Coleridge's Melancholia

Coleridge's Melancholia PDF Author: Eric G. Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813027753
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
This lively intellectual biography of the second half of Coleridge's life argues that the poet, in his mature work, reveals a brilliant though troubled genius for conveying the ambiguities of psychological limbo. Asserting that the later poetry is the key element of Coleridge's career, Eric G. Wilson proposes that this period of work reflects the poet's ability to imagine and dissect both sides of life's grand antagonisms--many and one, body and soul, fact and dream, flux and permanence. Trapped in a vague region between equally troubled and opposite states, the older Coleridge felt chronically incomplete, confused, dissatisfied. Yet, Wilson writes, this melancholy state brought him to the curious frontier where one achieves double vision, the capacity to perceive two sides of the world at once. Although this double refraction kept Coleridge from finding peace, Wilson contends that the psychic limbo became a muse--an inspiration to complete works on the impossibility of completion. In revealing the virtues of Coleridge's gloom, Wilson reassesses the trajectory of Coleridge's poetic career and discovers affinities between Coleridge and later Romantics who often criticized him. As a psychologist of limbo, Coleridge tests the spirit of Byron's meditations on the ruins of history and of Keats' broodings over the rifts between fact and fantasy. Wilson also finds a new place for Coleridge in the history of ideas, positioning him as an anxious precursor of Kierkegaard's dread and the abyss of Nietzsche, and offers a well-structured analysis of Coleridge's intellectual development in his later years. Though committed to Coleridge's poetry, this book is finally a philosophical meditation on the virtues of melancholy--its particular kind of creativity as well as its psychological depths. Exploring a tortured, luminous mind, Coleridge's Melancholia offers a primer on the search for the ancient ideal of soul.

Coleridge's Melancholia

Coleridge's Melancholia PDF Author: Eric G. Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813027753
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book

Book Description
This lively intellectual biography of the second half of Coleridge's life argues that the poet, in his mature work, reveals a brilliant though troubled genius for conveying the ambiguities of psychological limbo. Asserting that the later poetry is the key element of Coleridge's career, Eric G. Wilson proposes that this period of work reflects the poet's ability to imagine and dissect both sides of life's grand antagonisms--many and one, body and soul, fact and dream, flux and permanence. Trapped in a vague region between equally troubled and opposite states, the older Coleridge felt chronically incomplete, confused, dissatisfied. Yet, Wilson writes, this melancholy state brought him to the curious frontier where one achieves double vision, the capacity to perceive two sides of the world at once. Although this double refraction kept Coleridge from finding peace, Wilson contends that the psychic limbo became a muse--an inspiration to complete works on the impossibility of completion. In revealing the virtues of Coleridge's gloom, Wilson reassesses the trajectory of Coleridge's poetic career and discovers affinities between Coleridge and later Romantics who often criticized him. As a psychologist of limbo, Coleridge tests the spirit of Byron's meditations on the ruins of history and of Keats' broodings over the rifts between fact and fantasy. Wilson also finds a new place for Coleridge in the history of ideas, positioning him as an anxious precursor of Kierkegaard's dread and the abyss of Nietzsche, and offers a well-structured analysis of Coleridge's intellectual development in his later years. Though committed to Coleridge's poetry, this book is finally a philosophical meditation on the virtues of melancholy--its particular kind of creativity as well as its psychological depths. Exploring a tortured, luminous mind, Coleridge's Melancholia offers a primer on the search for the ancient ideal of soul.

The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge PDF Author: Frederick Burwick
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191651095
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 784

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Book Description
A practical and comprehensive reference work, the Oxford Handbook provides the best single-volume source of original scholarship on all aspects of Coleridge's diverse writings. Thirty-seven chapters, bringing together the wisdome of experts from across the world, present an authoritative, in-depth, and up-to-date assessment of a major author of British Romanticism. The book is divided into sections on Biography, Prose Works, Poetic Works, Sources and Influences, and Reception. The Coleridge scholar today has ready access to a range of materials previously available only in library archives on both sides of the Atlantic. The Bollingen edition, of the Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, forty years in production was completed in 2002. The Coleridge Notebooks (1957-2002) were also produced during this same period, five volumes of text with an additional five companion volumes of notes. The Clarendon Press of Oxford published the letters in six volumes (1956-1971). To take full advantage of the convenient access and new insight provided by these volumes, the Oxford Handbook examines the entire range and complexity of Coleridge's career. It analyzes the many aspects of Coleridge's literary, critical, philosophical, and theological pursuits, and it furnishes both students and advanced scholars with the proper tools for assimilating and illuminating Coleridge's rich and varied accomplishments, as well as offering an authoritative guide to the most up-to-date thinking about his achievements.

Coleridge's Dejection Ode

Coleridge's Dejection Ode PDF Author: J.C.C. Mays
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 303004131X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Coleridge's Dejection Ode completes J.C.C. Mays’ analysis of Coleridge’s poetry, following Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner (Palgrave 2016) and Coleridge’s Experimental Poetics (Palgrave 2013). "Dejection: An Ode" stands alone in Coleridge's oeuvre: written at a time of personal crisis, it reaches far back and deeply into his thinking in an attempt to find a poematic solution to ideas and problems he had mulled over for a long time. Mays reveals how the poem also marks the opening of the second half of Coleridge's career as both poet and thinker. In three central chapters Mays examines the new style that evolved in the process of writing the Ode: the technical means of metrics, rhyme and grammar; language and allusion; and symbol and structure. He recounts the complex, sometimes controversial critical history of the Ode, and suggests an editorial solution to the problem created by the Letter to Sara Hutchinson; re-evaluates the position of Wordsworth in the poem apropos the political statement it makes; clarifies the distinction between the views on Imagination expressed and those contained in Biographia Literaria; and traces the links of the concept "dejection" as it underpins Coleridge's late poems.

Against Happiness

Against Happiness PDF Author: Eric G. Wilson
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429944218
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Americans are addicted to happiness. When we're not popping pills, we leaf through scientific studies that take for granted our quest for happiness, or read self-help books by everyone from armchair philosophers and clinical psychologists to the Dalai Lama on how to achieve a trouble-free life: Stumbling on Happiness; Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment; The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. The titles themselves draw a stark portrait of the war on melancholy. More than any other generation, Americans of today believe in the transformative power of positive thinking. But who says we're supposed to be happy? Where does it say that in the Bible, or in the Constitution? In Against Happiness, the scholar Eric G. Wilson argues that melancholia is necessary to any thriving culture, that it is the muse of great literature, painting, music, and innovation—and that it is the force underlying original insights. Francisco Goya, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, and Abraham Lincoln were all confirmed melancholics. So enough Prozac-ing of our brains. Let's embrace our depressive sides as the wellspring of creativity. What most people take for contentment, Wilson argues, is living death, and what the majority takes for depression is a vital force. In Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, Wilson suggests it would be better to relish the blues that make humans people.

Platonic Coleridge

Platonic Coleridge PDF Author: James Vigus
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351194410
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
"The ambivalent curiosity of the young poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) towards Plato - 'but I love Plato - his dear gorgeous nonsense!' - soon developed into a philosophical project, and the mature Coleridge proclaimed himself a reviver of Plato's unwritten or esoteric 'systems'. James Vigus's study traces Coleridge's discovery of a Plato marginalised in the universities, and examines his use of German sources on the 'divine philosopher', and his Platonic interpretation of Kant's epistemology. It compares Coleridge's figurations of poetic inspiration with models in the Platonic dialogues, and investigates whether Coleridge's esoteric 'system' of philosophy ultimately fulfilled the Republic's notorious banishment of poetry."

Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form

Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form PDF Author: Ewan James Jones
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107068444
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
This book argues that Coleridge's most important philosophical ideas were expressed not through theoretical argument but through his poems.

Modernist Melancholia

Modernist Melancholia PDF Author: Anne Enderwitz
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137444320
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Modernist Melancholia explores modernism's melancholic roots through the detailed discussion of writings by Freud, Conrad and Ford. Melancholia ties modernism to the 19th-century obsession with loss and continuity and, at the same time, constitutes a formative moment in the history of 20th-century literature, modern subjectivity and critical theory

The Melancholy Android

The Melancholy Android PDF Author: Eric G. Wilson
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791481328
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Explores the cultural significance of androids.

The Romantic Poets

The Romantic Poets PDF Author: Uttara Natarajan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470766352
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This welcome addition to the Blackwell Guides to Criticism series provides students with an invaluable survey of the critical reception of the Romantic poets. Guides readers through the wealth of critical material available on the Romantic poets and directs them to the most influential readings Presents key critical texts on each of the major Romantic poets – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats – as well as on poets of more marginal canonical standing Cross-referencing between the different sections highlights continuities and counterpoints

Coleridge, Language and the Sublime

Coleridge, Language and the Sublime PDF Author: C. Stokes
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230295061
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Traversing the themes of language, terror and representation, this is the first study to engage Coleridge through the sublime, showing him to have a compelling position in an ongoing conversation about finitude. Drawing on close readings of both his poetry and prose, it depicts Coleridge as a thinker of 'the limit' with contemporary force.