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The Supernaturalism of the British Romantics

Coleridge belongs to a period of British poetry known as Romanticism. Other key poets in this period include William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. Admittedly, there’s no neat way to summarize the diversity represented by these poets. However, it is possible to note two broad trends that characterized the Romantic era. First, Romantic writers generally privileged intuition over rationality. Second, they emphasized the expression of emotion over the communication of didactic messages. For many Romantics, these two trends resulted in explorations of mysterious and occult phenomena. Blake, for instance, frequently had supernatural visions that he used as fodder for both his poetry and the remarkable engravings he made to illustrate his verse. Supernatural references also appear in Keats’s famous ballad “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1819) as well as Lord Byron’s apocalyptic poem “Darkness” (1816). Perhaps most famous of all is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which centers the occult science of bringing dead flesh to conscious life. Coleridge was similarly fascinated with the supernatural, which is a theme that runs through much of his poetry, including “Kubla Khan.” For each of these writers, in their own way, the supernatural provided a way to plumb the depths of the intuitive imagination.

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