4. The Mind

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we think about Coleridge’s interest in the mind and in consciousness, in particular the way in which the mind tries to make sense of experience by bringing it into order or a pattern of consciousness. This time, we consider once again Coleridge’s poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798), suggesting that what the poem is really about is not a man’s punishment for shooting an albatross, but that man’s attempt to find order and meaning in the things that he has done and their consequences.

Course

In this course, we think about the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, focusing in particular in the literary and historical background of this poems of the 1790s. In the first half of the course, we think about Coleridge’s religious views and how these impacted his views on politics and nature in poems such as ‘This Lime-tree Bower my Prison’, before moving on in the second half to explore Coleridge’s interest in the mind, imagination, and consciousness in poems such as ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Kubla Khan’, and ‘Dejection: An Ode’

Lecturer

Seamus' interests are principally in the field of English Romantic poetry and thought, especially Coleridge and Wordsworth, and in post-Romantic English poetry, especially Tennyson, Eliot, Auden, Larkin, and their circles. He also has an interest in the modern history of criticism, reflected in articles on A.C. Bradley, William Empson, F.W. Bateson, and M.H. Abrams. He is co-editor, with Christopher Ricks, of the journal Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism (OUP), and the general editor of the new series, 21st-Century Oxford Authors (OUP). He often reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and the Literary Review. He is also Fellow Librarian of Balliol.