Foucault and Coleridge

And this place our forefathers made for man !This is the process of our Love and Wisdom,To each poor brother who offends against us--Most innocent, perhaps--and what if guilty ?Is this the only cure ? Merciful God !Each pore and natural outlet shrivell'd upBy Ignorance and parching Poverty,His energies roll back upon his heart,And stagnate and corrupt ; till chang'd to poison,They break out on him, like a loathsome plague-spot ;Then we call in our pamper'd mountebanks--And this is their best cure ! uncomfortedAnd friendless Solitude, Groaning and Tears,And savage Faces, at the clanking hour,Seen through the steams and vapour of his dungeon,By the lamp's dismal twilight ! So he liesCircled with evil, till his very soulUnmoulds its essence, hopelessly deform'dBy sights of ever more deformity !
Samuel Taylor Coleridge from play Osorio/Remorse Act V

     Foucault might argue that Coleridge has missed the point. Prisons are meant to function both with a normative power, and to inure the populace to the concepts of discipline. But Coleridge in many ways is a figure who works to escape the disciplinary power of society.  The dungeon is a place that does not bring the incarcerated to normalcy, but through denying access to the restorative power of nature, actually reinforces the deformity of the soul that brings about violence. Foucault does make statements similar to this in terms of sexuality, that repression in fact breeds the sexual discourse, but there is not a similar statement in this section of Discipline and Punish.
     In many of Coleridge’s poems the speaker begins the poem as a physical presence. A body  reclining outside his cottage for example, but as the poem turns to a reflective reverie brought about by the scene, the I disappears. While poems like the “Aeolian Harp” are not overtly political in their subject matter, the poems do have a distinct counter culture aesthetic. Nature and the solitary reflection of the individual in response to Empire, Industry, obedience to the State. Perhaps by removing the body from the poem, he renders incarceration impossible. Remove the locus of punishment from the scene and the forces of repression are left only with disembodied discourse.

And thus, my Love ! as on the midway slope
Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon,Whilst thro' my half-clos'd eye-lids I beholdThe sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main,And tranquil muse upon tranquility ;Full many a thought uncall'd and undetain'd,And many idle flitting phantasies,Traverse my indolent and passive brain,As wild and various, as the random galesThat swell and flutter on this subject Lute !
And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversly fram'd,That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweepsPlastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,At once the Soul of each, and God of all ?