Spirit and substance in Romantic poetry
On Tuesday 16th and Tuesday 23rd January, Dr Alex Latter, Head of English at the King’s School, Canterbury, gave two talks, the first on William Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ and the second on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: an Ode’. In the first, Dr Latter focused on the question of spirit that he frames at the end of the fourth stanza: ‘Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?’ He looked at the use Wordsworth makes of Plato in stanza five and discussed the various consolations he turns to before affirming the life found in the ‘meanest flower’ in the final stanza. The second talk focused on Coleridge’s own meditation on the problem of continuing to live a life whose purpose has been exhausted and the paradox of how, at a moment of seemingly terminal impasse, he was able to produce perhaps his finest single poem.
