Coleridge

On a first and entirely non-literary note, Clevedon is Junction 20 of the M5 motorway and I live in Weston-super-Mare, which is Junction 21 and therefore only ten minutes away, so I’m predisposed to like The Eolian Harp.

The first thought I had when reading The Eolian Harp and This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison was that Coleridge loved nature and the landscapes he was describing and McKusick’s essay supports this, “to elucidate, and perhaps to defamiliarize, the ways in which crucial aspects of his poetic language emerge from his perceptual and affective engagement with the local environment.” In other words, Coleridge is often associated with his love of nature and as such is easy to just gloss over the effect this love has on his poetry because it is so familiar and expected. However, only if we look at Coleridge’s relationship with his environment can we see where his poetry and language comes from.

Coleridge does not just describe nature by itself: The Eolian Harp describes nature in relation to his feelings for his future wife whilst This Lime-Tree Bower concerns his thoughts of how his friends can experience nature and he experiences it through them to stop his “prison” becoming too unbearable. The relation of humans and nature and more importantly the respect of humans for nature is an idea we have discussed previously that we could link to this: nature provides solace and should therefore be preserved and humans should live as close to nature as possible, as when McKusick describes Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Lake District.