The Eolian Harp
composed at clevedon, somersetshire
Source: The Longman Anthology of Poetry (Pearson, 2006)
1. Conversation Poems
A group of
eight poems composed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) between 1795 and
1807. Each details a particular life experience which lead to the poet's
examination of nature and the role of poetry. They describe virtuous conduct and man's obligation to God,
nature and society, and ask as if there is a place for simple
appreciation of nature without having to actively dedicate one's life to
altruism.
The Conversation poems were grouped in the 20th-century by literary critics who found similarity in focus, style and content. The series title was devised to describe verse where Coleridge incorporates conversational language while examining higher ideas of nature and morality. The works are held together by common themes, in particular they share meditations on nature and man's place in the universe. In each, Coleridge explores his idea of "One Life", a belief that people are spiritually connected through a universal relationship with God that joins all natural beings.
Critics have disagreed on which poem in the group is strongest. "Frost at Midnight" is usually held in high esteem, while "Fears in Solitude" is generally less well regarded.
2. M.H. Abrams's comment on the conversation poem
The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied by integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation.
3. Pantheism(Wiki)
The belief that the universe (or nature as the totality of everything) is identical with divinity, or that everything composes an all-encompassing, immanent God. Pantheists thus do not believe in a distinct personal or anthropomorphic god. Some Eastern religions are considered to be pantheistically inclined.
Pantheism
was popularised in the West as both a theology and philosophy based on the work
of the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whose book Ethics was
an answer to Descartes' famous dualist theory that the body and spirit are
separate. Spinoza held the monist view that the two are the same, and monism is
a fundamental part of his philosophy. He was described as a "God-intoxicated
man," and used the word God to describe the unity of all substance. Although the
term pantheism was not coined until after his death, Spinoza is regarded as its
most celebrated advocate.
4. Harold Bloom's comments on Coleridge's palinode(a poem in which a poet retracts something said in an earlier poem): "a dialectic between two Coleridges, the imaginative and intellectually daring poet, and the timidly orthodox young husband, glad to submit to the mildly reproving eye of his 'Meek daughter in the family of Christ!'"
*The commentary a couple of quotes come from was made by John Spencer Hill at http://www.english.uga.edu/~nhilton/232/stc/comp2b.htm
5. Paul Magnuson¡¯s comment on ¡®The Eolian Harp¡¯
In the ¡®Conversation¡¯ poems, Coleridge adopts a natural symbolism in which the perceiving, remembering, imagining mind searches for images of itself and God in nature. Most of the poems begin with the poet in a state of repose, receiving sensations from nature. Receptivity changes to active speculation on the relation of the poet to nature and society, and activation of the imagination is often presented by the image of the Eolian Harp. The harp is a stringed instrument with sound box, which, when placed where the wind can blow over it, emits a natural music. In the eighteenth century it was an image of nature¡¯s music, but Colerige transformed it into an image of inspiration in which the poet was a harp over whom the winds of inspiration below.
From ¡°¡®The Conversation¡¯ poems¡± in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge.