Essay 2     Due Friday, 18 October

If I were you, I'd start basic.  If I didn't consult an encyclopedia to orient myself for the first essay, I'd certainly do so now.  You can access Britannica via Reference in Centenary's Super Surf.  Next, I might consult a longer article on Coleridge in a reference work such as the Dictionary of Literary Biography, which is accessible--along with other useful reference works--via the Literature Resource Center.  In Super Surf, clink on English.  I might also read the introduction to Coleridge in an anthology such as The Norton Anthology of English Literature.  An anthology only of Coleridge's poems, such as Richard Holmes's Penguin Selected Poems, might have a cogent introduction.  Being familiar with at least one of Coleridge's poems, I would be better able than otherwise to glean something useful from this material.  As I read it, I'd make note of any identifying characteristics of Coleridge's poetry, especially those that fit "Kubla Khan."

Of course I'd discover quickly that Coleridge wrote many poems that don't resemble "Kubla Khan."  I might want to classify those poems--as "conversation poems," for instance--and tell what they are like.  The contrast would make all the more meaningful for my audience my later description of the poems typified by "Kubla Khan."  For instance, if I had at hand Holmes's anthology, I'd discover that it is possible to read the poetry for its "strong and immediate autobiographical quality" and Holmes understands Coleridge's conversation poems, with their "intimate, blank-verse . . . line," as central to an autobiographical emphasis (xv).  As for the tone and mood of these poems, Holmes writes of their "tender, low-key meditative style . . . , with their quiet English radiance of sacred pastoral" (xvii).  I might provide the title of two of the most famous of these poems.

Knowing that "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is no less famous than "Kubla Khan," I'd make special note of Holmes's characterization of Coleridge's ballads.  (See the long passage in the middle of page xvii.)  And here it might occur to me that the references to "Romantic archetypes of disaster and possession" and the poet's "interest in symbolic, transcendental and non-rational experiences" apply no less well to "Kubla Khan," a "visionary fragment," than to ballads such as "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

I would then satisfy myself by rereading "Kubla Khan" of the pertinence to it of Holmes's assertion about the "new Romantic theory of poetry and the imagination" that Coleridge came to develop--a theory, as Holmes puts it, that privileged "passionate expression, intensity of subjective conception, and organic unity of thought and feeling" (xviii).  (If I didn't understand those terms, I'd consult my professor.)  Similarly, I'd consider his assertion that "[w]hat Coleridge did as a poet was to make [the] familiar world seem suddenly strange and perilous" (xix).  In this regard, it would interest me to learn from Holmes's note on "Kubla Khan" that surprisingly "[t]he paradisial landscape [in the poem] has strong local echoes of the Quantock region" in Somerset, where Coleridge was living.

Having made lots of notes, I'd then try to compose coherent paragraphs.  I might want to conclude my essay with specific observations about "Kubla Khan" as a poem that no one but Coleridge could have written.  I would then take stock of the whole and compose an introductory overview.  Finally, I would scrutinize the essay for one idea that ran through it--with the expectation of finding a thesis.

>Calendar>