John Colerridge Individualism Analysis

Coleridge is another poet who had a vast amount of success in the Romantic Period due to his individualism and depiction of nature. Coleridge wrote most of his poetry with his use of imagination. He had a whole chapter, Chapter 13, in his Biographia Literaria. In his poetry, Coleridge includes many examples of solitude. In his poem The Rime of The Ancient Mariner, and Frost at Midnight, both characters are experience solitude. Coleridge had a lasting impression on literary criticism. Coleridge 's writing addressed questions about “the relation between literary language and ordinary language, or between poetry and philosophy, or between perception and imagination”(9th, 439) Through use of imagination and solitude, Coleridge established his individualism.

While he does talk about nature and the deep feelings it evokes, he also focuses on the beauty of objects as a way to escape his eternal fear of death. Keats’s individualism is shaped by his experiences as a child and young adult. As a child Keats experienced a lot of death in his family. “By the time he was 15, he had lost a brother, his grandmother, and both his parents. Having witnessed so much death, Keats looked to art as a means of achieving immortality on Earth” (Carroll). At the same time he fears death, he also aspires to master poetry. He planned out the certain amount of time it would take to study and master the art, but feared that death would intervene before he could achieve his goals. He expresses his fears in When I Have Fears that I may cease to be. “In this sonnet, Keats questions whether he will be able to create poetry that will last even when the mortal man is gone” (Morse). From his fear of death and attempt to master the art of literature, Keats found his individualism. Because of this fear, he uses his poetry to go outside of his body and for a little while escapes the fear of death. Keats finds “a delight at the sheer existence of things outside himself”, and seems “to lose his identity in a total identification with the object he contemplates”.(902) Throughout his struggle with his realization that ‘“the world is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness, and

In Ode to a Nightingale Keats finds distraction in the sweet sound of the Nightingale and for a while is able to “fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget” all of the real world’s problems and the pressures of death. “By listening to a nightingale, which is ignorant of the cares and troubles of the world, the speaker is temporarily able to forget his human perspective” (Carroll). After taking in all of the nature surrounding him and being completely overtaken by the birds sweet sound, he allows the nature to make him happy and begins to contemplate a happy death. Keats says that he has “been half in love with easeful Death” and now he feels as though it would be “rich to die” and to “cease upon the midnight with no pain” (929). “The song of the nightingale is so beautiful that it makes death seem beautiful” (Flesch). In this poem we see how Keats allowed nature to captivate him in a way that he became immune to his previous fears. However, he soon realized he would not die and still be able to enjoy the sweet sound of the bird. “The song of the nightingale is so beautiful that it makes death seem beautiful, but death would mean that he could no longer hear its song. He would not be closer, but farther away from beauty, a senseless sod unable to hear the bird 's song” (Flesch). Keats allows himself to be distracted from the real life and the mortality by escaping into nature’s