Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works

"Yes, my second choice is Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’. That might seem controversial to those who have fond memories of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ or ‘Kubla Khan’. Both are great Romantic poems, but I chose ‘Frost at Midnight’, first, because I simply love it, and because it is so radically modern as a poetical self-portrait. Also, the poem is in close conversation with Wordsworth, with whom Coleridge was in a total mind-meld in their formative years. As in ‘Resolution and Independence’, nothing actually happens . I ask my students to imagine filming these poems. For ‘Frost at Midnight’, we would require only a single shot: a young father sitting up late by the fire, with his little baby boy sleeping beside him. That’s it. But what’s happening in Coleridge’s mind would fill a novel of Proustian dimensions. A flicker of blue flame in the fire reminds him of when he was a lonely, wretched schoolboy in London, watching the fire in the classroom and hoping for a visitor from home. He then remembers himself , as that earlier schoolboy self, remembering his childhood, and the reader is taken further back in the poet’s past, to one happy day of the Fair in his hometown. For the Romantic poets, it’s all about childhood. The child is father of the man, said Wordsworth, a statement with which we would all automatically agree today, but which in 1800 was just poppycock. The poem ends with Coleridge’s own anxious hopes that his little baby, Hartley, will have a happier life being brought up in the wild countryside of the Lake District, a student of nature. Sadly, Hartley’s life turned out as miserable as his father’s, which adds some poignancy for us to the buoyant conclusion. Nothing beats Coleridge’s opening lines for Romantic mood-setting: The frost performs its secret ministry Unhelped by any wind. ‘Nature’ and ‘power’ are words that continually come up when we talk about the Romantics. The Romantic poets looked for power in themselves — the power of imagination, the power to write — and also in the world. The majesty and dynamism of the natural world — be it the sea, a storm over a mountain, or here the invisible action of frost — fascinated the Romantics as images of a power with which they might connect. Poets had extolled natural beauty before, but the stakes were higher for the Romantic poets, who were writing in the midst of a massive demographic shift from the country to the city at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Cities were alienating to them, while England’s ‘green and pleasant land’ seemed to be slipping away — so their poems have a kind of weird nostalgia about them, an elegiac desperation. They were the first environmentalists."