Aeolian Harp Becomes Symbol of Romantic Poetic Inspiration
Poets involved
What happened
In 1795, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote The Eolian Harp, one of his earliest major poems, inspired by the actual aeolian harp — a stringed instrument designed to be played by the wind when placed in a window or outdoors — that he and Sara Fricker kept in their cottage at Clevedon, Somerset, England. The aeolian harp, invented in the seventeenth century and fashionable as a domestic instrument in the late eighteenth, produced haunting, ever-changing harmonics as breezes passed through its strings, and became the central metaphor for the Romantic conception of the poet as a passive receiver of divine wind-inspiration rather than an active craftsman of verse. Coleridge's poem launched the aeolian harp as one of the defining symbols of Romantic poetry.
Literary impact
The aeolian harp metaphor — the poet as an instrument played by the wind of divine inspiration — became one of the most productive and contested images in Romantic literature, taken up by Shelley in his Defence of Poetry, Percy's instrumental wind imagery, and Keats's Odes, and subjected to critical revision by Wordsworth who preferred to emphasise active poetic labour. The image pervades Romantic and post-Romantic poetry as a figure for passive inspiration, the unconscious, and the relationship between the natural world and artistic creation. No single wind metaphor has been more discussed in the scholarship of Romantic literature.
Source: Wikipedia
