Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Ideas About the Poet, Poem, and Imagination

Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Ideas About the Poet, Poem, and Imagination

     Romanticism is an intellectual and literary movement that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century in England and it directed the people’s interests to the pastoral life, nature, imagination, sentiments, freedom, spontaneity, simplicity, and individualism. The way to this movement was paved by William Blake’s literary works and poems in which he rebelled against the restrictions of church and the manacles of mind. The first appearance of the literary side of this movement accompanied the publish of the first edition of the “Lyrical Ballads” in 1798 which was written by the two famous Romantic poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge, and included the two poets’ collection of poems. Despite their friendship and despite the fact that they both participate in writing the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge hadn’t agreed on some points related to the concept of poetry. Therefore, in this essay the similarities and the differences between Wordsworth and Coleridge’s ideas and beliefs about the poet, poem, and imagination will be discussed.

    The first thing to talk about is the similarities and differences between the two poets according to the definition of the poet and what is related to this concept. In the Preface of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth, on one hand, defined the poet as “He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind.” On the other hand, Coleridge in the “Biographia Literaria” defined the poet as the following “The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination.” From these two definitions, we can find that Wordsworth emphasized on the characteristics that should be found in the poet that is to be a common man blessed with sensibility, tenderness, knowledge, and comprehensive soul while Coleridge focused on the sense of unity that the poet spread through his imagination. Another difference between the two poets opinions about the poet is that Wordsworth believed that the great poet is a teacher while Coleridge believed that “No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.” An important point I can here refer to is that Wordsworth supposed that the poet see the people and the objects around them as interactive with each other and he focused on the immediate effect that the objects project on those people. So the poet’s job for him is to see the interaction between man and nature and to reflect on it in his poems, while Coleridge sees that the duty of the poet is to select the most dignified as well as "The gayest, happiest attitude of things."

    The romantic poem, its subject, and its object was a matter of concern to the two poets. Wordsworth defined the poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” while Coleridge defined the poem as “that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.” The difference between the two definitions is that Wordsworth’s concern was the powerful feelings about specific incident that the poet recalls in the time of serenity while Coleridge’s concern was the effect of the poem on the receiver on the moment of receiving it. According to the subject of the poem, Wordsworth mentioned that it is the common life’s incidents in which common man language is used avoiding poetic diction which, as he assumed, makes the language very far away from the language of the common man. Coleridge, on the contrary, used the poetic diction and lofty language while talking about the supernatural persons or characters, so the difference is that Wordsworth defamiliarized the familiar and Coleridge familiarized the unfamiliar. The two poets’ beliefs diverged about the object or end of poetry, since Wordsworth asserted that the pleasure is the end of any poem while Coleridge said that the pleasure can result from the ultimate end but it is not necessarily to be the ultimate end and the end for him is the truth whether it is intellectual or moral. An important thing to mention here is the importance of metre and rhythm according to each of the poets. Wordsworth in his preface asserted that he accepts the language of prose and he said that a good poem is a good prose but he didn’t stick to the prose because of the importance of the metre for he thought that the metre or the rhythm makes the language much closer to the common man and will make people reread the literary work much more. Coleridge had almost the same ideas about the metre since he said that the pleasure could be achieved through the recurrence of sounds but he at the same time said “mere metre and rhyme, without imagination and emotion for their bases would not make poetry.”