The failures and disappointments in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's family life affected his poetry in several significant ways. His inability to achieve lasting happiness as a son, brother, husband, and father contributed to his idealization of domestic love and to his dependence on surrogate brothers, sisters, and mothers. His childhood trauma and later domestic frustrations apparently led to a preoccupation with Cain themes and other familial conflicts; however, he was usually reluctant to present detailed examinations of such themes in his poetry, and in several of his narratives, disturbing parallels to his private disappointments may have been one cause of his surrender to his habitual tendency toward fragmentary compositions When Coleridge did not leave a work as a fragment, he often seems to have used other means of screening himself from distressing implications of fratricide and domestic turmoil; severely editing the text, portraying conflicts symbolically, masking characters' identities, manipulating contrasts between violence and supportive love, adopting a pose of religious righteousness, or leaving a work unpublished. In several early poems, he praises domestic heroes and contrasts the unity of God's family with protrayals of tyrants who destroy their victims' families. In the conversation poems he focuses selectively on the most rewarding aspects of his relationship with his wife, his son Hartley, and the Wordsworths. After the collapse of his marriage, he found that he had virtually nothing to communicate in poetry concerning his own family. Most of his love poems to Sara Hutchinson remained unpublished, while some of the published lyrics conceal her identity and speak of her as if she were his wife. 'Christabel,' 'The Wanderings of Cain,' and 'The Three Graves'--narratives that closely reflect Coleridge's domestic frustrations--remained fragments, while in 'The Ancient Mariner' he deals with fratricide symbolically instead of literally. He was able to complete the plays Osorio and Zapolya, but apparently only at the cost of de-emphasizing the potentially meaningful Cain themes and contrasting the villains with numerous other characters who essentially represent domestic virtue. Other plays, which would have treated domestic violence more directly, remained unwritten projects / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_23292 |
| Date | January 1985 |
| Contributors | Luis, Keith Alan (Author) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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