Frost at Midnight

Alongside his friend and collaborator William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge is one of the most important figures in English Romanticism. Though Wordsworth and Coleridge differ in their aesthetic ideals (See: Further Readings & Resources), the two were unified in their desire to reinvigorate poetry. Coleridge regarded the precise verse of his 18th-century predecessors, such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope, to prioritize form over emotion. Coleridge preferred the blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) of earlier authors like John Milton over the heroic meter (rhyming iambic pentameter couplets) of Pope and Dryden. The easy blank verse of “Frost at Midnight” led critics to comment on its personal, conversational tone and name it, along with seven other poems, as one of Coleridge’s conversation poems. These poems stand among Coleridge’s most influential.

Coleridge’s movement toward freer, more emotive verse also signals one of the guiding principles of the Romantic movement. Wordsworth and Coleridge privilege sensory information over intellectual reason. Though many of Coleridge’s poems engage with philosophical ideas, they do so through the imagination rather than reason. Coleridge’s focus on supernatural phenomena in his contribution to 1798’s Lyrical Ballads is one part of this turn away from the reason and rationality of the 18th century and the Age of Enlightenment. Poems like “Frost at Midnight,” meanwhile, play out the natural education that Coleridge and his fellow Romantics celebrate. Instead of learning from the church bells, the speaker of “Frost at Midnight,” assumed to be Coleridge himself, compels his child to learn from the “[g]reat universal [t]eacher” (Line 64) found in the English countryside.