Comparing Wordsworth And Coleridge

‘The 1800 Preface’ to The Lyrical Ballads explains, amongst other things, the circumstances and mutual agreeability that led Wordsworth and Coleridge to co-author a work representative of their ‘joint opinions on Poetry’ (LB 16). Their kinship was founded by a sense of mutual respect for one another’s ability, having admired each other’s poetry for some time before they met in person, and through a shared similar background of being educated at Cambridge and subsequent sympathies for the radical movement of the age (Sisman 24). During Wordsworth’s journey to revolutionary France in 1792 he became ‘enthralled with the Republican movement’ (Nash 136), and likewise, Coleridge also expressed interest in the reformation of social and political

They both believed that rural, natural life was infinitely more beneficial for the human spirit than the rapidly industrializing cities, and they had a mutual distrust of ‘urbanity, mannerism and artifice’ (Perry 164). However, although they might seem highly compatible at first glance, it is in their presentation and discussion of nature that we can see clear differences emerging between Wordsworth and Coleridge; in their thoughts on what people should seek to discover in nature, what a connection with nature truly means, and hence what nature ultimately represents. In Coleridge’s work, he suggests a moral and religious framework in which to place the forces of nature and the awe of the sublime; the idea that nature will never leave those that are ‘wise and pure’ suggests a degree of selectivity based on virtue and thus the power of nature in his poetry is subsumed, and superseded by, Coleridge’s personal Christian beliefs and thus the power of God and His

In ‘Frost at Midnight’, Coleridge laments how he was ‘reared / In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim’ (LB 242.51-2). He goes on to promise Hartley, his sleeping son, that the boy will be a ‘true child of nature’ (68.171) and experience a better life growing up in the Lake District, where he can ‘wander like a breeze’ (243.54). This simile suggests both the child’s unity with nature, and a boundless sense of freedom, also captured in Wordsworth’s poetry; ‘I wondered lonely as a cloud’ (LB 188.1). This simple view of childhood as idyllic innocence and connection to nature remains uninterrupted throughout ‘Frost at Midnight’; ‘all seasons’ will be ‘sweet’ for the boy (243.65) and the cyclical structure of the poem, beginning with the ‘secret ministry of the frost’ (242.1) and ending with the same image, suggests a permanence and regularity for a life begun in natural surroundings. There is no faltering of the connection to nature, as Wordsworth experiences in The Prelude. Moreover, Coleridge seems to treat the setting of nature – ‘sea, hill and wood’ (242.11) as the perfect medium to grow up meditating on the ‘numberless goings of life’ (242.12). In this poem, the child’s upbringing in Cumberland is blissfully uncomplicated, and his natural surroundings give him