Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Language of Allusion

Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Language of Allusion
Author: Lucy Newlyn
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 242
Release: 1986
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

In her study of two creative minds, Lucy Newlyn offers a startlingly new version of the poetic interaction between Coleridge and Wordsworth during the critical years from 1797 to 1807. Rejecting the traditional accounts, even those given by the poets themselves, which have minimized the differences between the two, Newlyn demonstrates that it is only on the most superficial level that each poet seemed to be the other's ideal audience. Below that surface, she insists, there were radical dissimilarities between the two which led to a kind of "creative" misunderstanding by which each artist clearly defined himself in relation to the other. Because it is in the poet's "private language" of allusion that these differences are most clearly seen, the book concludes that this "private language" spoken by artists amongst themselves may in fact be the most aggressive of literary forms.

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 'the Language of the Heavens'

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 'the Language of the Heavens'
Author: Thomas Owens
Publisher:
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2019
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198840861

Thomas Owens explores exultant visions inspired by Wordsworth's and Coleridge's scrutiny of the night sky, the natural world, and the domains of science. He examines a set of scientific patterns which the poets used to express ideas about poetry, religion, criticism, and philosophy, and sets out the importance of analogy in their creative thinking.

Coleridge and Wordsworth

Coleridge and Wordsworth
Author: Paul Magnuson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2014-07-14
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1400859131

Paul Magnuson contends that the relationship between Coleridge's and Wordsworth's poetry is so complex that a new criticism is required to trace its intricacies. This book demonstrates that their poems may be read as parts of a single evolving whole, a "dialogue" in which the works of one are responses to and rewritings of those of the other. Professor Magnuson discloses this dialogue as a joint canon, or sequence, which includes the complete early versions of poems, as well as fragments, canceled drafts, and poems in progress. He further shows that this sequence is based on lyric structure: the relations among its poems and fragments resemble those among stanzas in an ode, and individual poems take their significance from their surrounding contexts in the dialogue. Coleridge's and Wordsworth's poetic conversation arose from their recognition that their themes and styles were similar. There were, as one of Coleridge's friends said, "fears of amalgamation," and it was actually from their failed attempts to collaborate on individual works that their dialogue began. The first chapter of the book elaborates a dialogic methodology and the following chapters discuss the dialogic relationship between Wordsworth's Salisbury Plain poems and "The Ancient Mariner"; "The Ruined Cottage" and Coleridge's "Christabel"; Coleridge's Conversation Poems and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"; Wordsworth's Goslar poetry of 1798, "Home at Grasmere," and Lyrical Ballads (1800); and the dejection dialogue of 1802. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The New Cambridge Companion to Coleridge

The New Cambridge Companion to Coleridge
Author: Tim Fulford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2022-11-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108936067

This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge's renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge's pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion's great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.

Re-Reading The Excursion

Re-Reading The Excursion
Author: Sally Bushell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 135190406X

Re-Reading The Excursion: Narrative, Response and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice is a groundbreaking study, which transforms contemporary critical understanding of The Excursion and of the place of this long poem in the Wordsworthian canon. Sally Bushell argues that the poem, which has suffered at the hands of critics for most of the twentieth century, has been unfairly judged according to a Coleridgean rather than a Wordsworthian definition of "philosophy"-that it has been read as a didactic work, rather than one which uses its dramatic form to teach its readers to think for themselves. She offers a new reading in which The Excursion is shown to be about providing the readers with moral habits and mental constructs by which to learn, not simply telling them what to think. The book begins with a discussion of the reception of the poem in 1814, considering the responses of Coleridge, Hazlitt, Francis Jeffrey and Charles Lamb. This historicized discussion is then balanced by a reading of the poem at the compositional stage, looking at the emergence from the manuscripts of a Wordsworthian dramatic voice. The author goes on to argue that the poem's philosophy is performative-that is, concerned with the way in which moral ideas can best be communicated, as much as with the ideas themselves. She then shifts her attention to consider how this operates in relation to the reader, considering the importance of context in relation to emotional response. Later, the epitaphic books are reconsidered in the light of Wordworth's critical writing; Bushell argues that the significance of the epitaph for him lies in its values as a poetic form in which the text itself is released from poetic authority. Finally, the author looks back at The Prelude from the perspective of The Excursion and shows how the later poem attempts to value the ordinary, rather than the poetic, mind. The conclusion reached is that Wordsworth is not just the "egotistical" poet of The Prelude, interested largely in the development of his own imaginative powers, but one who goes on to explore the limits of subjectivity and the importance of different kinds of imaginative links between individuals.

The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740–1830

The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740–1830
Author: Thomas Keymer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 542
Release: 2004-06-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139826719

This 2004 volume offers an introduction to British literature that challenges the traditional divide between eighteenth-century and Romantic studies. Contributors explore the development of literary genres and modes through a period of rapid change. They show how literature was shaped by historical factors including the development of the book trade, the rise of literary criticism and the expansion of commercial society and empire. The first part of the volume focuses on broad themes including taste and aesthetics, national identity and empire, and key cultural trends such as sensibility and the gothic. The second part pays close attention to the work of individual writers including Sterne, Blake, Barbauld and Austen, and to the role of literary schools such as the Lake and Cockney schools. The wide scope of the collection, juxtaposing canonical authors with those now gaining new attention from scholars, makes it essential reading for students of eighteenth-century literature and Romanticism.

Radical Contra-Diction

Radical Contra-Diction
Author: Björn Bosserhoff
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2016-05-11
Genre:
ISBN: 1443894060

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is chiefly remembered as the Romantic poet who wrote “The Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan”, as Wordsworth’s collaborator on the Lyrical Ballads, as the myriad-minded philosopher who introduced his countrymen to the thought of Kant, as one of the foremost critics of Shakespeare, and as a supremely gifted conversationalist who put a spell on any visitor to his Highgate home. In his own day, however, Coleridge was most notorious for his political “apostasy”. With the Revolution across the Channel, once celebrated as the harbinger of a new age, deteriorating into the terreur and the Pitt ministry desperately trying to contain revolutionary activities on British soil, public intellectuals were compelled to take sides. As it turned out, the choices they made during the 1790s would haunt them well into the 1810s. This first book-length study of Coleridge’s reactions to the French Revolution examines his trajectory from “radical” to “conservative” – and challenges the very notion that these labels can be applied to him. Particular focus is given to the part his friend Robert Southey played in Coleridge’s political coming of age, as well as to William Hazlitt’s role as his relentless prosecutor in later life. As such, the book offers an accessible portrayal of the first-generation Romantics and their political sensibilities.

"A Natural Delineation of Human Passions"

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2016-08-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004334483

Most of the articles in A Natural Delineation of Human Passions” originated in the Twelfth October Conference held in Leiden to celebrate the bicentenary of the publication of Lyrical Ballads. The first article, by the editor, “An Historic Moment: ‘A Natural Delineation of Human Passions’ as a ‘New Morality’?”, attempts to establish an historic and an historical context, both personal and political, for the six articles that follow, by Åke Bergvall, Myra Cottingham, C.P. Seabrook Wilkinson, James McGonigal, Jacqueline Schoemaker, and Suzanne E. Webster, which consider the themes of vagrancy and wandering in Lyrical Ballads, the expression of loss and compensation, and the consequences, both beneficial and perilous, for the language and rhetoric of poetry. Then three articles, by Annemarie Estor, Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, and Paul E.A. van Gestel, consider the ambience of science and philosophy in which Wordsworth and Coleridge strove to affirm the creative participation of poetry. After this, Jacqueline M. Labbe, Titus P. Bicknell, Robert Druce, and M. Van Wyk Smith discuss the parallel contributions of some of the more neglected contemporaries of the authors of Lyrical Ballads, not necessarily in English nor necessarily in England – Mary Robinson, Walter Savage Landor, Robert Bloomfield and Thomas Pringle. The volume concludes with an extended examination by Timothy Webb of the responses, both admiring and scornful, of the younger generation of Romantics to the legacy of Lyrical Ballads.

Coleridge's Dejection Ode

Coleridge's Dejection Ode
Author: J.C.C. Mays
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2019-01-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 303004131X

Coleridge's Dejection Ode completes J.C.C. Mays’ analysis of Coleridge’s poetry, following Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner (Palgrave 2016) and Coleridge’s Experimental Poetics (Palgrave 2013). "Dejection: An Ode" stands alone in Coleridge's oeuvre: written at a time of personal crisis, it reaches far back and deeply into his thinking in an attempt to find a poematic solution to ideas and problems he had mulled over for a long time. Mays reveals how the poem also marks the opening of the second half of Coleridge's career as both poet and thinker. In three central chapters Mays examines the new style that evolved in the process of writing the Ode: the technical means of metrics, rhyme and grammar; language and allusion; and symbol and structure. He recounts the complex, sometimes controversial critical history of the Ode, and suggests an editorial solution to the problem created by the Letter to Sara Hutchinson; re-evaluates the position of Wordsworth in the poem apropos the political statement it makes; clarifies the distinction between the views on Imagination expressed and those contained in Biographia Literaria; and traces the links of the concept "dejection" as it underpins Coleridge's late poems.

Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth

Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth
Author: Felicity James
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2008-09-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230583261

This book makes the case for a re-placing of Lamb as reader, writer and friend in the midst of the lively political and literary scene of the 1790s. Reading his little-known early works alongside others by the likes of Coleridge and Wordsworth, it allows a revealing insight into the creative dynamics of early Romanticism.