Samuel Taylor Coleridge: riassunto in inglese

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE: RIASSUNTO IN INGLESE

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834).

Life and main works - Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devonshire in 1772. He soon displayed prodigious talents as a natural orator and later went to study in Cambridge. He was heavily influenced by French revolutionary ideals.
After the disillusionment with the French Revolution, he planned to establish a community in Pennsylvania under the name of “Pantisocracy”, where every economic activity was done in common and private ownership did not exist, in order to provide labour and peace. This project came to nothing in the end.
In 1794 Coleridge married Sarah Fricker.
In 1797 he met the poet William Wordsworth and settled in Somerset. Most of his best poetry belongs to these years:
- The rime of the ancient Mariner; his masterpiece, is concerned with the supernatural. It is the first poem of the collection Lyrical Ballads.
- Christabel; an unfinished poem, set in Middle Ages, about a young girl under a witch’s spell.
- Kubla Khan; again unfinished.

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COLERIDGE LIFE

In the winter of 1798-1799 Coleridge went to Germany with Wordsworth, after his return his political inclinations became conservative. In 1799 he joined Wordsworth and his sister in the Lake District. Coleridge fell in love with Sarah Hutchinson.
The lectures he gave on Shakespeare between 1808 and 1818 laid the foundations of Shakespearian criticism.
Finally he settled in London, where he produced Biographia Literaria (1817), a classic text of literary criticism and autobiography. Here he explained the dual task which he and Wordsworth had set themselves in the Lyrical Ballads.
He died in 1834.

Prose and poetic works - The output of Coleridge was relatively small; this was due to his notoriously insecure and inconstant character.
The small number of poems he wrote has become an essential part of English literary history.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: riassunto

COLERIDGE: IMMAGINAZIONE

Importance of imagination - Coleridge stressed the role of imagination. He distinguished between “primary” and “secondary” imagination.
He described “primary imagination” as a fusion of perception. It was also the power to give chaos a certain order. “Primary imagination” – joining the world of thought with the world of things.
“Secondary imagination” – dissolves, diffuses, in order to re-create. It was the poetic faculty, which not only gave a shape and order to a given world, but built new worlds.

The power of fancy - Imagination was more important than fancy, was based on the power of association of material and subject to the rational law of judgement.
To the elements of fancy Coleridge added the power of associating them into a new unity. In using the secondary imagination Coleridge believed the poet was free to rise above the 18th century conventions, in order to create something in the true sense of the world.