Skip over navigation  Coleridge’s Poetry  Samuel Taylor
Coleridge  Themes, Motifs & Symbols     The Transformative Power
of the Imagination   The Interplay of Philosophy, Piety, and
Poetry   Nature and the Development of the Individual
Conversation Poems  Coleridge wanted to mimic the patterns and
cadences of everyday speech in his poetry. Many of his poems
openly address a single figure—the speaker’s wife, son, friend,
and so on—who listens silently to the simple, straightforward
language of the speaker. Unlike the descriptive, long,
digressive poems of Coleridge’s classicist predecessors,
Coleridge’s so-called conversation poems are short, self-
contained, and often without a discernable poetic form.
Colloquial, spontaneous, and friendly, Coleridge’s conversation
poetry is also highly personal, frequently incorporating events
and details of his domestic life in an effort to widen the scope
of possible poetic content. Although he sometimes wrote in blank
verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, he adapted this m