Comparative analysis of Wordsworth & Coleridge in poetry?

Wordsworth and Coleridge were also part of a larger group called the Lake Poets. Nature and redefinitions of nature are at the heart of the Romantic revival, and nature itself is, perhaps, nowhere more beautiful than in the region of England known as the lake country. According to his autobiographical poem The Prelude, William was allowed to run wild in nature, which became for him a kind of mother. Throughout his poetry, we see a pantheistic refrain: God inheres in the natural world around us. God is in nature. He tells us in The Prelude that there was much loneliness in his childhood. Wordsworth’s early circumstances rendered him extraordinarily introverted, and solitude was a vital element in his psychological makeup. Another of his most famous poems, “Daffodils,” opens with the line “I wandered lonely as a Cloud.” Loneliness and creativity are at the heart of Wordsworth’s poetry, and loneliness, for him, is a creative state. 

In 1795, he had met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose muse was both more philosophical and wilder than Wordsworth’s: opium and Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher fed that imagination. First published in 1798. Lyrical Ballads may be the most influential book of poetry in English literature. 

Coleridge was also living in the Lake District at this time, close by Wordsworth. Wordsworth’s famous one-line definition of poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility.” Coleridge supplied the “spontaneous” power, while Wordsworth offered the “tranquility,” the reflection. A perfect example of Coleridge’s spontaneity is found in “Kubla Khan,” the short poem he began (but never finished) under the influence of a narcotic dream. Among Coleridge’s utopian projects was his failed “pantisocratic” community, based on free love and philosophical ideas. Coleridge, in contrast, left in his chaotic wake a collection of fragments, short works, and prolegomena. Like Wordsworth, he compiled an autobiography—prose, in his case—Biographia Literaria, the biography of a literary sensibility. The work fuses Coleridge’s towering intellect, extraordinary powers of criticism, and feeling for poetry. His greatest complete poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, was composed during his collaborative years with Wordsworth.

At its best, Wordsworth’s poetry is of stunning purity and power. One example comes from the “Lucy” poems, included in later reprints of Lyrical Ballads. Breathtakingly simple and with only eight lines, the poem nonetheless conveys compelling emotion. Coleridge’s agenda was different. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the first work in Lyrical Ballads, he compacts into short-lined, four-line stanzas an amazingly pregnant and mystical narrative of the condition of man in an incomprehensible natural universe. A religious order exists in this universe, but it is an order that is enigmatic, although, mysteriously, meanings may be sensed. In writing this poem, Coleridge drew on gothic fiction and an extraordinary range of reading in theology, philosophy, and travel. His descriptions of the arctic regions are almost photographic.. The narrative of The Rime is simple. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner indicates the new directions that poetry would take over the next two centuries. A revolution had taken place and, arguably, is still taking place in English literature as a result of Lyrical Ballads.