SOURCE: "The Politics of 'Frost at Midnight'," in The Wordsworth Circle, Vol. XXII, No. 1, Winter, 1991, pp. 3-11.

Magnuson is an American educator, critic, and editor. In the following essay, adapted from a lecture delivered at the 1990 Coleridge Summer Conference at Cannington College, he examines "Frost at Midnight" in the context of the political climate and public discourse current at the time it was written.

I would like to begin with a quotation, which I take to be representative of common opinion on Coleridge's Conversation Poems and his mystery poems. In his Clark Lectures, published in 1953, Humphry House remarked:

It has been observed by Dr. Tillyard how very unpolitical "The Ancient Mariner" is. "Frost at Midnight" (dated February 1798—that is, while the "Mariner" was being written) is, if possible, less political still.

House argues that at the time that these poems were being written Coleridge began to divide his...