S. T. Coleridge’ s Frost at Midnight: Structure and Ideas
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Frost at Midnight epitomizes the change that gradually occured in English poetry and world-view after the Augustan Age. The Augustan poets strove to express what is universal in man, the Nature of man as it was thought to have always existed. This often resulted in the writing of vague social poetry. The Romantic poem Frost at Midnight, on the other hand, emphasizes the uniqueness and concreteness of the individual experience. The speaker of the poem can almost be identified with the poet himself, making the poem a personal, nearly confessional, utterance. Although when writing the poem in 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was still under the influence of the empirical, and hence anti-idealistic and anti-Romantic, associationism of John Locke and David Hartley – evident in the poem’s structure, the poet managed, more or less consciously, to incorporate into the poem many traits of the Romantic Weltanschauung. Alongside the stress on individual experience, we can observe the Romantic divinization of nature, alienation from and disgust with urban existence, mention of folklore and local custom, cognition by illumination and introspection and, last but not least, the optimistic belief i
Some topics in this essay:
Frost Midnight, Robinson Crusoe, Weltanschauung Alongside, William Blake, David Hartley, God Utters, John Locke, God Coleridge, Taylor Coleridge, Eden Living, frost midnight, individual experience, phenomenological field, john locke, samuel taylor, samuel taylor coleridge, associated speaker’s, powerful imagination, divinization nature, sensory stimuli, taylor coleridge, poem frost midnight, speaker’s phenomenological field,
Join now to see the rest of the essay!
Approximate Word count = 1594
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
|
Example Essays Home
