Coleridge, the Romantic poet, is a central figure in traditional literary histories and the anthologies that support them. However, Coleridge’s role as a political essayist and commentator on Britain’s colonial activities at the time that he was writing his poetry is less well-known in spite of the fact that his productivity in this area was vastly greater. Almost ignored by traditional literary histories are his many volumes of writings in which he celebrates the benefits of British imperialism and supports the view that it was his country’s duty to spread the concept of civilisation to as many “less fortunate” people as possible. The traditional emphasis upon Coleridge as poet of fantasy, supernaturalism and of the primary imagination, has all but blocked out his other major public role —that of enthusiastic supporter of political issues of the day including the politics of empire.
While the following discussion does not attempt to offer an explanation for how this lopsided view of Coleridge’s work has developed, it argues, by means of a politicised reading of Coleridge, that there is a much closer relationship between Romanticism and imperialism than is usually acknowledged and that the canon of literary history has had a crucial and by no means innocent role to play in masking this connection. Writers like Coleridge have been grouped, by historical structures such as Romanticism, in a way which asks that they be remembered for their creative abilities as literary artists rather than for the role they played in validating the imperialistic attitudes that became so deeply embedded in Britain’s sociocultural framework during the early nineteenth-century. This discussion is concerned with the way that those historical structures have cast Coleridge firmly into the role of the “Romantic poet,” so distracting attention away from his active role, in his time, as a social and political commentator openly supportive of British imperialism. Further, I argue here that, in a more oblique way, his poetry and Romanticism itself were also supportive of that political process.
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Arthur, Paul Longley. “From Politics to Pleasure: Coleridge and Romantic Imperialism,” Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 45 (1997): 73–87.
