Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets.
Poem and poetry
Coleridge not only distinguished prose with poems but poetry with poems also. He says that the poetry is a wider than poem, it brings the whole soul of the man. He differentiate poetry with poetic genius. He further explain that poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre and even without the contradistinguishing object of a poem.
"poetry for coleridge is an activity of the poets mind and a poem is merely one of its expression"
the best example which supports this definition of poetry is of William butler yeats's sailing to Byzantium'
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
In the above stanza of the poetry the poet describes the present situation of his country. He says that there is corruption everywhere. Thus he wants to sail to the holy city Byzantium. In this poetry the poet covers much wider topics and it is successively presents the activity of the poets mind.
Poem and prose
S T Coleridge gives his views to differentiate poem from prose in chapter 14 of biographia literaria.
he says that the difference between poem and prose must consist in the different object proposed. Some poems are made in metre or rhyme, but this is done only for remembering it. Coleridge says that the poem is not only differentiate by using metre or rhyme with prose, but it would gives pleasure. The immediate object of poem is to give pleasure not the truth. On the other hand the immediate object of prose is to give the truth. He again differentiate poem from those prose whose objective is also to please the readers by saying that a poem must be a legitimate poem, means each and every single word of poem should explain and support the entire part of poem. There should be harmonious whole in poem.
In legitimate poem " the reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity or by the pleasurable activity of mind exited by the abstractions of the journey itself".
The best example to support this lines is of ' Faerie Queen' by Edmund Spenser
https://archive.org/stream/spensersthefaeri15272gut/15272.txt
"Helpe then, O holy Virgin chiefe of nine,
Thy weaker Novice to performe thy will;
Lay forth out of thine everlasting scryne
The antique rolles, which there lye hidden still,
Of Faerie knights[*] and fairest Tanaquill
Whom that most noble Briton Prince[*] so long
Sought through the world, and suffered so much ill,
That I must rue his undeserved wrong:
O helpe thou my weake wit, and sharpen my dull tong.
n the above canto Queen Elizabeth ask for help to the holly knight. She wants to sent him into the forest where there is a devil. She wants that knight to fight with the devil and killed him. In this lines of the poem there is not only the curiosity of the reader and restless desire to arrive at the final solution that what should this holy knight do, whether he get success in killing the demon in the forest or not, but also the there arise the pleasurable activity of the mind excited by the abstractions of the journey itself.
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