Category: Poetry

“The dominant mode of ethical thinking in the Renaissance argued that the passions should be governed by reason to ensure good order in society.” A paradox exists in Renaissance ethics: passions – by definition, ‘barely controllable’ – should be controlled, and the success of a stable public sphere pivots on the control of one’s private…

Of all the English poets that comprise the Romantic period, George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), John Keats (1795-1821), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) stand as the quintessential masters of Romantic poetry. Their contributions to the aesthetics of versification, from which emerged “a concept of the poetic imagination that acted as a single unifying force within…

The philosophical concept of The Sublime, though typically hard to define due to its complex nature, is most often described as an object or a surrounding which evokes a feeling of profound awe when viewed. The key difference between the concept of The Sublime and the more straightforward one of ‘beauty’ is that The Sublime,…

It’s a common hope in the life of parents that their children will go on and live more successful lives. That their child will learn the lessons their parents taught them and the road their parents laid out for them to lead them to a more promising future. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Frost…

The poems “Marriage” by Marianne Moore and “Home Burial” by Robert Frost demonstrate a clear separation between men and women. Equality between genders is a controversial issue today, but truly began to arise during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s when Modern American poetry was also on the rise. In these poems the social expectations,…

Coleridge’s Poetry in “Conversation” Nothing about Samuel Coleridge’s “conversation” poems is conventionally conversational. These poems do not create a dialogue between two characters, but instead focus on an internal dialogue that Coleridge’s personas have with themselves. For Coleridge, conversation is a personal, individual action. In “Sonnet to the River Otter” and “Frost at Midnight” the…

”To account for life is one thing; to explain life another” – Coleridge (Norton p.596) One of the most easily definable of Coleridge’s Mariner’s losses is his loss of a concrete existence. Coleridge’s mariner exists in a in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. He is neither dead nor alive, his soul has been won…

With “The Visionary Hope,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge romanticizes the overpowering state of yearning without excluding the turmoil it causes in human life. Coleridge develops for the reader an almost picturesque cluster of emotional impulses and handicaps far from abstract, and obscure only in the question of their true source. The reader of “The Visionary Hope”…

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” considered by many scholars as the quintessential masterpiece of English Romantic poetry, the symbolic themes of mystery and the supernatural play a very crucial role in the poem’s overall effect which John Hill Spencer sees as Coleridge’s “attempt to understand the mystery surrounding the human soul…

How do we describe an emotion? Happiness, sadness, and fear, all simply words which we tie to certain “feelings,” observable by bodily functions — flushed cheeks, tears, goosebumps, the production and distribution of certain hormones. As humans our emotions manifest as art, but when the chosen medium is through language, how accurate are our descriptions…