Changing Interpretations Over Time: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Double whammy today: not one, but two extracts from the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), best known for the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan - which the online Encyclopedia Britannica labels 'two of the greatest poems in English literature'. He was a mover and shaker within the Romantic movement, and good mates with Wordsworth. It is probably worth reading a little more about the Romantics before you move on, since some of the ideology is reflected here in Coleridge's words. The British Library is a good place to start. S. T. COLERIDGE: from Lectures on Shakespeare , 1818 IN Hamlet he [Shakespeare] seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our senses, and our meditation on the workings of our minds, - equilibrium between the real and the imaginary worlds. In Hamlet this balance is disturbed: his thoughts, and the images of his fancy, are far more vivid than his actual perce...