Coleridge and the daemonic imagination
By: Gregory Leadbetter
Edition: 1st ed.
Series: Nineteenth-century major lives and letters; Nineteenth-century major lives and letters
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 274
ISBN-13: 9780230103214
Subjects: Religion; Friends and associates; Supernatural in literature; Psychology; Philosophy; Criticism and interpretation; Romanticism
Description: "Fascinated by his own imagination, Coleridge secretly wrote that its characteristic blend of power and desire made him a "Daemon": a being superstitiously feared as "a something transnatural." Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination examines this simultaneous experience of exaltation and transgression as a formative principle in Coleridge's poetry and the fabric of his philosophy. In a reading that spans the breadth of Coleridge's achievement, through politics, religion and his relationship with Wordsworth, this book builds to a new interpretation of the poems where Coleridge's daemonic imagination produces its myths: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel." Gregory Leadbetter reveals a Coleridge at once more familiar and more strange, in a study that unfolds into an essay on poetry, spirituality, and the drama of human becoming"--

"Through politics, religion and his relationship with Wordsworth, the book builds to a new interpretation of the poems where Coleridge's daemonic imagination produces its myths: 'The Ancient Mariner', 'Kubla Khan' and 'Christabel'. Re-reading the origins of Romanticism, Leadbetter reveals a Coleridge at once more familiar and more strange"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [243]-254) and index.
Table of contents: title: The Willing Daemon: Coleridge and the 6ransnatural; title: "Pagan Philosophy" and the "Pride of Speculation": spiritual politics and the metaphysical imagination, 1795-1797; title: "Not a Man, But a Monster": organicism, becoming and the Daemonic Imago; title: Transnatural language: the "Library-Cormorant" in the "Vernal Wood"; title: "The Dark Green Adder's Tongue": Osorio and the "Poetry of Nature"; title: "A Distinct Current of My Own": poetry and the uses of the supernatural; title: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"; title: "Kubla Khan"; title: "Christabel".