'Eolian Harp'

Paper Summary:

This paper reviews Samuel Coleridge's poem, 'Eolian Harp'. According to the paper 'Eolian Harp' is a poetic depiction of the choices we make in life and the consequences we accept from those choices.

From the Paper:

" In lines 49-51 when he says, "But thy more serious eye a mild reproof Darts, O beloved woman! nor such thoughts dim and unhallowed dost thou not reject" he is putting on paper his understanding of the life-long limitations he will be accepting with his adherence to this marriage to Sara."
"Another thought to keep in mind is that Coleridge ostensibly wrote this poem for his wife Sara, and that it was also edited and changed as his relationship with her as changed. JCC Mays noted the way that some of Coleridge's poems seemed to change in an essay he wrote titled; "Reflections on Having Edited Coleridge's Poems". He said; "in the way they asked to be interpreted, moving towards an idea of poems growing and changing, even reversing their progress; looking for a method to record stages in their life which were discrete in a way which made the notion of their evolving, their succeeding one another, misleading" (Brinkley 140)."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Brinkley, Robert, Keith Hanley, ed. Romantic Revisions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "The Eolian Harp." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Abrams, M.H., Stephen Greenblatt (ed). Seventh Editions. New York: WW Norton & Company, 2000. 419-420.
• Harper, GM. "Coleridge's Conversation Poems". QR, 1925, vol 244, Issue none, pp 284-298
• Rajan, Tilottama, Julia M. Wright., ed., Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998
• Robinson, Jeffrey C. "To Dwell in Possibility Anthologizing a Revised Romantic Poetics". Eighteenth Century Studies, John Hopkins University Press, Vol 39, Issue 2, pp 251-258, 2005

More papers on 'Eolian Harp':

• Comparison Essay # 7463 : "The Eolian Harp" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes"
• Analytical Essay # 52011 : "Coleridge as a Romantic Poet"
• Analytical Essay # 55219 : "Samuel Taylor Coleridge"

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