When Coleridge died in 1834, the old friends had been distant for some time.
Both men experienced troubled family lives stemming from extramarital love, and Coleridge would develop an opium addiction causing increasing instability. Ultimately, differing personalities and personal circumstances would keep the poets from working together again-although they remained in contact all their lives. Nonetheless, two great poetic masterpieces emerged from this volume: Wordsworth’s “ The Thorn” and Coleridge’s famed “ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
They frequently disagreed on both style and subject matter, ultimately abandoning certain poems when they could not find a consensus as to how best to express certain concepts. However, by the time they began their poetic collaboration, they had each developed their own political ideas and definition of human nature-a fact that would cause many artistic differences. During their youth, both men shared a passion for the democratic ideals of the French Revolution. Looking to their natural environment for inspiration, their emotionally charged poems focused on the purity, innocence, and beauty found in nature-ideals that were jeopardized more and more by society. These “Lake Poets,” as they would be called, went on to change the course of English literature with their poetic experimentation. Their mutual friend, Robert Southey, also worked with them at times. Eventually, their exchanges resulted in both the first and second editions of Lyrical Ballads. Through their frequent discussions, the poets influenced, inspired, and even criticized each other’s work. The period that ensued was a tremendously fruitful one for both men. Their connection was so strong from the start that Coleridge decided to move to Grasmere to live closer to his new poet friend. Wordsworth and Coleridge met by chance in Somerset, England, in 1795. While the works of both poets have stood the test of time, their enduring friendship during a time of artistic revolution, social change, and personal conflict is just as fascinating as any poem either man ever wrote. This distinction project explores two facets of the relationship.William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are often considered driving forces behind the English Romantic movement. The intellectual background of English Romanticism as we know it today is heavily influenced, if not created, by Spinoza.
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Especially in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, there is a clear importance put on the effect of nature on human emotions and the absence of free will: in “Tintern Abbey,” for example, Wordsworth describes how “a motion and a spirit.rolls through all things” and in “The Eolian Harp,” Coleridge writes of the “one life within us and abroad.” Similarly, Spinoza, in The Ethics, claims that there is only one “sole substance”. Spinoza, through his philosophical legacy, also made way for the Romantic Movement to spread to England through the pantheism controversy of 1785 and the rise of German romanticism. Though Spinoza’s life preceded English Romanticism by more than a century, his concept of a pantheistic universe and the influence of nature on the life of an individual are prevalent in English Romanticism.
This distinction project examines the indirect influence of the thinking of Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza on the English poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In so doing, my project will demonstrate that two very different approaches to viewing the world - mathematically or through poetry - can lead to surprisingly similar insights. This is a key part of my project - connecting these two kinds of writing that seem so far apart, but in reality, are remarkably similar. Not many people try to compare a philosopher like Spinoza, who structured his arguments mathematically, to the flowery poetry of the English romantics.
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