Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge"founder of the
Romantic movement in poetry"
presented at -
K.V. No.2 Delhi Cantt (ii Shift)
presented by
Madhur Tripathi
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Coleridges Childhood

• Coleridge was born in 1772, son of a vicar in a
  small Devon town. He was the youngest of many
  children (some say 10, some 14), much adored and
  even spoiled by his parents. He was a dreamy
  child who loved reading I found the Arabian
  Nights entertainments--one tale of which... made
  so deep an impression on me... that I was haunted
  by spectres whenever I was in the dark--and I
  distinctly remember the anxious and fearful
  eagerness with which I used to watch the window
  in which the books lay--and whenever the sun lay
  upon them, I would seize it, carry it by the
  wall, and bask, and read (from his Biographia
  Literaria).

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Education and the Dragoons

• Coleridges father died when he was only nine,
  and Samuel was sent away to a very strict London
  boarding school, Christs Hospital. He attended
  Jesus College, Cambridge for several years in the
  early 1790s, where he met lifelong friend and
  fellow poet Robert Southey, and came in contact
  with the radical political and social ideas
  fermenting just after the French Revolution. In
  1793, depressed by his lack of funds and a failed
  love affair, he left college and enlisted in the
  dragoons. His brother rescued him from this
  misguided commitment and he returned to
  Cambridge, but never completed his university
  studies.

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Utopianism and an Unhappy Marriage

• Southey and Coleridge dreamed up and hoped to
  make real a utopia based on the ideals of Platos
  Republic, and called it pantisocracy, meaning
  equal rule by all members of the community. They
  intended to move to the New World with their
  wives and a select few other couples to realize
  this vision it never happened. But Coleridge and
  Southey did marry sisters, Sara and Edith
  Fricker, in 1795. Coleridge was actually in love
  with another woman, Mary Evans, who was obligated
  elsewhere, and his marriage ended unhappily in a
  legal separation in 1806.

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge's daughter Sara
Fricker-Coleridge  1830. Portrait by Richard
James Lane
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Poetry

• Despite not enjoying the name recognition or
  popular acclaim that Wordsworth or Shelley have
  had, Coleridge is one of the most important
  figures in English poetry. His poems directly and
  deeply influenced all the major poets of the age.
  He was known by his contemporaries as a
  meticulous craftsman who was more rigorous in his
  careful reworking of his poems than any other
  poet, and Southey and Wordsworth were dependent
  on his professional advice. His influence on
  Wordsworth is particularly important because many
  critics have credited Coleridge with the very
  idea of "Conversational Poetry".

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• The idea of utilizing common, everyday language
  to express profound poetic images and ideas for
  which Wordsworth became so famous may have
  originated almost entirely in Coleridges mind.
  It is difficult to imagine Wordsworths great
  poems, The Excursion or The Prelude, ever having
  been written without the direct influence of
  Coleridges originality. As important as
  Coleridge was to poetry as a poet, he was equally
  important to poetry as a critic. Coleridge's
  philosophy of poetry, which he developed over
  many years, has been deeply influential in the
  field of literary criticism. This influence can
  be seen in such critics as A.O. Lovejoy and I.A.
  Richards.

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Coleridge draft of the poem Kubla Khan
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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel,
and Kubla Khan

• Coleridge is probably best known for his long
  poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christa
  bel. Even those who have never read the Rime have
  come under its influence its words have given
  the English language the metaphor of
  an albatross around one's neck, the quotation of
  "water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink"
  (almost always rendered as "but not a drop to
  drink"), and the phrase "a sadder and a wiser
  man" (again, usually rendered as "a sadder but
  wiser man"). The phrase "All creatures great and
  small" may have been inspired by The Rime "He
  prayeth best, who loveth best/ All things great
  and small/ For the dear God who loveth us/ He
  made and loveth all." Christabelis known for its
  musical rhythm, language, and its Gothic tale.
• Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream, A Fragment,
  although shorter, is also widely known.
  Both Kubla Khan and Christabel have an additional
  "Romantic" aura because they were never
  finished. Stopford Brooke characterised both
  poems as having no rival due to their "exquisite
  metrical movement" and "imaginative phrasing."

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The statue of the Ancient Mariner at Watchet,
Somerset, England. The statue was unveiled in
September 2003, as a tribute to Samuel Taylor
Coleridge.
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The Conversation poems

• The Eolian Harp (1795)
• Reflections on having left a Place of
  Retirement (1795)
• This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison (1797)
• Frost at Midnight (1798)
• Fears in Solitude (1798)
• The Nightingale A Conversation Poem (1798)
• Dejection An Ode (1802)
• To William Wordsworth (1807)

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The Rime of The Ancient Mariner
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SUMMARy
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• Three guys are on the way to a wedding
  celebration when an old sailor (the Mariner)
  stops one of them at the door (we'll call him the
  Wedding Guest). Using his hypnotic eyes to hold
  the attention of the Wedding Guest, he starts
  telling a story about a disastrous journey he
  took. The Wedding Guest really wants to go party,
  but he can't pry himself away from this grizzled
  old mariner. The Mariner begins his story. They
  left port, and the ship sailed down near
  Antarctica to get away from a bad storm, but then
  they get caught in a dangerous, foggy ice field.
  An albatross shows up to steer them through the
  fog and provide good winds, but then the Mariner
  decides to shoot it. Oops.

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• Pretty soon the sailors lose their wind, and it
  gets really hot. They run out of water, and
  everyone blames the Mariner. The ship seems to be
  haunted by a bad spirit, and weird stuff starts
  appearing, like slimy creatures that walk on the
  ocean. The Mariner's crewmates decide to hang the
  dead albatross around his neck to remind him of
  his error.Everyone is literally dying of
  thirst. The Mariner sees another ship's sail at a
  distance. He wants to yell out, but his mouth is
  too dry, so he sucks some of his own blood to
  moisten his lips. He's like, "A ship! We're
  saved." Sadly, the ship is a ghost ship piloted
  by two spirits, Death and Life-in-Death, who have
  to be the last people you'd want to meet on a
  journey. Everyone on the Mariner's ship dies.

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• The wedding guest realizes, "Ah! You're a
  ghost!" But the Mariner says, "Well, actually, I
  was the only one who didn't die." He continues
  his story he's on a boat with a lot of dead
  bodies, surrounded by an ocean full of slimy
  things. Worse, these slimy things are nasty water
  snakes. But the Mariner escapes his curse by
  unconsciously blessing the hideous snakes, and
  the albatross drops off his neck into the
  ocean.The Mariner falls into a sweet sleep, and
  it finally rains when he wakes up. A storm
  strikes up in the distance, and all the dead
  sailors rise like zombies to pilot the ship. The
  sailors don't actually come back to life.
  Instead, angels fill their bodies, and another
  supernatural spirit under the ocean seems to push
  the boat. The Mariner faints and hears two voices
  talking about how he killed the albatross and
  still has more penance to do. These two
  mysterious voices explain how the ship is moving.

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• After a speedy journey, the ship ends up back
  in port again. The Mariner sees angels standing
  next to the bodies of all his crewmates. Then a
  rescue boat shows up to take him back to shore.
  The Mariner is happy that a guy called "the
  hermit" is on the rescue boat. The hermit is in a
  good mood. All of a sudden there's a loud noise,
  and the Mariner's ship sinks. The hermit's boat
  picks up the Mariner.

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• When they get on shore, the Mariner is desperate
  to tell his story to the hermit. He feels a
  terrible pain until the story had been told. In
  fact, the Mariner says that he still has the same
  painful need to tell his story, which is why he
  stopped the Wedding Guest on this occasion.
  Wrapping up, the Mariner tells the Wedding Guest
  that he needs to learn how to say his prayers and
  love other people and things. Then the Mariner
  leaves, and the Wedding Guest no longer wants to
  enter the wedding. He goes home and wakes up the
  next day, as the famous last lines go, "a sadder
  and a wiser man."

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English frozen crew joined albatross which sits
on the ship