Coleridge and "Slavery's Spectres"

The issue of slavery and the slave trade was a burning topic during the Romantic period. The ebb and flow of the anti-slavery movement strangely followed the time line of the Romantic period in Britain. It started in late 1780s and officially ended with the 1833 act abolishing slavery. Most of the Romantic poets were radicals and they became part of the anti-slavery campaign and the discourse of slavery became an important part of their poetry. Coleridge started his poetic career with a prize winning Greek ode on slavery and joined the anti-slavery campaign in the last decade of the eighteenth century; wrote against slavery and opposed the racial formations of the time. However, towards the end of his career his attitude to race and slavery underwent a big transformation. The paper aims to trace Coleridge’s evolution from an Anti-slavery advocate to a reluctant apologist for racism and slavery.