supernatural

That Coleridge would take it upon himself to sojourn into the supernatural world with his pen is once more reflective of his obsession with the control of audience. Coleridge here divides the endeavor of creating poetry for Lyrical Ballads into two parts: poems on ordinary, everyday objects in nature and poems in which “incidents and agents” were supernatural.

Staying within the supernatural realm allows Coleridge firmer ground from which to claim the status of creator. Regardless of whatever new and unsuspected charms a poet is able to conjure out of “things of every day”, the fact remains that it all is ultimately dependent upon an external creator—nature. Such a process is essentially an outside-in process wherein an external, already created object is brought into an inner consciousness and given meaning within its new context. Since the basis of the poem is external, it allows for the possibility of a reader bypassing the poet and directly accessing the vision.

To write about the supernatural, however, would eliminate any such loopholes by which the audience might circumvent the poet. The supernatural is beyond nature, is outside nature, and such a case, whether the vision is given through revelation or created through the creative process, it conveys upon the poet a position of undeniable exclusive power. There is only one point of access, and it is entirely controlled by he/she to whom that particular supernatural event was revealed—an essentially inside-out process. This sets up the relationship that Coleridge is ever obsessing about—that of the absolute dependency of an audience upon the poet.

I think that this tension between the natural world and supernatural world, and Coleridge's preference for the supernatural world in which he is the indisputable lord, is especially evident in The Eolian Harp in which the conflict between His world and God's world is explicitly played out.