- a series of distinctive poems, many following the pattern of contemporary verses as found in the magazines and journals of the time, but marked in each case by some further quality;- presented as having been written chiefly ‘to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure’;

PREFACE TO THE LYRICAL BALLADS

The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings, and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature. The language, too, of these men has been adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions. Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more

philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets […] I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind, and in whatever degree, from various causes, is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will, upon the whole, be in a state of enjoyment.

- 1800 the famous PREFACE to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads - attacked much current poetic diction - insisted on the use in poetry of ‘a selection of the language really spoken by men’ - asserted that ‘all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ - made the claim that ‘poetry is the breath and spirit of all knowledge… the first and last of all knowledge… immortal as the heart of man.’- preoccupation with unusual states of mind- poems recording and celebrating the lives of individuals (‘The Idiot Boy’, etc.) – reverence to even the humblest human existence in a deliberately simple style which often scandalised contemporary critics;- humble people presented with a dignity and tragic quality that made them emblematic for the rest of mankind;- poems in ballad form [ballad - connotations of folk song and populism, startlingly simple vocabulary] e.g. ‘We Are Seven’ – recording a child’s inability to see her dead siblings as anything but part of the living family- paradoxically, Wordsworth, who notoriously strove to avoid the artificial poetic diction of his predecessors and to address his readers in ‘the very language of men’ is, in spite of his unpretentious and accessible style, surprisingly difficult for modern readers to get into:- because he is so understandable, readers tend to dismiss him quickly, without pausing to reflect on the significance of certain terms e.g. The ‘Lucy’ poems – so apparently simple, yet containing some of his most enigmatic statements)- in spite of this simplicity, he was a sophisticated writer - accomplished prosody, assured handling of verse forms (Pindaric ode, mock heroic, sonnet)

‘Lines written above Tintern Abbey’

FIVE years have past; five summers, with the lengthOf five long winters! and again I hearThese waters, rolling from their mountain-springsWith a soft inland murmur. - Once againDo I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,That on a wild secluded scene impressThoughts of more deep seclusion; and connectThe landscape with the quiet of the sky. […]

These beauteous forms,Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the dinOf towns and cities, I have owed to them

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;And passing even into my purer mind,With tranquil restoration: -- feelings tooOf unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,As have no slight or trivial influenceOn that best portion of a good man's life,His little, nameless, unremembered, actsOf kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,To them I may have owed another gift,Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,In which the burthen of the mystery,In which the heavy and the weary weightOf all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened: -- that serene and blessed mood,In which the affections gently lead us on, -- Until, the breath of this corporeal frameAnd even the motion of our human bloodAlmost suspended, we are laid asleepIn body, and become a living soul:While with an eye made quiet by the powerOf harmony, and the deep power of joy,We see into the life of things.

- long meditative poem in blank verse recording his return to the banks of the Wye, five years after his first visit; - reflections on the difference between his feelings during each visit, from the emotional days of youth to a more reflective pleasure in nature + perceptions of the moral and philosophical lessons to be learned when “We see into the life of things”;

• - the pleasures of boyhood and the young man’s passionately ambivalent relationship with nature are seen as both contributing to his psychic good & moral resources;

• contrast between the current state of mind and the remembered passions of the past, back to a time when mind and nature were so united that he could not be sure whether external objects has a separate existence at all;

LATER WORKS

* ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ – mysticism + the sense of an almost platonic world of more perfect reality; - attempt to come to terms with the loss of the splendours of the world as seen through the eyes of childhood wonder.* ‘Resolution and Independence’ – gives a new valuation to those who display simple endurance; the great and simple affections of humankind are celebrated together with the impact of the natural world.* The Prelude (1805) – long autobiographical poem, focusing on his unhappiness at Cambridge, his walking tour in the Alps, the time spent in France (the French revolution, the love affair with Annette Vallon)

WORDSWORTH’S VISION

- the existence in nature of spirits to which as a boy he had been particularly responsive;- some state of excitement, particularly if suddenly arrested, can leave the human open to unusually profound sensations, where nature seemed to reveal the unity that lay at her centre and impress it permanently on one’s own being;- this set of beliefs, explored at its height with Coleridge, could be exciting to poets who felt oppressed by the limitations of a mechanised universe, offering a sense of the universality and indestructibility of life [there were disastrous reminders that even if life on a grand scale is immortal individual lives are not]

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)

ACTIVITIES AND INTERESTS

- Coleridge wrote poetry throughout his life- regarded primarily as a poet only for a few years - combined literary activities with researches and writings in many fields – political, scientific, critical, moral, theological- thought of himself as a metaphysician, one who “feels the riddle of the world and may help to unravel it” - “inquiring spirit” active in all these concerns; in poetry it informed some of his most delicate descriptions and vivid images, and played a part in his emergence as a major literary critic of his time- one of the most controversial aspects of his life – his prescribed use of opium, leading to addiction

PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS

- drawn to the new ideas of reform and renovation; influenced by the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, etc. & the rediscovery of ancient vitalist ideas such as those of the neo-platonist philosophers- together with Robert Southey he planned to set up a small egalitarian society to be called ‘Pantisocracy’- unusually wide-ranging consciousness + an equally active conscience, keeping him aware of the value of the old even as he found himself attracted to the new - the very contradictions which were inherent in the new phase of civilisation were fully operative in his own psyche, so that the work he left was often fractured or fragmentary

CONVERSATION POEMS

- efforts to reconcile himself both with the workings of the imagination and with the moral and political requirements of society- feeling for the subtler energies of life - intensified by his friendship with William and Dorothy Wordsworth - power for sensitive description - particularly evident in meditative poems:‘This Lime-tree Bower my Prison’ ‘The Nightingale’ ‘Frost at Midnight’

MYSTERY POEMS

‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ – Coleridge’s poetic status very largely and justly depends on its inclusion in the Lyrical Ballads- at times the sense of a central harmony at the centre of creation is magically evoked- much of the poem’s power comes however from complex movements between opposites such as terror and peace- new way of writing poetry, a play of mind which liberated his poetic powers to perform at their finest‘Kubla Khan’‘Christabel’

‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (excerpts)

It is an ancient Mariner,And he stoppeth one of three.`By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

He holds him with his skinny hand,"There was a ship," quoth he.`Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!'Eftsoons his hand dropped he.

He holds him with his glittering eye - The Wedding-Guest stood still,And listens like a three years' child:The Mariner hath his will.

The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:He cannot choose but hear;And thus spake on that ancient man,The bright-eyed Mariner.

And now there came both mist and snow,And it grew wondrous cold:And ice, mast-high, came floating by,As green as emerald.

And through the drifts the snowy cliftsDid send a dismal sheen:Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken - The ice was all between.

The ice was here, the ice was there,The ice was all around:It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,Like noises in a swound!

At length did cross an Albatross,Thorough the fog it came;As it had been a Christian soul,We hailed it in God's name.

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,The furrow followed free;We were the first that ever burstInto that silent sea.

Down dropped the breeze, the sails dropped down,'Twas sad as sad could be;And we did speak only to breakThe silence of the sea!

All in a hot and copper sky,The bloody sun, at noon,Right up above the mast did stand,No bigger than the moon.

Day after day, day after day,We stuck, nor breath nor motion;As idle as a painted shipUpon a painted ocean.

About, about, in reel and routThe death-fires danced at night;The water, like a witch's oils,Burnt green, and blue, and white.

And some in dreams assured wereOf the Spirit that plagued us so;Nine fathom deep he had followed usFrom the land of mist and snow.

Water, water, every where,And all the boards did shrink;Water, water, every where,Nor any drop to drink.

The very deep did rot: O Christ!That ever this should be!Yea, slimy things did crawl with legsUpon the slimy sea.

And every tongue, through utter drought,Was withered at the root;We could not speak, no more than ifWe had been choked with soot.

Ah! well-a-day! what evil looksHad I from old and young!Instead of the cross, the AlbatrossAbout my neck was hung."

SUMMARY: The old mariner detains a wedding guest at the very doors of the bridegroom’s home with a compulsive tale of how his ship was tossed towards the South Pole and locked in a desolation of ice until an Albatross came through the fog and ate at the sailors’ hands. Then the ice split and they steered through it, but the mariner shot the bird that had brought them luck, and a terrible price was paid. Becalmed on the Equator, one after another of the crew died of thirst, each one cursing the mariner. Back home after his ghastly adventure, the mariner is shriven, but a lifetime’s penance periodically compels him by a renewal of his agony to retell his tale.

CHRISTABEL- the archaic and haunting mystery of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ are matched in Christabel (1816)- the problem of allowing innocence to survive and flourish in a world where nature’s energies act ambiguously and amorally is personified in the encounter between the innocent Christabel and the enigmatic Geraldine, who hides a nameless horror under a beautiful appearance. PLOT (scarcely developed in the only two sections that Coleridge completed): the Lady Christabel finds in the forest one who claims to be a forlorn maiden and takes her home to the castle to help her. But Geraldine is an evil being in disguise and at night she takes Christabel in her arms to lay a spell on her.- lines with widely differing numbers of syllables - repetitive rhetorical devices - bold, suggestive images- strange incantatory eeriness, in harmony with the gothic background

KUBLA KHAN

- how far drugs contributed to the calling up of a dreamlike and nightmarish atmosphere is a question brought sharply into focus by the remarkable opium-product, Kubla Khan, the third ‘supernatural’ poem of that time, a fragment which Coleridge claimed to have composed in a ‘dream’ or a ‘reverie’ and to have been pouring spontaneously onto paper when he was interrupted by a ‘person from Porlock’.- rich, exotic flood of sensuous image and symbol- tantalizing brevity and incompleteness- raised questions concerning the status of the visionary imagination that did not cease to agitate Coleridge’s mind

KUBLA KHAN – GENESIS

In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: ‘Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden

thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.'’ The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!”

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

- Wordsworth - exposure to nature = beneficial moral resource - Coleridge’s poetry - references to the demonic forces that seem to be particularly involved in evil behaviour:* Kubla Khan – a man of commanding genius who does not understand the full destructive power of his own creative daemon; * the Ancient Mariner - by his thoughtless act unleashes equally ambiguous daemonic forces, which continue to wreck vengeance upon him until he glimpses the depth and significance of what he has done, after which they demand further penance* Christabel - similar forces play part, with Geraldine as an ambiguous demonic figure, acting partly for Christabel’s good, partly exercising a subtly malign influence

Dejection: An Ode

- abridged version of his verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, combining hopeless love and fears about the continuance of his creativity. - the best solution to the suspected decline of his poetic powers entailed resorting to his analytic powers → Coleridge later became remarkable among his contemporaries not only for his poetry but for his literary criticism; his reputation in the field was first established by his Shakespearean lectures, notable for the use of psychological comments on the actions of the characters and on the role of the audience

Biographia Literaria (1817)

- Coleridge endeavoured to set forth at length his principles as a critic and to provide some justification for his career so far- on the intellectual plane he wished to reconcile the aesthetic with the moral, by suggesting that what was most deeply true of our emotional response to literature was a key to our appreciation of the moral universe- the divine supremacy of the imagination (he distinguishes between imagination and fancy, and between different levels within imaginative activity)

LATER LIFE

- strangely haunted figure, turning increasingly to theological questions – those who looked deep into their own consciousness while also committing themselves to the Christian faith would find doubt disappearing in a new assurance of their truth. - final stages of his life → double role: * increasingly looked up to as a Christian sage, pointing the way forward to those who found themselves in religious doubt * elderly poet writing about his condition in old age

LIFE IN DEATH

- the theme of ‘life in death’ (The Ancient Mariner) survives even into his final ‘Epitaph’ (1833), where he solicits a prayer for himself:

That he who many a year with toil of breathFound death in life, may here find life in death!

- the search for eternal life in the Christian sense carries echoes of earlier thinking, when his sense of the ‘one Life’ had stimulated the writing of his finest poems + caused him to look at life in nature and human consciousness in a new way, seeking out the relationship between them - it could be argued that the germ of his greatest achievements had lain in the search for that elusive connection

INFLUENCE

- the growing popularity of Coleridge’s poetry during his lifetime was partly due to its influence upon his immediate successors, some of whom developed particular aspects of themes well beyond the point he had reached:* Keats seems to have found in poems such as The Aeolian Harp and The Nightingale inspiration for his poetry of warm sensuousness* Shelley was evidently encouraged by the link between natural description and metaphysical psychology to develop a similar mode in his Odes* Byron, who was particularly impressed by Kubla Khan, developed Oriental tales of his own.