Your Very Own Ecstasy: A Life in Verse of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This thesis consists of two parts: a creative dissertation entitled Your Very Own Ecstasy: A Life in Verse of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and an accompanying critical commentary. Your Very Own Ecstasy is a verse biography of the British Romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Your Very Own Ecstasy is divided into three parts documenting Coleridge’s life from 1772 to roughly 1804. It attempts to combine the generic form of a biography with the style and subject matter of a long poem in (mostly) pentameters, taking its cue from William Wordsworth’s The Prelude. However, unlike The Prelude, Your Very Own Ecstasy is self-conscious of the historical and cultural distances which obtain between the composition of the verse and the subject whose life it attempts to describe; and itfluctuates between first- and third-person narration, with a gradual transition over time, from omniscient narration toward the ahistorical mode of the Romantic lyric. The critical element of this thesis is an extended commentary on the poem’s three parts, plus a special chapter on the use of pentameters in the poem. This critical portion attempts to engage with a few poetical theorists throughout, especially Coleridge himself, who wrote extensively on the nature of poetry in Biographia Literaria. Critics in the fields of British Romanticism, philosophers of poetry, and scholars in Coleridge studies are likewise engaged. Some themes of the poem are identified, and topics like immersion, truth and fiction, narration, voice, and form are discussed in relation to the poem. The chapter on pentameters, which performs some metrical scanning, attempts to justify the use of pentameters throughout the poem, and draws especially on the work of George Wright. Wright’s remarks on pentametrical versatility are read against more recent prosodists who would reject the utility of metrical analysis in favour of a more holistic, rhythm-based approach.