‘Feelings all too delicate for use’: Coleridge and the gendering of genre

Abstract

Drawing upon the work of Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, and with specific reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem ‘Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement’, this article attempts to offer an analysis of some of the ways in which constructions of masculinity and femininity function within pastoral poetry of the Romantic period in England.