S.T.Coleridge biography and characteristics of his work

 

S.T.Coleridge Biography

(1) Life and period background

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, critic and philosopher. He was born on October 21, 1772 at Ottery St Mary. The son of a vicar who wanted to incline him to ecclesiastical life. Between 1791 and 1794, he studied at Jesus College, Cambridge. Later, he left Cambridge without getting a doctorate and, together with the poet Robert Southey, tried to found a utopian society in Pennsylvania based on the ideas of William Godwin. He married Southey's sister-in-law, Sara Fricker in 1795.

In 1796, he published Miscellaneous Poems. The previous year he had met the poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, with whom he would strike up a deep friendship. With Wordsworth, he collaborates on a volume of Lyrical Ballads (1798), which became a landmark in English poetry. A work with which they introduced Romanticism into English literature.

In 1797 and 1798, he wrote 'Old seaman' and the symbolic poem 'Kubla Khan', he began the mystical-narrative poem 'Cristabel', he composed 'Frost at midnight' and 'The nightingale'.

In 1798, he travels to Europe. He studied German and translated the romantic poet Friedrich von Schiller's Wallenstein dramatic trilogy into English. These works made him the most influential English interpreter of German Romanticism. He was addicted to opium, a drug he used to alleviate his rheumatism.

In 1800, he returned to England and settled with his family and friends in Keswick, in the Lake District. In 1804, he marched to Malta, where he was secretary to the governor. He returned to England in 1806. Between 1808 and 1819, he gave his famous series of lectures on literature and philosophy. In 1816, he settled in the London residence of an admirer of his, the physician James Gillman. There he wrote his main prose work, Biographia Literaria (1817), a series of dissertations and autobiographical notes on various subjects, among which his literary observations stand out. Sibylline leaves (1817), Aids for reflection (1825) and Church and State (1830) were published.

(2) Characteristics of the work and its position in English literature

If we remove the specific limitations as a characteristic of poetry, I think his poetry works are very important if they are of considerable value, even if they are insignificant. The most strikingly striking feature among his poetic works is his intense imagination, supremely controlled by his erroneous artistic flair within his fine works. It is seeking the grotesque, the supernatural, and the obscure. But on the other hand, that's what true imagination is, and it creates what Coleridge calls the "spontaneous cessation of disbelief," which for a long time makes us believe it all. He sees nature with a penetrating or revelatory glance, and draws poetry materials and materials from that nature. He is particularly good at depicting aspects of the sky, the sea, and more expansive and expansive objects. No poet can surpass Coleridge in the magic of language. The magic of his language is like a song sung by the Lady Siren.

Readers who have read the above quoted poems can discover something of the secret of the poetry's charm by observing the musicality and rhyme that are connected with the vowels, and observing other technical features, but in the end, the beauty of these poems is explained. do not use This is what a genius looks like. In accordance with his explosive zeal, Coleridge maintains Shea's wonderful simplicity. He writes so clearly that he appeals directly to the imagination of the reader. In this respect, he sometimes bears close resemblance to Wordsworth. Meditation poems such as Frost at Midnight strongly demonstrate this similarity.

The same obstacle (dark shadows) that plagued Coleridge's poetry is in his prose. They are fragments like crumbs, chaotic and tempting. In terms of quantity, they are quite numerous and irregularly spread out, and in terms of manners, they are scattered and scattered and intricately intertwined. However, if looked closely (rarely praised), it has the wisdom to dig into every corner.

In 1808 he began a series of lectures on subjects related to poetry, but already the curse of his opium had overtaken him, and the lectures ended in failure. During his stay in the Lake District, his life ended as short as The Watchman published in Penrith. Therefore, in 1817, when he was freed from his opiate addiction, he published Biographia Literaria and Sibylline Leaves.

The Biographia Literaria is his most valuable prose work. Coleridge, the last chapter of this book, the most enduring exposition of one romantic theory in England, is placed in the chief position of criticism. His work as a critic was crucial for English literary criticism, to which he contributed new criteria and concepts; his fundamental work in the aforementioned change is Literary Biography (1817). Praised by his contemporaries for his pro-European spirit and as a poet and literary critic of the first order, he conceived the poetic imagination as the mediating element between the various modern cultures, the central idea of ​​romantic aesthetics.