Coleridge As a Romantic Poet

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Chief characteristics of Coleridge as a Romantic Poet “Lyrical Ballads” published in 1798 is a joint venture of Wordsworth and Coleridge which is a key to understand all the poetry of the Romantic Age including that of Coleridge. This joint adventure was taken by Wordsworth and Coleridge to find out a balance between the two extremes; the tendency to realism and the tendency to romance in their extreme forms. These two poets felt that English poetry needed first that romance should be saved and ennobled by the presence and the power of truth-truth moral and psychological, and secondly that naturalism (realism) without losing any of its fidelity to fact, should be saved and ennobled by the presence and power of imagination _ the light that never was, on sea or land. In this respect both the poets agreed to present two different kinds of poems. Coleridge chose such series of poems in which the incidents and agents were to be, in part at supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interest of affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturall accompany such situations, supposing them real. For the second kinds of poems that were mainly to be presented by Wordsworth were such poems in which the subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life. The characters and the incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves. In this idea originated the plan of the ‘Lyrical Ballada’. In this plan it was agreed that Coleridge’s endeavors should be directed to persons and charaters supernatural or at least romantic. However, such supernatural element should not be void of human interest and inward nature of man. It must contain the semblance of truth sufficient to procure of these shadows imagination that
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