Comparison between Wordsworth and Coleridge PDF

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Comparison between Coleridge and Wordsworth - Romantic Age...

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Comparison between Wordsworth and Coleridge Wordsworth and Coleridge are the two most important poets of the first English romantic period. They worked together to create the collection “Lyrical Ballads”, and they have some different point of view about poetry, nature and imagination. Imagination: 1. Wordsworth believes that imagination is used to enrich simple ideas in tranquillity. Men has this faculties before the birth and they lost it growing up; 2. Coleridge divides it into primary and secondary, and it is the capacity of perceive the world around us (common to all people) and then the capacity of order those memories and enrich them with supernatural. Nature: 1. Wordsworth feels nature as full of life, as it would be a part of us, in order to a Pantheistic vision; nature is opposed to town, it is a source of feelings and it is pervaded by an active force; 2. Coleridge, instead, sees the nature as the One Life (a divine power), and all his description of landscapes or natural elements, are endowed with a deeper symbolic meaning. Poetry: 1. Wordsworth says the poetry is a spontaneous expression of feelings; it is “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. The poet takes inspiration from rustic life, and then, he combines the memory of those emotions, with the use of imagination. 2. Coleridge believes that poetry is a product of unconscious and it creates a kind of ecstasy, reproduced with the use of memory and the adding of supernatural elements.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devonshire in 1722. He went to Cambridge but he never graduated. He was influenced by French Revolution ideals which made him an enthusiastic republican. In 1797 he met the poet William Wordsworth and they started an important collaboration: they published the Lyrical Ballads, a collection of ballads which had a preface written by Wordsworth that is considered the Manifesto of English Romanticism, it included Coleridge's masterpiece, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). He began a literary and journalistic career, the lectures he gave on Shakespeare laid the foundations of Shakespearean criticism. When he settled in London, he produced Biographia Literaria (1817), a classic text of literary criticism and autobiography. He explained the task which he and Wordsworth had set themselves in their Lyrical Ballads: in contrast to Wordsworth preoccupation with subjects taken from ordinary life, his task was to write about extraordinary events in a credible way. He died in 1834.

Imagination and fancy Like Blake and Wordsworth, Coleridge underlined the role of imagination; he made a distinction between 'primary' and 'secondary' imagination. The first one was a fusion of perception and the human individual power to produce images and the power to give chaos a certain order, the second one was something more, that is, the poetic faculty which gave shape to a given word and also built new words. Imagination was considered more important than fancy, that was the changing some details into something else, so fancy enabled the poet to blend various features into beautiful images.

Coleridge’s view of nature Coleridge's view of nature was different from Wordsworth's one: he didn't regard nature as a moral guide or a source of happiness.

His Christian faith didn't let him identify nature with God, the form of pantheism Wordsworth adopted, instead. He saw nature and the material world as the projection of the real world of ideas, so the poet believed that natural images had abstract meanings and he used them in some of his poems.

Wordsworth and Coleridge - comparison Wordsworth and Coleridge worked together to create the collection “Lyrical Ballads”, it shows the taste for the Middle Ages that was present during the Romantic Age, and they have some different points of view about imagination, nature and poetry. Imagination: Wordsworth believes that imagination is used to beautify simple ideas in tranquillity (recollection in tranquillity); Coleridge divides it into primary and secondary, the first one was a fusion of perception and the human individual power to produce images and the power to give chaos a certain order, the second one was the poetic faculty which gave shape to a given word and also built new words. Imagination was considered more important than fancy, that was the changing some details into something else, so fancy enabled the poet to blend various features into beautiful images. Nature: Wordsworth feels nature as full of life, as it was a part of us (Pantheistic vision); nature is opposed to town, it is a source of feelings and it is pervaded by an active force; Coleridge, instead, sees nature as the projection of the real world of ideas, so the he believed that natural images had abstract meanings and he used them in some of his poems. Poetry: Wordsworth says the poetry is a spontaneous expression of feelings; it is ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. The poet combines the memory of emotions with the use of imagination (kindred emotion). Coleridge believes that poetry creates a kind of ecstasy, reproduced with the use of memory and the adding of supernatural elements....