2014 April ; 6 Vol. 4, No. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science 176 S.T. Coleridge's Attitudes toward Nature and Their Effect on Him as a Poet Dr. Mutasem T. Q. Al-Khader * Associate Professor Al-Quds Open University P.O. Box (65) Tulkarm Palestine Authority, Palestine Abstract This study demonstrates the vital relationship between Coleridge and nature at the beginning of his career as a poet. Coleridge later changed his attitude toward nature and began to consider it a spiritless object. He was innovative and creative when he established organic relations with nature, as manifested in his great poems such as "Frost at Midnight" and "Kubla Khan," but when Coleridge distrusted nature and his views about it converged, he ceased to be a poet, or at least stopped creating great poems. He realized that his imagination regenerated whenever he was with nature, but for unknown reasons, he ignored the axiom that nature for the romantic poet is like water for fish. Keywords: Attitudes, Coleridge, Dejection, Nature, Relationship, Romantic 1. Introduction The relationship between Coleridge and nature forms an important component in Coleridge’s poetry and prose writing. Coleridge’s views about the poet's creativity and its relation to nature are profound because he was both a poet and a philosopher. Therefore, as the title of this article shows, I will limit my study to Coleridge's vacillating outlook toward nature. However, Coleridge is a devotee to nature, and a (Schulz, 1964) "sense of fraternity with man and nature permeates" his nature poems (p. 131). Thus, Wordsworth considered him to be: The most intense of Nature's worshippers, In many things my brother, chiefly here In this my deep devotion. (ll. 2: 513-15) It is significant that, for Coleridge, nature (Lawrence, 1999) "holds a special key to comprehending the meaning of life" and the "human happiness." However, I will cite several references from Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode", as it is a poetic expression of the relationship between the poet's perceptive mind and the external world—that is, the relationship between the subjective and the objective. 2. Coleridge's Views about Imagination and Its Relationship with Nature Coleridge’s ideas about the nature of imagination are central to his critical theory, but at the same time, he goes beyond a traditional concern with imagination and considers it to be the only mediator in the field of creativity and aesthetics. Thus, as a romantic poet to whom nature is an integral part of creativity, Coleridge tries to analyze and logically explain the relationship between imagination and nature that he intuitively experienced in his poems. In Biographia Literaria (1962), he gives his well-known definition of imagination: The IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. (Vol. 1, p. 12) ------------------------ * Sponsoring information: This research is not supported by any organization.