Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Romanticism

The Romantic movement was a reaction and answer to  the Enlightenment's focus on rationality, perceived by the Romantics as emotionally and aesthetically repressive.

Romantics were concerned with:

• The Sublime: an aesthetic and moral human experience of the supremely beautiful, the boundless, the terrifying.

• Emotions: art and poetry are meant to excite one's emotions; emphasis on turbulent or stormy emotions like dread, awe, obsession.

• Mimesis vs. Creation: the poet creates; he does not imitate or hold a mirror up to nature

• Nature: it should be pure, wild, uncultivated, untouched.

• The Supernatural: ghosts, possessed/cursed objects, insanity and insane/unreal things, dreams as real or prophetic.

• Medievalism: a revival and rewriting of medieval literature, folk tales, art, etc.; the "romanticization" of the Middle Ages.

• Neo-Platonism: belief in the One or the Good ("the mind of God"); all of reality emanates from the One; Platonic ideals/forms: Good, Beauty, Justice, Freedom, etc.

Kubla Kahn

• An opium-induced dream

• The famous interruption by the arrival of a "Person from Porlock"

• Poem-specific Themes:

  • Inspiration, Creation

  • Dreams

  • Nature; specifically Nature vs. Man/Civilization/Cultivation

  • Lovers, Sexual Relationships

  • The Sacred

Frost at Midnight

• Written in 1798

• The babe in the poem is Coleridge's son Hartley

• Poem-specific Themes:

  • The parent-child relationship

  • Dreaming

  • Creation, Inspiration

  • City vs. Country Living

  • Nature

  • "Secret ministry"

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  Pictured: Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818