Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Friedrich Schlegel, a German poet, defined romanticism as, “literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form”. Romanticism was a movement in literature that was popular during the 18th century that primarily focused on the individual through imagination, freedom and emotion; feeling was valued over emotion. Edgar Allen Poe and Longfellow are two well-known writers who incorporated romanticism in their works. The romanticism traits of imagination and awe of nature are depicted in…

Coleridge allegory, Ancient Rime of the Mariner, explores religion in this story through integrated Christian motifs .The story tells of a man on a voyage who through an impulsive and heinous act changes the course of his life. Throughout the plot, the mariner experiences an internal struggle regarding the crime he committed, killing an Albatross which was perceived as a good omen. In order to gain redemption, take responsibility and understand the consequences of his actions. The mariner’s…

19th-century Romanticism was a literary, artistic, and intellectual movement characterized by its emphasis on emotion, individualism, and the love of life. The Romantic hero is a literary archetype that serves as a personification of these ideals. The protagonist of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield, is a prime example of this archetype. Throughout the book Holden is strongly portrayed as an isolated individual, caring more for his own personal views than the paradigm.…

Decades after the first publication of Mary Shelly’s revolutionary novel, Frankenstein, it still influences modern novelists and has even infiltrated our pop culture. Many authors have pulled upon her iconic book and have incorporated this memorable story into their own. These authors created literary connections between their work and Shelly’s to enhance their writing and Mary Shelly is no stranger to this common practice of intertextuality. Throughout her own science-fiction novel, she pulls…

has many symbols in the story, the most prominent being the Christian symbolism, especially with what the mariner does to the albatross and how it affects the seafarers and their journey. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is different from many of Coleridge 's works, especially with the archaic language, length, and the strange moral in the story. The story begins with a simple, unnamed man who is going to a wedding before the Mariner caught his arm and started rambling about how there was a ship.…

Piercing as the music described in it, the poem “A Musical Instrument” investigates the concepts of human nature and growth through the use of imagery, symbolism, and various literary devices. At the heart of the poem, Browning explores the need for humans to use their beastly nature to create a force greater than themselves in order to achieve growth. The impact of the actions of a seemingly indifferent, careless god on an unassuming reed creates a dichotomy throughout the poem, one that is…

CPE Bach’s Fantasia in F Sharp Minor and the 18th Century Sublime This is going to be an essay about how CPE Bach’s Fantasia in F Sharp Minor could relate to some of the 18th century ideas of the sublime. In the eighteenth century, there were a lot of differing ideas as to what, exactly, the sublime entailed. I shall mostly be concerning myself with those of Edmund Burke, as written in “A Philosophical Inquiry Into The Origin Of Our Ideas Of The Sublime And Beautiful”, though many of the other…

During a session in the House of Commons during the 1930s, Winston Churchill remarked to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin that “history will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” The idea of history being written by the victors has existed for centuries, with original phrase attributed variously to figures ranging from Niccolò Machiavelli to Walter Benjamin to Napoleon Bonaparte. Historical revisionism—history rewritten—is a theme that is discussed in John Gardner’s Grendel in the form of the…

W.B. Yeats’ Opinion of War W.B. Yeats was an Irish poet during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. He wrote following the belief of “spiritus mundi”, the spirit of the universe and the collective unconscious or memory, which influences him to write around different mythologies, despite being a Christian. “Spiritus Mundi” leads to two of the works that reflect his opinion regarding war and conquest. Through these two works, “Leda and the Swan” and “The Second Coming,” Yeats’ opinion of war as a…

The poem “Blackberry Picking" is written by Seamus Heaney and carries the overall message of how to enjoy the evolution of life before it is corrupted by death. Seamus Heaney is trying to convey this message by describing the life cycle of berries. “At first, just one, a glossy purple clot among others, red, green, hard as a knot.” In this line, the author uses figurative language to ignite reader’s memories and senses of the beauty and excitement of youth. By rhyming “clot” and “knot” Heaney…