Introduction
A movement in the arts and literature which originated in the late 18th century, emphasizing inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual is known as romanticism. P.B.Shelley and St.Coleridge are well known romantic poets. As we read through their individual works, both the endowed poets have their own qualities in writing. The two poets have certain similarities as well as differences in their ways of writing.
P.B.Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is regarded by critics as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. A radical in his poetry as well as his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition for his poetry grew steadily following his death.
The name of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the brilliant English poet from the early 19th century, is often heard in the same breath as his friends Byron and Keats, all great poets from the later romantic period. His second wife, Mary is best known for her work, “Frankenstein”. His life was tainted with tragedy as his first wife, Harriet, commit suicide drowning herself in Hyde Park, and Shelley himself died by drowning when only thirty years old. Although Shelley was a poet from the romantic period, that’s not to say that his poetry is all about romance. Rather, romantics wrote about nature, life, pain, depression, baring their emotions.
St.Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. He coined many familiar words and phrases too. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, as the youngest son of the vicar of Ottery St Mary.
After his father’s death Coleridge was sent away to Christ’s Hospital School in London. He also studied at Jesus College. In Cambridge Coleridge met the radical, future poet laureate Robert Southey. He moved with Southey to Bristol to establish a community, but the plan failed. In 1795 he married the sister of Southey’s fiancée Sara Fricker, whom he did not really love. His poems were basically about fresh ways of looking at nature. His way of writing was rather simple to understand.
Findings
As stated before both the poets had their own individualism and way of appealing the people by their poems. Coleridge’s poems are usually in which the hero takes advantage of the goodness surrounding him and sucks the decency out of everything around him. In contrast to Coleridge, Shelley as a poet doesn’t use devastation, destruction and evil for his own purposes, rather he is absorbs both the grand, the atrocious and combines all the painful feelings in man in his poems. Shelley as a poet values the exquisiteness in all things, even those which are flawed by imperfection, ruin, or mystery. Shelley used philosophical thoughts in his poems while Coleridge was more creative, pioneering and innovative. Thus, their method or way of writing differed as well as showed similarities.
With this it is possible for us to conclude that both the poets were equally admirable and tremendous in their own ways. Though the both of them were romantic poets with almost similar thoughts, their ways of portraying poems varied. Their similarity was that both of their poems formed a conclusion in the mind of the reader that nothing remains forever, or nothing is immortal. Thus there is an end to everything, and everything will be destroyed with time, that is time is the conqueror of time. Time always triumphs over everything and thus leaving behind nothing.
