Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Political Voice In his Frost at Midnight, Fears in Solitude, and France: An Ode

In 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge published Fears in Solitude and Frost at Midnight in a slim volume with France: An Ode as a defence of his public standing as a West Country radical and an opposition journalist. Coleridge in his three poems, all involved with explicit political themes, portrays himself not only as the imaginative poet in retirement, but as the breaker of idols. For Coleridge idolatry is the worship of the gods of war, sexuality, thievery and drunkenness, and these are the gods of those who prosecute the war with France, enslave Africans and perjure themselves in courts. Here, it should be mentioned in reading of a poem as an isolated, integral, and individual poem, the process of interpretation relies only upon the poem itself; in the variety of dialogic reading, the meaning of a poem depends upon the meanings of its themes and figures that exist in the public discourse before the poem is written. Thus, the author of this paper will elaborate an argument through which these three poems are political poems if read in the dialogical and public context of the political debates of 1790s.

کلیدواژه ها:

Discourse ، Political Voice ، Romanticism ، Samuel Taylor Coleridge