An Exploration Of The Mysterious Elements In Coleridge's Poems

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was a great English romantic poet,whose poetry has exerted a crucial and widespread influence on European literature and literary criticism in the nineteenth century. His important works such as Christabel(1797-1801), The Rime of the Ancient Mariner(1798) and Kubla Khan(1798) have given a mysterious world with his imagination and poetic creation.Known as psychobiography, this method of analysis begins by amassing biographical data of author through biographies, personal letters, lectures, and any other document deemed related in some way to the author. Using these documents and the author's canon, the psychoanalytic critics believed they could theoretically construct the author's personality with all its idiosyncrasies, internal and external conflicts, and most importantly, neuroses. In turn, such a devised theory, they believed, could illuminate an author's individual works, giving rise to the latent content in the author's texts. By gaining an in-depth understanding of the author, these critics assumed that they would be better able to interpret an author's canon. In the 1950s, Psychoanalytic critics turned their attention away from psychobiography to character analysis, studying the various aspects of characters' minds found in an author's canon (Bressler, 1999:166).In this thesis, the author will put the former three main poems into study and try to have a detailed text analysis to explore the mysterious elements based on the close reading of New Criticism; then, to explore the mysterious elements in Coleridge's three main poems by combing the exact stanza, lastly, to analyze the subjective reasons, the profound social and cultural reasons by ways of psychobiography.This dissertation contains four chapters: Chapter One Introduction, in this chapter, the literature review about Coleridge and the research results about him both at home and abroad and the research methods of the text will be introduced. Chapter Two The mysterious elements in Christabel(1797-1801), The Rime of the Ancient Mariner(1798) Kubla khan(1798). In this chapter the author introduces Coleridge's creation of mystery poetry and shows a classification of the mysterious elements in Coleridge's poetic works to make the reader have a clear understanding of his poems: mysterious human beings, mysterious animals, mysterious numbers, mysterious spirits and mysterious events. Then the author will make an analysis of the imagery and simile of the mysterious elements: the old ancient mariner is just like a regretful Christian, and the Albatross is also like a real Christian who saved their fate and companied them all the time, but it is killed without any reason at last. The Albatross which has saved crew's lives and accompanied them was a simile of the son of the God. The cross of the Christ was hung around his neck by the Christian, the crew also handed the dead albatross around the ancient mariner's neck. It is the imagery of the animals that the reader can catch the profound meaning and the connotation of the texts.Chapter Three Reasons for the Mysterious elements in Coleridge's Three Main Works. In this chapter, by ways of analyzing Coleridge's personality and his theory of imagination and philosophy, the author tries to find the subjective reasons for the mysterious elements in his works. Almost every poet and writer may have experienced a lot of hardships all through their lives, Coleridge is no exception. Coleridge was lonely and melancholy when he was a little boy. He is always solitary and fancying all by himself. The life experiences make Coleridge a poet with the disposition of sensitivity, escapism and melancholy. Under the influence of his experiences and his disposition, Coleridge formed gradually his own theory of imagination and philosophy and created three representative poems with mystery, obscurity and beautifulness in his world of imagination. Imagining in loneliness and creating in imagination, he could achieve the sense of reality by combining the natural and supernatural, the ordinary and the extraordinary, what's more, the social background and the dominant cultural tendency are also very significant to the creation for a poet or a writer. So in this chapter, on one hand, Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) paved the theatrical way for Coleridge's mysterious poetry. The striking features of the gothic novels are that it takes the medieval castle, convent and ruins and the open country as the background, describing greatly the horror, the strangeness, the mystery, the violence, the wicked , the incest-committing and the murder of an event and irrational content, during which the ghost and some supernatural things will appear. When reading Coleridge's poems, the influence of the gothic novel is evident. On the other hand, the age Coleridge found him in is turbulent, profound economic and social changes were under way. The Industrial Revolution had begun in the mid-eighteenth century, and British were experiencing a transition from an agricultural society to an industrial one. The French Bourgeois Revolution in 1789 destroyed the French feudal system and shook the whole European feudal reign. Under the influence of the revolution, many countries surged the bourgeois democratic movement and national liberation movement. Under such kind of social background, the gothic novel became the main ways for the romantic poets to express their worries and panic. The mystery poetry is the response to the social order, religion and the perplexity and confusion of the economy.In Chapter Four, from the analysis of the previous chapters, the author will draw the conclusion naturally, that is to say, Coleridge, as one of the romantic poets, his creation of mystery poetry is not accidental, Coleridge's personality of sensitivity, melancholy and escapism, the age and social surroundings, the prevailing literary genre are the combining influence on Coleridge's creation of mysterious poems. The mysterious elements in his representative poems contain profound cultural meanings and images: the culture of Christian, the gothic novel, the French Revolution, the Jesus-like albatross, the water snake, the mysterious numbers, etc. In recent years, the research concerning Coleridge and his poems has made a great progress. This dissertation tries to take the poems as model to analyze the mysterious elements in Coleridge's poems as well as exploration of the reasons. Now the study of Coleridge and his poems is stepping into a new stage, I'm sure that the articles about him and his poems will be much more abundant in the future.