Comparative study between two Romantic poets: William Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge

Take two Romantic poets and make a comparative study on them

  a. Why their poems are representatives of Romantic period?

  b. Why they are different from each other?

William Wordsworth is the father of Romantic Movement in English literature. He created a new style of poetry and in that poetry we can find a new style not only in topic but also in language. That is why, he is immortal in the history of English literature and of the change that he gave a lot of focus was the subject of poetry. Until him, most poets focused on urban or aristocratic people for their theme. If we study English literature until Wordsworth then we will find that the subject matter is always high people or rich people or many poets only wrote about their beloved. It was Wordsworth who revolutionized the theme of poetry by focusing that the theme should be ordinary person.

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Nature was the most important aspect of Romantic Movement in English literature. It was William Wordsworth who is credited with the starting of the movement but what we often forget is that his close friend S.T. Coleridge had almost equal contribution in the beginning of the Romantic Movement. To Wordsworth, nature was very important and Coleridge did not disagree with this view but he had some differences with Wordsworth about the role of nature in human life and in poetry. In ‘Dejection: An Ode’, Coleridge has tried to talk in details about the relationship between man and nature.

Wordsworth has consistently written about his own life and own ideas.  Sometimes he wrote about his sister, sometimes he wrote about his daughter or the people he met during his life. Sometimes, he even wrote about unknown people that he saw while traveling to another place. So, in many of his poems, we can find autobiographical elements. Even he wrote about his biography in his poem called ‘The Prelude’. He put into practice the idea that the people or the subject of the poetry should be ordinary people. He was a very ordinary person during his time. At first he was a very ordinary person with little success and he suffered a lot of poverty at the early part of his life. It took time for him to get any kind of success as a poet.

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The basic theory of Wordsworth is that the nature has an immense contribution to the flourishing of poetic feeling and nature is very close to the poetic self. According to Coleridge, soul and individual creativity are much more important. Individual creativity and poetic intuition are even more important than nature. Poet’s poem could become more beautiful with individual creativity and enough practice. Coleridge’s opinion is exactly opposite of Wordsworth’s from this point of view as well.

Wordsworth said some important things about poetry. His first major statement was that there was not much difference between poetry and prose. We might think that they are same. Wordsworth emphasized that there is not much difference between the language of prose and the language of poetry because they are quite close. Coleridge did not agree with this statement and he clearly mentioned it in his Biographia Literaria. Hence, it is important when we will discuss about Coleridge’s view on nature and function of poetry.

Coleridge said that poetry and prose are entirely different subjects. At first, the two may appear close for both of them actually work with words. We use words while writing prose and poetry. However, the sequence of words in poetry is different from that of prose. According to Coleridge the function of poetry is different from that of prose. The main function of prose is to present the truth but that is not the same with poetry.

Coleridge believed that the main function of poetry is to provide pleasure to its reader not to present the truth. Poetry may represent the truth but that is not very important. Coleridge seriously discussed on this issue in his Biographia Literaria. Coleridge said that if we look into scientific prose then we would see that they only present what happened but imagination has a major role in poetry. The main difference between poetry and prose lies in the use of imagination in these two forms.  Except novel, there is not much use of imagination in prose. During the time of Coleridge, novel became very popular but many considered poetry equally important.