A Modern Coleridge: Cultivation, Addiction, Habits

Remarkably, in placing the poem in context with its various stages, Timar discusses how Coleridge's later introductory note to the poem signals the desire to establish a social and a cultural distance between the poet and the "mob," between a medical use of opium (as a tranquillizer) and an addictive one (as a stimulant), which eventually leads to devastating consequences. [...]the 1816 version of "Kubla Khan" reveals Coleridge's newly conservative approach to addiction, which, Timar argues, "serves as a warning sign that the author produced something he did not want to produce" (96). [...]the "repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM" (Coleridge 189) turns into an impersonal mechanism that deprives the subject of his own humanity. Following a thematic rather than a chronological arrangement, the last part of the volume becomes entirely devoted to (mental) habits, where Timar presents a captivating study of "Dejection: An Ode" (notably the only poem in which Coleridge employs the word "habit") in the context of a notebook entry, of a biographical reference on his controversial relationship with his mother (and in more general terms on the mother's love as the mediator of God's), and finally of his most compelling unfinished work Opus Maximum. Since 2015 she has co-directed the CEMS (Centre for European Modernism Studies). [annalisa.volpone@unipg.it] Work Cited Coleridge, Samuel Taylor.