Romanticism

Born in 1770 in the Lake District, his main source of inspiration. He went in 1790 on a tour of France: his contact with revolutionary France filled him with enthusiasm for democratic ideals. The consequence of revolution and the war between France and England brought him in a nervous breakdown. He went to live with his sister Dorothy in 1795, who constantly supported his poetry. He produced his major poems in the years that followed 1800. He was made Poet Laureate in 1843 and he died in 1850.

Born in 1772 in Devonshire. He was influenced by French revolutionary ideals, which made him republican. After the disillusionment with French revolution he suffered from chronic rheumatism that he took care of with opium, from which he became dependent. In 1797 he met W. W. and started a collaboration. In 1799 he joined W. and his sister in the Lake District and fell in love with Dorothy. Then he spent a period of solitude in Malta (1804-1806), after which he returned to England and began a career in literary work and journalism. He died in 1834.

Lyrical Ballads (1798-1800)

The Prelude (autobiographical poem)

Lyrical Ballads (1798-1800)

Biographia Literaria (1817 text of literary criticism and autobiography)

He is interested in the relationship between nature and man. The main focus of interest is the poet’s response to nature. Man and nature are inseparable: man doesn’t exist outside the natural world but he’s an active participant in it, so “nature” for W. means something that includes both inanimate and human nature. Nature is a source of joy and teaches man to love. He’s pantheistic and he thinks that God is within nature.

Coleridge didn’t view nature as a moral guide or a source of consolation; his idea of nature is always accompanied by awareness of the presence of the ideal in the real; he doesn’t identify, because of his Christian faith, nature with God (pantheism), rather he saw nature and the material world in a neo-Platonic interpretation, as the reflection of the perfect world of the Ideas.

The poet is a common man who speaks to men with a greater sensibility, enthusiasm and the ability to penetrate the heart of things.

Unlike W., Coleridge believes that the poet isn’t a common person but a superior man.

The power of imagination enables the poet to communicate his knowledge, so that he becomes a teacher who shows men how to improve their moral being.

In the Biographia Literaria, imagination represents the power and the source to create a new world. He distinguished between primary, a fusion of perception and the human power to produce images, and secondary imagination.