| Samuel Taylor Coleridge perhaps took his
revolutionary ideals to an extreme when he spoke directly to a quadruped
in "To A Young Ass" by saying, "I hail thee BROTHER." Coleridge's poetry
and prose writings, however, are pervaded by a sense that and understanding
of the natural world is a key to human happiness and wisdom. At the same
time, "nature" in Coleridge can be terrifying, but never quite as terrifying
as the human mind. When asked why he attended so many public lectures on
chemistry in London, he said, "To improve my stock of metaphors." Few poets
could claim as detailed or as wide an understanding of the scientific tenor
of their times as Coleridge. He corresponded regularly with Humphry Davy,
electrochemist and discoverer of nitrous oxide (laughing gas). Coleridge's
polymathic writings reveal familiarity with Newton's mechanics, Herschel's
astronomy, Priestley's
Opticks, Bartram's
natural history, and Erasmus
Darwin's botany, among many other scientific advances of his day. "Nature"
for Coleridge, as for Wordsworth,
was a complex and sometimes contradictory category. "The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner" is perhaps the greatest Romantic statement about the consequences
of psychic separation of an isolated individual from the natural
world. At the same time, a poem like "To Nature" suggests just how much
of our idea of "nature" may be constructed within our own mind:
It may indeed be phantasy,
when I
For Coleridge, poetry, the human mind, and the natural world are often linked as part of that "one Life within us and abroad," a force that can connect the apparently disparate aspects of reality into a unity perceived by the creative intellect. Of course, such a radical idea has as many consequences for the science of Coleridge's time as for poetry: "And what if all of animated nature / Be but organic harps diversely framed" ("The Eolian Harp"). Here he is, writing to Joseph Cottle in 1797 about his plans to write an epic, a project that will require that he become as much a natural scientist as a poet: I should not think of devoting less than 20 years to an Epic Poem. Ten to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science. I would be a tolerable Mathematician, I would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine--then the mind of man--then the minds of men--in all Travels, Voyages and Histories. Coleridge's poetry and prose writings are shot through with images drawn from just such widespread reading and study. At times he seems to doubt in the unifying efficacy of the the natural world when confronted with the human mind's imagining: "I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. / O Lady! we receive but what we give, / And in our life alone does nature live" ("Dejection: An Ode"), but he is also a poet and thinker who provides an entire generation with new ways of thinking about the wonders and strangeness of the natural world. |
| Anima
Poetae
(Coleridge comments on plants, animals, and natural history)
William Bartram's imagery Water snakes |