ABSTRACT

In the half-lyrical, half-topical poem "Fears in Solitude," Samuel Taylor Coleridge employs the real threat of French invasion—the imperative for the composition of the poem—as a metaphor for the recreative power of the secondary imagination and the epistemological instability of generic categories. Coleridge specifies the circumstances under which he wrote "Fears in Solitude" by appending to the title the following: "Written in April 1798, during the Alarm of an Invasion." He partially circumvents this ethical problem by aestheticizing history and making it the subject of the poem, thereby allowing for the simultaneous existence of political realities and aesthetics. Coleridge, the radical lecturer from Bristol, and author and editor of the mostly political journal The Watchman, retired from public life after the failure of the journal in May 1796. He believed that Robespierre had been true to the original tenets of the Revolution, but was unfortunately also adept at using them to justify terrorism.