There is little doubt that Coleridge suffered the most of the major romantics consequently he is the most unhinged and, lacking negative capability, the least in control of his powers. It is the patient hope of earthly salvation met with the rage of impotence, pent-up and maddened to imagistic frenzy. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. It dramatizes an unendurable longing for paradise that haunts and sears the mind's eye. Kubla Khan is another interesting case, being perhaps the furthest foray into the depths of imagination after Milton and before Rimbaud. The lines retain their vigour, and aren't dragged into cerebral vagueness like many parts of the Conversation Poems. Here the images are actually sharpened and actualized to unbearable clarity by the moralizing tone which is itself the symptom of delusion. A notable exception is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in which the need to moralize or attribute undue cause amid the reality of suffering is itself the theme of the poem. His images are vivid realizations, but they are almost always brought down by moralizing sentiments that overdetermine his voice. Coleridge's imagination is difficult because it is at once expansive and constrained.
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