Conversation poems

The conversation poems are a group of eight poems composed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) between 1795 and 1807. Each details a particular life experience which led to the poet's examination of nature and the role of poetry. They describe virtuous conduct and man's obligation to God, nature and society, and ask as if there is a place for simple appreciation of nature without having to actively dedicate one's life to altruism.

The Conversation poems were grouped in the 20th century by literary critics who found similarity in focus, style and content. The series title was devised to describe verse where Coleridge incorporates conversational language while examining higher ideas of nature and morality. The works are held together by common themes, in particular they share meditations on nature and man's place in the universe. In each, Coleridge explores his idea of "One Life", a belief that people are spiritually connected through a universal relationship with God that joins all natural beings.

Critics have disagreed on which poem in the group is strongest. Frost at Midnight is usually held in high esteem, while Fears in Solitude is generally less well regarded.

20th-century literary critics often categorise eight of Coleridge's poems (The Eolian Harp, Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement, This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison, Frost at Midnight, Fears in Solitude, The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem, Dejection: An Ode, To William Wordsworth) as a group, usually as his "conversation poems". The term was coined in 1928 by George McLean Harper, who used the subtitle of The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem (1798) to describe all eight. Harper considered these poems as a form of blank verse that is "...more fluent and easy than Milton's, or any that had been written since Milton". In 2006, Robert Koelzer wrote about another aspect of this apparent "easiness", noting that "The Eolian Harp and The Nightingale maintain a middle register of speech, employing an idiomatic language that is capable of being construed as un-symbolic and un-musical: language that lets itself be taken as 'merely talk' rather than rapturous 'song'."

M. H. Abrams wrote a broad description of the works in 1965. He observed that in each, the speaker "begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied by integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation." In fact, Abrams was describing both the conversation poems and later works influenced by them. Abrams' essay has been describes as a "touchstone of literary criticism". As Paul Magnuson wrote in 2002, "Abrams credited Coleridge with originating what Abrams called the 'greater Romantic lyric', a genre that began with Coleridge's 'Conversation' poems, and included William Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, Percy Bysshe Shelley's Stanzas Written in Dejection and John Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, and was a major influence on more modern lyrics by Matthew Arnold, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and W. H. Auden."

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