An Analysis Of Frost At Midnight, And Political Anxietie

â€Å"Frost at Midnight† and Political Anxieties in 1790s Britain During the writing and first publication of â€Å"Frost at Midnight,† the political atmosphere within Britain was particularly tense. The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 was incredibly concerning for European powers; it demonstrated that radical political ideas could take hold in a country and utterly overturn hegemonic structures that had been firmly in place for centuries. These worries were exacerbated as radical revolutionary politics spread around Europe, including Britain, where it reached Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his contemporaries. Furthermore, Britain had been at war with France since 1793, and many Britons, including Coleridge, worried about the threat of an†¦show more content†¦The publication of â€Å"Frost at Midnight† concurrent with two other political poems made an otherwise apolitical poem itself intricately connected to the ideology of the collection’s accompanying poems. â€Å"Frost at Midnight† does not comment on Britain’s war with France, nor does Coleridge’s patriotism, present in â€Å"France: an Ode† and â€Å"Fears of Solitude† make an direct appearance. In â€Å"An Autumnal Blast, a Killing Frost: Coleridge’s Poetic Conversation with John Thelwall,† Judith Thompson suggests that publishing these three poems together would ensure that â€Å"Frost at Midnight† would be read by some not as a nature poem, but as â€Å"an entry in a rancorous public debate about patriotism and the domestic affections in with Coleridge cannily plays both sides of the ideological fence† (428). In his younger years, before his work on â€Å"Frost at Midnight,† Coleridge held more liberal, even radical political philosophies that were influenced by the French Revolution; yet as he grew older he developed ideas of conservatism and even denied the liberal views of his youth (Black 407). Magnuson and Thompson agree that Coleridge’s presentation of his political views, as a whole, tended towards ambiguity, where Coleridge could present a dualistic stance and thus be seen as both a religious patriot and a supporter of liberty (Magnuson 6). Coleridge’s growing disillusionment with radical politics would also have influenced his ambiguity during this period of his