Coleridge

Summary

Dominique Pagani places Coleridge among the English Romantics, contemporaries of German Romanticism, and calls him a "Romantic of the North"1. He returns above all to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which he calls "the most beautiful poem there is"2. What he takes from it is the act of the old mariner who kills with a crossbow the white albatross, the bird that had freed the ship from the ice, and then the guilt that follows3. He sees in the albatross pierced by an arrow a return of the opposition between red and white, and in Coleridge a Romantic who is already nocturnal. He also uses the poem's frame, the young man so captivated by the tale that he forgets the wedding he was heading to, to distinguish the end from the goal4. He reads Dejection: An Ode as a poem of dejection, already spleen without its symptoms5. Finally, he links this poetry to the Industrial Revolution: in his view, landscape poetry develops further where industrialisation is most advanced67.

1. 1#9 Romantic irony and the Vinteuil sonata15 Jan 2021 · 9:17
2. 2#4.4 Angélique (by Nerval)15 Jan 2018 · 16:55
3. 3#6 Harnessed to confinitude26 Apr 2020 · 27:46
4. 4#1.4 Between crisis and war: philosophising?10 Dec 2015 · 14:38
5. 5#13 Mozart restored2 Feb 2021 · 41:18
6. 6What is to be done? 3/329 Jan 2016 · 1:10:15
7. 7#10.2 Dialectics of identity and difference6 Oct 2021 · 18:17

Summary produced automatically from 9 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.