Lyric Principles and Productivity: Intersecting Landscapes and the Culture of Coleridge`s Cottage Gardens = Lyric Principles and Productivity: Intersecting Landscapes and the Culture of Coleridge`s Cottage Gardens

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This essay suggests that Coleridge’s poems of poetic failure are often considered thematically, and perhaps narrowly, in terms of an intensely private genre in which a poet-speaker confronts a scene of personal crisis or transition and confesses lyrical impulses at the breakdown of his creative power. Take, for example, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “The Eolian Harp” and “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement.” Fascinated with the images of a poet-speaker secluding himself in an enclosed, embowered place, Coleridge presents the contained site as partly a lyrical and sublime space in which the effects of the fall of imagination could be reversed; but this essay argues that the genre assumes greater importance as it draws on the changing values of plants and places. The genre helps twenty-first century readers understand the Coleridgean tropes of containment and botanical analogies as an open, if stylized, question about the transitions in the cultural representation of rural Britain and vernacular landscapes in poetry. Highlighting the contrasting values of extravagant beauty and vast productivity, Coleridge’s scenic mode helps us rethink the conventional views of Coleridge’s blank verse lyric poems as a vehicle for a quintessential Romantic meditation on the content and interruption of the poetic vision itself.