Biographia Literaria: Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Classic Books Company, 1834 - 351 頁

Despite the friendship and collaborations between Samuel Coleridge?and William Wordsworth, the pair were not completely compatible in their respective?literary visions. In his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge attempts to do?what Wordsworth did in Preface to the Lyrical Ballads: offer his perspective?on the value and nature of poetry. Throughout the piece, Coleridge draws?important distinctions between his poetic ideals and Wordsworth?s. One key?facet of Coleridge?s philosophy is his insistence on the necessity of?imagination which is more complex than many reader?s contemporary notions of?the imagination. Additionally, Coleridge establishes his view that good poetry?does not necessarily have to be written in "the language of men," as Wordsworth?suggested. For Coleridge, poetry should use diction that is lofty and more?beautiful than ordinary speech. Since its publication in 1817,?Biographia Literaria has become an?essential document in the study of English Romanticism.?

關於作者

Born in Ottery St. Mary, England, in 1772, Samuel Taylor Coleridge studied revolutionary ideas at Cambridge before leaving to enlist in the Dragoons. After his plans to start a communist society in the United States with his friend Robert Southey, later named poet laureate of England, were botched, Coleridge instead turned his attention to teaching and journalism in Bristol. Coleridge married Southey's sister-in-law Sara Fricker, and they moved to Nether Stowey, where they became close friends with William and Dorothy Wordsworth. From this friendship a new poetry emerged, one that focused on Neoclassic artificiality. In later years, their relationship became strained, partly due to Coleridge's moral collapse brought on by opium use, but more importantly because of his rejection of Wordworth's animistic views of nature. In 1809, Coleridge began a weekly paper, The Friend, and settled in London, writing and lecturing. In 1816, he published Kubla Kahn. Coleridge reported that he composed this brief fragment, considered by many to be one of the best poems ever written lyrically and metrically, while under the influence of opium, and that he mentally lost the remainder of the poem when he roused himself to answer an ill-timed knock at his door. Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and his sonnet Ozymandias are all respected as inventive and widely influential Romantic pieces. Coleridge's prose works, especially Biographia Literaria, were also broadly read in his day. Coleridge died in 1834.

書目資訊

• 書名: Biographia Literaria: Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions; The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge第 3 卷
• 作者: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• 出版者: Classic Books Company, 1834
• ISBN: 0742683656, 9780742683655
• 頁數: 351 頁