Politics and Religion

The Poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In this course, we think about the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, focusing in particular in the literary and historical background of this poems of the 1790s. In the first half of the course, we think about Coleridge’s religious views and how these impacted his views on politics and nature in poems such as ‘This Lime-tree Bower my Prison’, before moving on in the second half to explore Coleridge’s interest in the mind, imagination, and consciousness in poems such as ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Kubla Khan’, and ‘Dejection: An Ode’

Politics and Religion

In this module, we think about Coleridge’s political and religious views and the impact they had on his poetry. In particular, we think about Coleridge’s attitude to the French Revolution (an event that happened when he was a young man) as well as his highly idiosyncratic version of Christianity, which emphasized fraternity and equality within the created world