From todays Writers Almanac (10/21): Its the birthday of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born in Ottery St. Mary, England (1772). He was the youngest of 14 children, precocious and introverted. He studied at Cambridge, but he struggled there, and dropped out to join the cavalry. He did as poorly as a soldier as he had as a student, and his brothers ended up getting him discharged by reason of insanity. At Cambridge, Coleridge struck up an intense friendship with the poet Robert Southey, and the two men devised a plan to move to Pennsylvania and start a utopian community. Marriage was key to this utopia, so when Southey got engaged, Coleridge married the sister of Southeys fiancée, but they had a deeply unhappy marriage. Then Southey abandoned the utopia idea and decided to become a lawyer instead. Coleridge was devastated. He wrote to Southey: You have left a large void in my heart — I know no man big enough to fill it. Shortly after that, Coleridge made a pilgrimage to visit the poet William Wordsworth. The Wordsworths were outside gardening, and they looked up to see an excited figure jump over their fence and literally run toward them through the vegetables. Coleridge and Wordsworth became close friends, and both families moved to the village of Grasmere to be near each other. The two men went for daily walks over the hills, discussing poetry, and together they wrote the book Lyrical Ballads (1798),which included Wordsworths Tintern Abbey and Coleridges Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Between the fall of 1797 and the spring of 1798, a period when he saw Wordsworth daily and smoked a lot of opium, Coleridge wrote his most famous poems: Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel, and Frost at Midnight. He said, A great poet [...] must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent desert, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an enemy upon the leaves that strew the forest, the touch of a blind man feeling the face of a darling child. And, I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry: that is, Prose — words in their best order; Poetry — the best words in the best order. https://youtube/watch?v=GzyI6B745BI
Posted on: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 11:21:39 +0000
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