SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the founder of the Romantic movement with William Wordsworth: they wrote together the Lyrical Ballads, which are the symbol of the Romantic period. Reported to Wordsworth, Coleridge has a different style and his attention falls to different particulars: he tries to extrapolate the metaphysical points of all the things he sees and lives with and to make the reader living good emotions thanks to the imagination that makes the author create strange and supernatural situations. The atmospheres that we can read in Coleridge are far away from the everyday reality: for example there are horrible and mysterious, but also fantastic and splendid and all this gives a dramatic characteristic and a sense of invisible presences. This is typically of the romantic sensitiveness, but Coleridge is able to go deep into it: he thinks that we all have inside us a receding and elusive mystery and a powerful and both horrid and ambiguous and that we find them in everyone and in every life.

After the enthusiasm and the impetus of the French Revolution, in Coleridge every disillusion turns itself over in a philosophical- metaphysical restlessness.

He says that there's a big difference between his poetical- theories and Wordsworth's ones: in particular he's convinced that his friend allows too much to the palpability of things. As a matter of fact, Coleridge goes over the Romanticism and operates a rigorous distinction between fantasy and imagination, using this one to give a dynamic to his poetry and to dissolve and re- create things; its power lead the variety shattered of the reality to the sharpness unifying of the poetic words. But Coleridge also thinks that things are symbols revealing of mysterious and elusive essences of the multivalent reality and this makes the typical sense of 'magic' of indefinite and unfinished.

KUBLA KHAN

In the summer of the year 1797, the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm- house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: 'Here in the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall'. Coleridge continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which times he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on businnes from Porlock, and detained be him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! Without the after restoration of the latter!

In the famous fragment that Coleridge subtitles 'a vision in a dream' , the elements of a 'precious' vision, like the 'stately pleasure- dome', the fantastic garden, all the splendour and sonority , like in Orient's images between Marco Polo, magic and romantic exoticism, recompose themselves with the quiet details' care. There's an absolute impalpability and also construction , magic and energy, symbolism and acute sense of the concrete detail.

Then all the charm

Is broken, all that phantom- world so fair

Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,

And each mis- shape['s] the other. Stay awhile,

Poor youth! Who scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes-

The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon

The visions will return! And lo, he stays,

And soon the fragments dim of lovely fprms

Come trembling back, unite, and now once more

The pool becomes a mirror.

Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, Coleridge has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him.

Kubla Khan is opened with the representation of the fantastic kingdom of Xanadu, where Kubla Khan built a residence of pleasure, over which impend some unknown dangers. Xanadu disappear right after the 1^st stanza, which isn't the prelude to a poetic narration, but one of the possibles ways to start a poetic composition; the next stanzas, modulated every in a different metrics, investigate the development of the poetry, with a collage of literary themes and codes (the demoniac lover, the Abyssinian girl, the sacred river Alph) and finish with the vision of the poet possessed by gods. It has been considered a Divine Comedy of the modern man, the trilogy goes around the only theme of the poetic creation as a sensorial representation of the individual experience, seen as the existential condition and as the put himself in front of it. The fact that this poem is uncompleted, isn't a sign of a shortage of the constituent part structure, but a sign of the (fragmentariety) of the 'inexpressible', a sort of flux of conscience that had been found in The road to Xanadu as the foundation of Coleridge's poetic world, built into a solid metric architecture, where the metaphorical exuberance is restrained with a intelligent selection of rhythms and words.

The exotic imagery and rhythmic chant of this poem have led many critics to conclude that it should be read as a 'meaningless reverie' and enjoyed merely for its vivid and sensuous qualities. An examination of the poem in the light of Coleridge's psychological and mythological interests, however, suggests that it has, after all, a complex structure of meaning and is basically a poem about the nature of human genius. The first two stanzas show the two sides of what Coleridge elsewhere calls 'commanding genius': its creative aspirations in time of peace as symbolized in the projected pleasure dome and gardens of the first stanza; and its destructive power in time of turbulence as symbolized in the wailing woman, the destructive fountain, and the voices prophesying war of the second stanza. In the final stanza the poet writes of a state of 'absolute genius' in which, if inspired by a visionary 'Abyssinian maid,' he would become endowed with the creative, divine power of a sun god--an Apollo or Osiris subduing all around him to harmony by the fascination of his spell.