164- ] English Literature
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge is the premier poet-critic of modern English tradition,
distinguished for the scope and influence of his thinking about literature as
much as for his innovative verse. Active in the wake of the French Revolution
as a dissenting pamphleteer and lay preacher, he inspired a brilliant
generation of writers and attracted the patronage of progressive men of the
rising middle class. As William Wordsworth’s collaborator and constant
companion in the formative period of their careers as poets, Coleridge
participated in the sea change in English verse associated with Lyrical Ballads
(1798). His poems of this period, speculative, meditative, and strangely
oracular, put off early readers but survived the doubts of Wordsworth and
Robert Southey to become recognized classics of the romantic idiom.
Coleridge
renounced poetic vocation in his thirtieth year and set out to define and
defend the art as a practicing critic. His promotion of Wordsworth’s verse, a
landmark of English literary response, proceeded in tandem with a general
investigation of epistemology and metaphysics. Coleridge was preeminently
responsible for importing the new German critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant
and Friedrich von Schelling; his associated discussion of imagination remains a
fixture of institutional criticism while his occasional notations on language
proved seminal for the foundation and development of Cambridge English in the
1920s. In his distinction between culture and civilization Coleridge supplied
means for a critique of the utilitarian state, which has been continued in our
own time. And in his late theological writing he provided principles for reform
in the Church of England. Coleridge’s various and imposing achievement, a
cornerstone of modern English culture, remains an incomparable source of
informed reflection on the brave new world whose birth pangs he attended.
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772 in the remote Devon village of
Ottery St. Mary, the tenth and youngest child of Ann Bowdon Coleridge and John
Coleridge, a school-master and vicar whom he was said to resemble physically as
well as mentally. In vivid letters recounting his early years he describes
himself as “a genuine Sans culotte, my veins uncontaminated with one drop of
Gentility.” The childhood of isolation and self-absorption which Coleridge
describes in these letters has more to do, on his own telling, with his
position in the family. Feelings of anomie, unworthiness, and incapacity
persisted throughout a life of often compulsive dependency on others.
A
reader seemingly by instinct, Coleridge grew up surrounded by books at school,
at home, and in his aunt’s shop. The dreamy child’s imagination was nourished
by his father’s tales of the planets and stars and enlarged by constant
reading. Through this, “my mind had been habituated to the Vast—& I never
regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my
creeds by my conceptions not by my sight—even at that age.” Romances and fairy
tales instilled in him a feeling of “the Great” and “the Whole.” It was a
lesson he never forgot. Experience he always regarded as a matter of whole and
integrated response, not of particular sensations. Resolving conflicted
feelings into whole response occupies much of his best verse, and his developed
philosophical synthesis represents a comparable effort of resolution.
A
year after the death of his father in 1781 Coleridge was sent to Christ’s
Hospital, the London grammar school where he would pass his adolescence
training in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, at which he excelled, and in English
composition. His basic literary values were formed here under the tutelage of
the Reverend James Bowyer, a larger-than-life figure who balanced classical
models with native English examples drawn from Shakespeare and Milton. While
Wordsworth was imitating Thomas Gray at Hawkshead Grammar School, Coleridge was
steeping in this long tradition of distinguished writing, learning to compose
on Bowyer’s principles. These included an insistence on sound sense and clear
reference in phrase, metaphor, and image: literary embroidery was discouraged.
So were conventional similes and stale poetic diction. Coleridge’s later
development as a poet may be characterized as an effort to arrive at a natural
voice which eschewed such devices. Critical of the rhetorical excesses of the
poetry of sensibility which prevailed at the time, he would join forces with
Wordsworth in promoting “natural thoughts with natural diction” (Biographia
Literaria, chapter 1).
Charles
Lamb’s evocative portrait of “Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago”
(1820) suggests what a hothouse environment the school was at the time. The student
population included boys who went on to important careers in letters, church,
and state. Even in such company Coleridge stood out unmistakably: “Come back
into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies, with hope like
a fiery column before thee—the dark pillar not yet turned—Samuel Taylor
Coleridge—Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!—How have I seen the casual passer
through the Cloisters stand still, intranced with admiration (while he weighed
the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to
hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of
Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such
philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar—while the walls
of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity-boy!”
The opening notes of awe and eventual disappointment are characteristic, but
the portrait of the artist as a young prodigy is more disturbing than Lamb
admits. The vatic voice was already alive to its social possibilities, the sole
resource of an isolated personality.
At
Christ’s Hospital, Coleridge acquired an exalted idea of poetry to match this
waxing voice. From Bowyer he would learn that “Poetry, even that of the loftiest
and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as
that of science.” The comparison of poetry and science was an important one,
leading to his mature definition of the art as a form of composition whose
immediate aim was pleasure while science was concerned first of all with truth.
Yet poetry arrived at truth in its own way, and that way was “more difficult,
because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive
causes.” The logic of science was derived from pure reason; the logic of poetry
depended on human understanding, which was anything but pure. Understanding
belonged to the world of sensation, generalization, and language, and through
it poetry was committed to ordinary human experience. Hence its tangled
condition . The words of the common tongue kept the poet in touch with this
common world.
Poetry
as living speech, poetry as act of attention: the commitments of Christ’s
Hospital encouraged fresh judgment on the state of the art, and on what rang true
now. Pope’s couplets had begun to sound contrived while the more masculine
energies of Shakespeare and Milton were welling up in the imagination of a
generation of young writers. In the sonnets of the Reverend William Lisle
Bowles, the schoolboy Coleridge found a contemporary model whose voice struck
him as “tender” yet “manly,” at once “natural and real.” These words are
Coleridge’s own, and they describe his aspirations at least as much as they do
Bowles’s fulsome versifications. Long after the model had lost its grip on him,
he would credit Bowles with drawing him out of a metaphysical daze, restoring
him to “the love of nature, and the sense of beauty in forms and sounds.” To
the poet in his first flush, Bowles represented the modern possibilities of “the
more sustained and elevated style” in English verse.
At
Jesus College, Cambridge, where Coleridge matriculated in October 1791, he
composed a mass of occasional poetry. Full of the rhetorical machinery of the
middling verse of the period, and often cloying in sentiment, these early poems
have little in common with the work of 1795 and after, on which his reputation
would be founded. They do not even show him developing in the direction of his
mature voice. Some of the phrasing of this college phase bears witness to the
force of Milton’s example on the student’s impressionable ear. The backward
ambience of Cambridge in the 1790s seems to have retarded Coleridge’s muse,
setting him to composing an arid (and ungrammatical) prize poem in Greek (in
summer 1792), while driving him to escape from “bog and desolation.” Reports of
his college life suggest that he was absorbing not only Greek texts but English
political pamphlets at this interesting moment. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on
the Revolution in France (1790) had met the rising sympathy for events in
France with questions about the legitimacy and future of the state. Coleridge
is said by a Cambridge contemporary to have consumed Burke’s various
productions on first publication, reciting them from memory to company at
supper. His sympathies were broadly liberal—critical of William Pitt’s
government and the slave trade, yet wary of the situation in France. He was
active in defense of William Frend, a Unitarian and Fellow of Jesus College who
was expelled for publishing a pamphlet advocating Peace and Union (1793). This
episode marks the beginning of a convergence between politics and poetry in
Coleridge’s career which is characteristic and important. For he was never a
disinterested observer . His poetry participated in ongoing reactions to events
at home and abroad, and he recognized its vocation in this public setting.
On
the basis of seemingly contradictory responses, Coleridge has sometimes been
depicted as a turncoat who betrayed his original revolutionary sympathies. His
poems suggest, and his lay sermons of the period confirm, that his allegiance
was always to an ideal of freedom, not to democratic insurgency. The quality of
his ambivalence did not prevent his speaking out in situations which damaged his
reputation among Burke’s party, his natural constituency. What sort of
revolutionary would enlist in the king’s army in this perilous moment?
Coleridge did so on 2 December 1793 under an assumed name, fleeing debts and
discouragement at college. He was rescued by family and friends after serving
locally for some five months. Escape, servitude, and retreat would become a
familiar pattern in Coleridge’s life.
The
Fall of Robespierre was a collaboration undertaken with Southey, whom he met at
Oxford in June 1794, while on a walking tour from Cambridge. With Southey he
hatched another escape route, a utopian scheme for immigration to America,
where a small group was to found a commune on the banks of the Susquehanna in
Pennsylvania. The ideals of Pantisocracy, as they called their project,
involved shared labor and shared rewards. Servitude in this setting was exalted
as “aspheterism,” a Christian selflessness. “Religious Musings” envisions the
dismal historical world which they hoped to escape, as well as their aspiration:
‘Tis the sublime of man,
Our noontide majesty, to know
ourselves
Parts and proportions of one
wondrous whole!
This fraternizes man, this
constitutes
Our charities and bearings!
Pantisocracy
occupied Coleridge’s energies and continued to influence his sense of vocation
for some time after the scheme’s collapse in 1795. A communitarian ideal
remained essential to his writing, as to the life he now proposed to live.
For
he left Cambridge, without taking a degree, in December 1794, in the midst of
this communitarian enthusiasm and was soon thrown back on his own resources .
In the course of the next year Coleridge delivered a series of lectures on
politics and religion in Bristol, where Southey had connections. He considered
various journalistic enterprises and made influential friends, including Joseph
Cottle, a local publisher, who was interested enough in his poetry to advance
him living expenses against copyright. The volume of Poems on Various Subjects
(including four sonnets by Lamb and part of another by Southey) which Cottle
would publish in 1796 represents a rite of passage. Behind him, the young
author’s school verse, sonnets, and rambling effusions trace a course of
aimless poetasting. Before him, in “The Eolian Harp” (included in the 1796
volume as “Effusion xxxv”) and in “Religious Musings” (which concluded the
volume), something is stirring. The former, addressed to Sara Fricker, whom he
married in Bristol on 4 October 1795, looks forward to the conversational line
which he would develop and share with Wordsworth. The latter, on which he
claimed in a letter to “build all my poetic pretensions,” is an affirmation of
Christian principle in troubled times. Both poems are broadly communitarian in
aspiration.
Coleridge
expanded on “Religious Musings” over the next two years. A section of it was
published as “The Present State of Society” in The Watchman, a periodical which
Coleridge conducted through ten issues (1 March-13 May 1796). Its contents were
various, including reports from Parliament, foreign intelligence, and responses
to current issues. The loaf was leavened with bits of poetry, some of it the
editor’s own. The Watchman failed despite Coleridge’s strenuous efforts to
enlist subscribers, but it bears witness to his seriousness of purpose. This
conjunction was where Coleridge staked his claim. Poetry as a vatic art in the
service of a general social revival: the restless England of George III,
reeling from the shock of American and French revolutions, was surely prepared
to listen. The scientific and political culture which had emerged in the 1770s
was gaining force among the dissenters, Unitarians in particular, whom Coleridge
cultivated in and around Bristol. They were his constituency and his means of
support. He spoke to them in sermons and lectures, through The Watchman and
also, as he hoped, through his verse.
His
move with Sara to Clevedon, Somersetshire, along the Bristol Channel, in
October 1795 was a change of air though not of social context. From here he
continued his attack on the king and his ministers, returning occasionally to
Bristol to lecture or walking to Bridgwater to speak at the Unitarian chapel.
At his cottage he wrote “The Eolian Harp,” a meditative poem different in every
way from “Religious Musings” and the real inauguration of his mature voice. In
its primitive form, as the effusion of 1796, it reflects the conflict between
natural response—“the sense of beauty in forms and sounds,” as he put it in the
Biographia Literaria—and higher responsibility. Nature as an animated,
omnipresent life force, a benevolent companion, is memorably characterized
through the image of the wind harp, which is identified with the poet’s
“indolent and passive brain.” Poetic imagination is simply an instrument of
this Nature, one “organic harp” among others in its universal symphony. In the
exemplary setting of the new life he was undertaking, the claims of
enlightenment thinking succumbed to faith.
“The
Eolian Harp”establishes the terms of this important conflict, which was not
simply intellectual but broadly social in implication. For pantheism was
associated with the progressive scientific culture for which the empirical world
of nature was simply reality itself . A personal God had no empirical reality.
Unitarians and various sorts of deists adhered to a divinity which was known
through sensation: a Nature god of sorts. This was Coleridge’s intellectual
milieu, and he tried out its ideas in his Bristol period. Yet his enduring
commitments showed through. The community espoused in the conclusion of “The
Eolian Harp” is not the egalitarian utopia of scientific aspiration, but “the
family of Christ.” The ideals of Pantisocracy triumph over the temptations of
the new science. In his extensive correspondence of the period Coleridge
proclaimed himself a Necessitarian for whom everything had a place in the
divine scheme. “The Eolian Harp” shows how the lure of an alternative vision of
human experience dominated by sensation could provoke an equal and opposite
reaffirmation of first principles to the contrary. A traditional faith was
confirmed through temptation.
Community
after the collapse of Pantisocracy meant a wife and family, impassioned
friendships based on shared concerns, and the company of kindred spirits.
Thomas Poole, a prosperous tanner of good family in the tiny Somerset village
of Nether Stowey, became Coleridge’s closest associate in the uncertain period
following his return to Bristol in 1796. The arduous and ultimately futile
enterprise of The Watchman led him to seek a steady haven where he might work
and write in sympathetic surroundings. Supporting Sara and their newborn son,
Hartley (born September 1796), was a priority: “Literature will always be a
secondary Object with me.” There was something desperate in such a resolution,
and it proved hard to keep after their move to a small thatched cottage in
Nether Stowey at the end of 1796.
“This
Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” composed from Poole’s cottage garden the next year,
relates to the community which he made there. Poole had proved a loyal friend
and steady companion; his patronage was crucial to the success of the
resettlement. Wordsworth, whom Coleridge had met in Bristol some time before,
came to visit with his sister, Dorothy, and they soon occupied a substantial
house at Alfoxden, walking distance from Nether Stowey. Charles Lloyd lived at
Coleridge’s cottage for a time, providing steady income in exchange for tuition.
Lamb, the old friend from Christ’s Hospital, and the youthful Hazlitt joined
Cottle and other Bristol connections to make up a real if transient community
of socially interested parties. All were writers at least by aspiration; all
were involved in the reformation of English values for which “romanticism” has
since come to stand. The lives they were leading on the fringes of conventional
society would become the subject of their work.
So
it was in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” which describes a walk some of them
took one day in Coleridge’s absence. The jealous Sara had spilled a pan of
boiling milk on his foot, excluding him from the company of Dorothy and William
Wordsworth, as well as Charles Lamb, on a jaunt in the surrounding spur of low
hills—combes, in local parlance—the Quantocks. From his confinement in the
garden, he celebrates the pleasures of the natural world as seen from within
this harmonious community of like-minded individuals. The detailed evocation of
their itinerary marks the apogee of his response to landscape. In the end, the
poet’s imagination triumphs over his separation: his bower reveals pleasures of
its own; Nature is hospitable to human response. Sensation proves adequate to
human need; Nature is a providential resource against isolation. The poem’s
conclusion dwells on the joy of companionship in such a world.
Coleridge’s
new community was instrumental in bringing him to such feeling, and to such
expression. This proved to be the most satisfying arrangement he would ever
enjoy. It was the setting of his verse breakthrough, of the annus mirabilis in
which most of his enduring poems were written. Here he built on the achievement
of Clevedon, writing reflectively about his inner life in a social environment
which excited and encouraged the questions he was asking. Was the human place
in nature a merely passive one, comparable to the wind harp’s ? Was natural
beauty sufficient to our moral needs? And more speculatively, what was the
meaning of nature conceived as an organ of divine will? How did this bear on
our idea of society?
These
questions haunt the reflective idiom which he developed in the course of this
residence of a year and a half at Nether Stowey, with storm clouds brewing on
the horizon. The topographic realism of “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”
reverts via Wordsworth’s An Evening Walk (1793) to James Thomson and The
Seasons (1730), but the voice at work here is that of “ a man speaking to men,”
in the parlance of the “Preface” to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. Speech
replaces stale poetic convention from the start. The character of the poet lies
at the center of the exercise. The self-consciousness of Wordsworth’s
poetically premature ramble is turned to good effect in Coleridge’s effort at
something true to the occasion. The sense of occasion is conveyed in fresh
blank verse, not the rattling heroic couplets of Wordsworth’s first extended
production. The prickly personifications and moralizing eye of “An Evening
Walk” are vestigially present in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” but the
effect is not of conventional chatter. Coleridge’s diction is clear and direct
for the most part, his apostrophes natural to the drama of the situation which
he develops.
Walking
was more than recreation for the writers’ colony in the Quantocks. It provided
the fresh air which their assumptions required. If Nature were to be their
muse, and the source of their living values, it would have to be observed in
all its sorts and conditions. Coleridge’s plan for an expansive treatment in verse
of the course of a brook from source to river shows how his walks in the nearby
combes contributed to his reflection on the human condition. “The Brook” as he
conceived it would mix “description and incident” with “impassioned reflection
on men, nature, society.” He traced a local stream to its wellsprings,
recording occasional images in his notebook, but these are all that survive of
an ambitious and characteristic project of the period.
Wordsworth’s
move to Alfoxden in the summer of 1797 stimulated further projects. At loose
ends Coleridge found in Wordsworth a catalyst for his thinking about poetry.
The year following his friend’s move to the area would prove to be his most
productive, and the beginning of a collaboration which culminated in the Lyrical
Ballads volume. On his own telling, his conversations with Wordsworth during
this year “turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of
exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of
nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors
of imagination.” The first point may be described as Wordsworthian, the second
as basically Coleridgean. Imagination was already one of his preoccupations; he
was interested in Erasmus Darwin’s idea that “the excess of fancy is delirium,
of imagination mania.” Extraordinary states of mind, or casts of spirit, color
his major poems of this period of innovation, and the effects which he achieved
through them have earned enduring recognition.
Most
extraordinary of all, in the eyes of later readers, is “Kubla Khan,” an
opium-induced, orientalizing fantasia of the unconscious. It is important to
recognize that Coleridge himself claimed nothing for this production’s
“supposed poetic merits.” He did not publish it until 1816, under financial
pressure as usual and at the urging of Lord Byron, and only as an appendage to
the more substantial “Christabel,” which Wordsworth had excluded from the
second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800). The poem was not liked even then. As
a “psychological curiosity” it was interesting to its author mainly as evidence
of a state of extreme imaginative excitement. “Kubla Khan” had nothing to do
with the reflective idiom to which Coleridge was committed. It might be verse,
but it was not good poetry.
The
story of its genesis is one of the prodigies of English literature. In the
course of a solitary walk in the combes near the Bristol Channel in the fall of
1797, Coleridge took two grains of opium for the dysentery which had been bothering
him for some time. He retired to an old stone farmhouse some distance from
Porlock, where he fell asleep while reading an old travel book, Purchase His
Pilgrimage (1613), by Samuel Purchase. He awoke hours later to record the
extraordinary train of images which arose during his opiated stupor. The act of
composition was interrupted by a “person from Porlock”—often conjured by later
poets as a figure of life intruding on art—and it proved impossible to continue
afterward. Much ink has been spilled over these circumstances, but their oddity
makes them generally plausible, even considering Coleridge’s habits of
prevarication.
If
they are significant at all it is because they epitomize his reputation as the
truant phantast of romantic legend. He did much to encourage it, certainly, but
he lived to regret what his friends made of him and to defend himself against
charges of idleness and premature decay. The Coleridge phenomenon, as it might
be called, has been recounted in every literary generation, usually with the
emphasis on wonder rather than disappointment, though sometimes—among
moralizing critics, never among poets—with a venom which recalls the
disillusionment of his associates. Henry James’s story, “The Coxon Fund”
(1895), based on table talk of the genius who became a nuisance, is indicative
of both attitudes. The Coleridge phenomenon has distorted Coleridge’s real
achievement, which was unique in scope and aspiration if all too human in its
fits and starts.
The
compelling imagery of “Kubla Khan” might be regarded as preparation for “The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” conceived soon after on a walk to the port of
Watchet on the Bristol Channel in the company of Wordsworth and his sister.
Some time before, John Cruikshank, a local acquaintance of Coleridge’s, had
related a dream about a skeleton ship manned by spectral sailors. This became
the germ of a momentous project in which Wordsworth acted as collaborator. The
plot was hatched on the walk, according to Wordsworth’s own later
recollections, and it was he who conceived of the tale of crime and punishment
which Coleridge would treat, in Christian terms, as a story of transgression,
penitence, and atonement. Wordsworth also claimed to have suggested that the
Old Navigator, as Coleridge initially called him, kill an albatross and be set
upon by the “tutelary spirits” of Cape Horn, where the deed is done. He
contributed some few lines of verse to the poem in addition.
The
collaboration on “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is interesting on several
counts. It underlines the collective enterprise involved in the inauguration of
the new poetic idiom which would eventually be called Romantic. Creation of
this kind is more than a matter of oracular power. It has much to do with
rational inquiry and exchange. Further, the episode gives some idea of the
working relations between Coleridge and Wordsworth at the moment when the
scheme for Lyrical Ballads (1798) was being hatched. Their constant
companionship on walks, at Alfoxden and elsewhere, gave rise to extended
discussion of poetry present and past. Both proved open to suggestion; both
grew as poets through their conversations. Most of what is known of this
process is known through the Lyrical Ballads volume and its later “Preface.”
The conclusions which it expresses, in Wordsworth’s voice more than
Coleridge’s, have long been seen as foundations of modern poetry.
The
genesis of the “Ancient Mariner” is more than the story of one poem. It is the
story of a project. In Coleridge’s own account of events, they decided on two
sorts of poems for Lyrical Ballads : “In the one, the incidents and agents were
to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to
consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such
emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real.
And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever
source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural
agency.”
Lyrical
Ballads was deliberately experimental, as the authors insisted from the start.
The “Ancient Mariner” pointed the way. The fact that it was a collaboration
meant that both authors took responsibility for the design of the experiment.
This was more than a volume of poems from various hands. The largely negative
reviews which it excited on publication concentrated on the “Ancient Mariner,”
in part because it was the most substantial poem in the collection, but also
because of its self-consciously archaic diction and incredible plot. Southey
described it in a dismissive (and anonymous) review as “a Dutch attempt at
German sublimity.” Elsewhere it was reckoned “the strangest story of a cock and
a bull that we ever saw on paper.” The character of the Mariner also caused
confusion.
Despite
the problems, the poem flourished on the basis of strong local effects—of its
pictures of the “land of ice and snow” and of the ghastly ship in the doldrums,
in association with a drumming ballad meter. Wordsworth frankly disliked it
after the reviews came in, but Lamb led the way in appreciating its odd mix of
romance and realism. It is perhaps as a poem of pure imagination, in the words
of Robert Penn Warren’s landmark reading , that the “Ancient Mariner” has
appealed. In this respect among others it bears comparison with “Kubla Khan”;
they are usually classified, with Christabel, as poems of the supernatural. All
answer to the formula proposed for Coleridge’s contributions to Lyrical
Ballads: supernatural, or at least preternatural, phenomena dignified by association
with a human voice. For most readers this is the line of Coleridge’s verse that
has mattered. Whatever their liabilities of dramatic construction, the highly
charged imagery of these poems has made a strong impression. Its influence
rings clear in Shelley and Keats in the next generation , and in Tennyson,
Browning, Rossetti, and Swinburne among their Victorian inheritors. In the
title of W. H. Auden’s Look, Stranger! (1936) the echo of the Mariner’s
exhortation, “Listen, Stranger! ,” from the text of 1798, shows how far
Coleridge’s oracular voice would carry.
Coleridge’s
contributions to the Lyrical Ballads volume included a short piece from Osorio
called “The Foster-Mother’s Tale,” and a meditative poem in blank verse, “The
Nightingale,” as well as “The Ancient Mariner.” The collaboration with
Wordsworth is perhaps most striking in their development of the conversational
idiom for which the subtitle of “The Nightingale, A Conversation Poem , Written
in April, 1798” provided a name. It was not the first of the conversation
poems; these are considered to begin from “The Eolian Harp” and to include
“Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’’ and “This Lime-Tree Bower
My Prison” among his earlier meditative verses. Coleridge himself never distinguished
them in this way, nor has Wordsworth’s poetry of the kind ever been described
as conversational. Yet the term has come to stand for Coleridge’s decisive
innovation as a poet and for his contribution to the formation of Wordsworth’s
voice.
It
was at this moment of intense exchange that Coleridge wrote his most imposing
conversational verse, and that Wordsworth wrote “Lines Written A Few Miles
Above Tintern Abbey,” his startling initiation in the conversational idiom.
Wordsworth’s poem stands at the end of Lyrical Ballads rather as the “Ancient
Mariner” stands at the beginning. It stands out, a monument to the realized
achievement of the experiment. From the title, with its particularity about
time and place, and the graceful discursive manner, through the association of
ideas and the praise of Nature to the address in the concluding stanza to his
sister, this poem is virtually a homage to Coleridge’s conversational manner.
What Wordsworth would make of the conversation poem is the story of the most distinguished
poetic career of the period.
Their
achievement in the developing conversational line has seemed more momentous in
retrospect than it did at the time. “Tintern Abbey” was noticed only fitfully
in early reviews. Yet the example of the conversation poems took where it
mattered most, among the poets of the next generation and every generation
since. Shelley’s “Julian and Maddalo” (1818) represents an early effort to
expand on the possibilities of conversational verse. Matthew Arnold and T. S.
Eliot in England and Robert Frost in America elaborated variously on the
conversational convention. The testimony of Charles Tomlinson shows how the
influence of Coleridge’s innovation has been transmitted by modern writers:
“The distinguishable American presences in my own work, so far as I can tell,
were, up to then, Pound, Stevens, and Marianne Moore, and yet, if through them
the tonality sounded American, the tradition of the work went back to
Coleridge’s conversation poems.” The meditative verse of Geoffrey Hill in the
same postwar generation rings changes on the Coleridgean originals of this line
of modern verse.
Wordsworth
made the conversation poem the vehicle of his celebration of enlightenment
values: of nature as spiritual home, of man as the measure of things.
Coleridge’s conversational verse points in the same direction under the
influence of his great friend, yet it is deeply conflicted under the surface.
The conviction of a benevolent nature is compromised by mounting fears. In the
earlier poems of the kind these are indicated only indirectly. In “Frost at
Midnight,” composed from the front room of the Lime Street cottage in the
winter of 1798, the poet’s isolation drives him to test the resources of nature
conceived as a mediating agent. The poem dramatizes Coleridge’s sense of
vulnerability in the face of a threatening outside world. Part of this feeling
must have come from the growing hostility of the community in which he was
living. Fear of a French invasion was widespread, and the outsiders were
suspected of democratic sympathies, even of collusion with the national enemy.
Walking home from Bristol, Coleridge heard himself described as a “vile Jacobin
villain.” The spy sent by the government found nothing much to report against
him, but there was open mistrust of his motives and way of life. Such testimony
provides incidental evidence of social pressures which Coleridge expressed in
“Frost at Midnight”in an intensely personal way.
“Frost
at Midnight” is the most psychodramatic of Coleridge’s conversation poems even
if the conclusion is not really consistent with the imaginative process which
gives rise to it. For it exposes the deep fears behind the passion for Nature
conceived in this way, as an intentional agent and life companion. “Religious meanings
in the forms of nature” practically defines the idea as Coleridge understood
it. In “Fears in Solitude,” written soon after, and the source of this fine
characterization, the sense of danger and vulnerability is directly related to
political apprehensions. “Fears in Solitude” shows Coleridge trying to
associate the scenery around Nether Stowey with feelings for his country
without giving way to the government which he despised. It is an uncertain
performance, rambling and disjointed, yet interesting as a portrait of
political conviction under pressure.
Despite
the difficulties, this was a time of rare promise for the young writer.
Wordsworth’s presence was catalytic. It was through the Lyrical Ballads volume
that Coleridge’s voices, conversational and “romantic,” were developed and
rationalized. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal of 1798 shows how collaborative were
all of their undertakings of this formative moment. Yet their auspicious
beginning was to prove the beginning of the end of Coleridge’s poetic powers.
While Wordsworth would carry on with the experiment for some ten years after
that spring in the Quantocks, his companion in the art was all but finished
with it. Reasons for the divergence are bound to be conjectures after the fact,
but two at least remain worth considering. The collaboration turned out to be a
struggle for poetic primacy, and Wordsworth’s personal domination eventually
meant loss of conviction—and loss of face—for his troubled colleague. There was
room for only one strong voice of this kind. Coleridge was drawn to other roles
in any case, and to other causes. Poetry was his means, not his vocation.
What
was his vocation then? He is usually described as a man of letters—as the
prototype of the modern writer who lives from his earnings as journalist, book
reviewer, and jack of all literary trades. Coleridge was provided, quite
unexpectedly, a life annuity of 150 pounds sterling by Josiah and Thomas
Wedgwood, heirs to the pottery and friends of reliable standing. There were no
strings attached. The point was to free him of the routine material
difficulties which were already closing in on him from all sides. This was a
godsend, but it also put Coleridge on his mettle. For he was now faced with the
imperative to choose and define a vocation for himself . Freedom imposes its
own obligations, and patronage remains patronage even without the strings. The
imminent departure of the Wordsworths, whose one-year lease at Alfoxden was not
renewed in June 1798 due to local doubts about their character, precipitated a
personal crisis of sorts. The upshot was an extended residence in Germany,
separation from family and friends in Nether Stowey, and a change of direction.
Coleridge
was drawn to Germany for its literary ferment and new learning. His residence
of some months at the university in Göttingen exposed him to the earlier
Germanic languages and literatures and also to the new scriptural criticism
which would change the face of modern theology. He read Friedrich Gottlieb
Klopstock and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing rather than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe;
enlightenment thinking—not Sturm und Drang—was the object lesson. Germany
opened doors whose existence he had hardly imagined. It was here that he
learned the language sufficiently to approach the critical philosophy of
Immanuel Kant, which consumed his thinking from about 1800. Göttingen supplied
a working idea of language which he would turn to his own uses on his return.
And it involved him in historical inquiries—on the origin of the free farming
class, for example—which he communicated to his correspondents at home. The
impression left by his notebooks and letters of this period of residence abroad
is of unusual intellectual attentiveness.
The
intellectual turn is what distinguishes Coleridge from others, including his
friends William Hazlitt and Lamb, whose activity as writers in the period was
more clearly in the native grain. His example was followed by De Quincey and
Carlyle with differing emphases; “men of letters” would appear less apt to
their cases than “literary intellectuals,” with the stress on fresh thinking.
Literature, or “polite literature” as Coleridge sometimes called it, included
the prose essay for all of them. Verse and prose did not live separate lives;
they were distinctive in means but not different in ends as Coleridge explained
them. Both gave scope to the same human understanding.
Coleridge
rejoined his family in Nether Stowey in midsummer 1799, some time after having
returned from Germany. It was an uncomfortable homecoming on several counts.
Wordsworth was soon on his way to Dove Cottage at Grasmere in the remote north
country , and Coleridge was not far behind. There was trouble with Southey and
a difficult leave taking from Thomas Poole. On his way north he tarried in
London as political correspondent for the Morning Post, writing a brilliant
piece on Pitt, the prime minister, showing what his own convictions counted
for. For readers interested only in the poetry, such topical work is bound to
seem tedious; yet it represents the heart of Coleridge’s commitment in the
period when he was writing his best verse. His Essays on His Own Times (1850),
collected long after in three volumes, show how serious and capable a critic of
society he was. The promotion of his most personal and individualistic work by
later readers has obscured his constant attention to social arrangements and
social ideals.
His
move to Keswick in summer 1800 (not long before the birth of his third son,
Derwent, on 14 September) represented a kind of retreat from the discouraging
world of city politics and city life. The Wedgwood annuity made it feasible,
Wordsworth’s presence nearby practically inevitable. Lyrical Ballads was to be
republished in a new edition; Christabel was still unfinished, and here he
added the second part, with its altered landscape reflecting the scenery of
Langdale Pike and “Borodale.” It was a critical time in his professional
transition. Wordsworth’s rejection of the still unfinished poem contributed to
Coleridge’s sense of personal incapacity. He came to feel that he was not a
poet; not a great poet, at least not like Wordsworth. Yet his valedictory ode,
“Dejection,” first composed as a letter in 1802, shows him at the peak of his
powers. Writing in the shadow of Wordsworth’s “Intimations” ode, Coleridge here
cultivated a more colloquial delivery while remaining true to his own muse.
This is his magisterial conversation poem, the most compelling (though not the
most celebrated) achievement of his foreshortened poetic career.
Coleridge
was now on his own as never before, unsettled, constantly ill, searching for a
way through his difficulties. He decided at this time on a career as a critic,
at first proposing “an Essay on the Elements of Poetry / it would in reality be
a disguised System of Morals & Politics—.” The real orientation of his
poetics is indicated here. It was refined but not fundamentally altered by
subsequent reflection and formulation. By 1804 he was calling the same project
“On the Sources of Poetic Pleasure—in which without using the words bad or
good, I simply endeavor to detect the causes & sources of the Pleasures,
which different styles &c have given in different ages, & then
determining their comparative Worth, Permanency, & Compatibility with the
noble parts of our nature to establish in the utmost depths, to which I can
delve, the characteristics of Good & Bad Poetry—& the intimate
connection of Taste & Morals.—” The lectures delivered at the Royal
Institution in 1808 on “The Principles of Poetry” apparently fleshed out this
program, beginning from Shakespeare and concluding “On Modern Poetry.” They
were the first of several lecture series conducted by Coleridge in the years
1808-1814. Their contents are known mainly from unreliable reports when they
are known at all.
The
lectures of 1811-1812 on Shakespeare were influential in the general revival of
interest in the Elizabethan drama. Dr. Johnson’s 1765 preface to his edition of
Shakespeare’s works had defended him as the poet of nature who held up a mirror
to life and manners. Against this mimetic emphasis Coleridge lay stress on
Shakespeare’s expressive language and the psychological acumen associated with
it: “In the plays of Shakespeare, every man sees himself, without knowing that
he does so.” A more important legacy of the lectures on Shakespeare is the idea
of organicism, which has deep roots in his earlier critical reflection. In
lecture notes on Shakespeare, Coleridge evokes organic form in terms which
mimic the contemporary German critic August Wilhelm Schlegel. The form of
Shakespeare’s dramas grew out of his characters and ideas , on Coleridge’s
telling; the old dramatic conventions did not impede the conception. The
structural variety of his plays—the seeming irregularities of The Tempest, in
particular—arose from expressive requirements. Organic form redeemed
Shakespeare’s unconventional dramatic constructions.
The
importance of the organic metaphor and idea for later thinking about poetry can
hardly be exaggerated. The sense of the work of art as an organism, self-germinating
and self-enclosed, pervades modern writing and modern criticism. Coleridge’s
elaboration on the idea of imagination in this period owes something to the
distinction of mechanic and organic form as well. His definitions of primary
and secondary imagination and of fancy have become canonical; they served I. A.
Richards, notably, as a theoretical basis of the “semasiology” which he
proposed in 1935. This putative science of meaning was meant to shore up the
foundations of English as an academic discipline and proved influential not
only at Cambridge but throughout the English-speaking world, including the
United States, where it provided impetus for the development of the New
Criticism, as it was called. Treating Coleridge as a provincial outpost of the
new German critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, English and American readers
have usually abandoned the complex record of his reading and response in favor
of one or two manageable ideas. The result has been general misapprehension
about his orientation and commitments. Coleridge does not make sense as a model
of aesthetic reading despite the efforts of Richards and others to bend him to
this purpose.
What
sort of reader was he, then? Moral and political, certainly, but something more
. On his return from Germany in 1799, Coleridge had undertaken “a metaphysical
Investigation” of “the affinities of the Feelings with Words & Ideas,” to
be composed “under the title of ‘Concerning Poetry & the nature of the
Pleasures derived from it.’” The connection of his philosophical studies with
his critical ambition is important for understanding how Coleridge imagined the
critical function. He was not interested in judging writing by current
standards. Conventional judgments of good or bad relied on unspoken assumptions
which he was concerned to test and modify, where appropriate, by the light of
reason. Adjudicating taste is the usual purview of the “man of letters.”
Coleridge was trying for something more philosophical, of larger scope and
bearing: “acting the arbitrator between the old School & the New School to
lay down some plain, & perspicuous, tho’ not superficial Canons of
Criticism respecting poetry.”
In
the wake of the republication of Lyrical Ballads in early 1801 (with ‘1800’ on
the title page), Coleridge’s critical project became a protracted effort to
come to terms with Wordsworth’s radical claims in the “Preface” for a poetry
composed “in the real language of men.” This was the “New School” of “natural
thoughts in natural diction”: Coleridge’s own school despite his differences
with Wordsworth. His effort to make the case for the new verse in the teeth of
pitched hostility on the part of reviewers culminated in his Biographia
Literaria (1817), where the “Old School” is treated anecdotally in the opening
chapters on the way to the triumph of Wordsworth’s voice. The fifteen years
between the “Preface” and Biographia Literaria were consumed with working
through the critical agenda which Coleridge set himself at the turn of the
century. The process was a fitful, often tortuous one. The metaphysical
investigation assumed a life of its own, waylaid by deep plunges into Kant and
Schelling, among others. It culminates in the first volume of the Biographia
Literaria with an effort to provide rational ground for the critical exercise
which follows in the second. His definition of imagination remains an important
part of his poetic legacy, nevertheless, since it underwrites the development
of a symbolist aesthetic still associated with his name though at odds with his
enduring commitments.
The
thoughtful approach to Wordsworth in the second volume represents Coleridge’s
understanding of poetry at its best. His account of the Lyrical Ballads project
challenges some of Wordsworth’s claims in the “Preface” to the second edition
in a way which distinguishes the effective from the peculiar in his verse.
Readers have often taken Coleridge’s theoretic pronouncements about imagination
as constituting his poetics, while the account of Wordsworth’s verse shows him
applying more conventional standards in new and thoughtful ways. This
discussion of the new school in English poetry includes a detailed treatment of
the question of poetic language as raised by Wordsworth, and it is Coleridge’s
response to his positions in the Lyrical Ballads “Preface” that makes up the
real centerpiece of the argument. The defense of poetic diction in particular
is important for understanding his idea of poetry. Its roots lie in a long
meditation on language, not in a philosophically derived faculty of
imagination.
This
meditation on language occupied Coleridge occasionally during the years between
his return from Germany in 1799 and the composition of the Biographia
Literaria. Among projects which he undertook during these long years of opium
addiction, physical disability, and aimless wandering, The Friend (1809) stands
out for its originality and influence. After two years away, in Malta, Sicily,
and Rome, he returned to Keswick in 1806, separated from his wife (who had
given birth to their daughter, Sara, on 23 December 1802), lectured and
dilated, and finally settled on publishing “a weekly essay” which ran from 1
June 1809 to 15 March 1810. The publication rose and fell by subscriptions,
relying on Coleridge’s name and reputation, and finally collapsed under the
weight of his private difficulties. Eclectic in approach, broadly literary in
style, its various essays remain worth considering for what they indicate of
the evolution of letters in the period. The Friend established a high
discursive tone which was influential among Coleridge’s inheritors, including
Carlyle and Emerson, for whom it was counted among his most valuable works.
In
1812 the Wedgwood annuity was reduced by half due to financial difficulties
related to the war. Coleridge continued to wander, staying with friends all
over the kingdom and occasionally with his family in Keswick. In 1816 he
published Christabel with “Kubla Khan” and “The Pains of Sleep” in a single
volume; the next year his collected verse, Sibylline Leaves, appeared. He moved
into the house of Dr. James Gillman, a physician in Highgate, now a north
London village, trying to cure or at least to treat his opium problem. Here he
would pass the remainder of his life, writing only occasional verse while
preparing philosophical lectures (delivered in 1818), revising the text of The
Friend for publication as a book, and collating the moral and theological
aphorisms which appeared as Aids to Reflection (1825). These were popular and
influential in America as well as in England. Coleridge published a meditation
on political inspiration in The Stateman’s Manual (1816) among other tracts on
subjects theological and political. On the Constitution of Church and State
appeared in 1830 ; Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit posthumously in 1840. He
planned a comprehensive philosophical synthesis which he was unable to realize,
conjuring with a system which lived only in his constantly working mind. The
most finished text from among his philosophical papers was published in 1848 as
Hints towards the Formation of a more Comprehensive Theory of Life. The
reconstruction of his abortive synthesis is in progress.
Coleridge
died in 1834 after years of personal discomfort and disappointment. A legend in
his time, he came to be seen by friends and contemporaries as the genius who
failed. The failure was largely relative to early expectations, however, and to
hopes defeated by disease and drugs. Despite everything, Coleridge can still be
regarded as a groundbreaking and, at his best, a powerful poet of lasting
influence. His idea of poetry remains the standard by which others in the
English sphere are tried. As a political thinker, and as a Christian apologist,
Coleridge proved an inspiration to the important generation after his own.
Recent publication of his private notebooks has provided further evidence of
the constant ferment and vitality of his inquiring spirit.
Evaluation
Coleridge’s
achievement has been given more widely varying assessments than that of any
other English literary artist, though there is broad agreement that his
enormous potential was never fully realized in his works. His stature as a poet
has never been in doubt; in “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
he wrote two of the greatest poems in English literature and perfected a mode
of sensuous lyricism that is often echoed by later poets. But he also has a
reputation as one of the most important of all English literary critics,
largely on the basis of his Biographia Literaria. In Coleridge’s view, the
essential element of literature was a union of emotion and thought that he
described as imagination. He especially stressed poetry’s capacity for
integrating the universal and the particular, the objective and the subjective,
the generic and the individual. The function of criticism for Coleridge was to
discern these elements and to lift them into conscious awareness, rather than
merely to prescribe or to describe rules or forms.
In
all his roles, as poet, social critic, literary critic, theologian, and
psychologist, Coleridge expressed a profound concern with elucidating an
underlying creative principle that is fundamental to both human beings and the
universe as a whole. To Coleridge, imagination is the archetype of this
unifying force because it represents the means by which the twin human
capacities for intuitive, non-rational understanding and for organizing and
discriminating thought concerning the material world are reconciled. It was by
means of this sort of reconciliation of opposites that Coleridge attempted, with
considerable success, to combine a sense of the universal and ideal with an
acute observation of the particular and sensory in his own poetry and in his
criticism.
Collected
works
The
current standard edition is The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
edited by Kathleen Coburn and many others from 1969 to 2002. This collection
appeared across 16 volumes as Bollingen Series 75, published variously by
Princeton University Press and Routledge & Kegan Paul.[73] The set is
broken down as follows into further parts, resulting in a total of 34 separate
printed volumes:
Lectures
1795 on Politics and Religion (1971);
The
Watchman (1970);
Essays
on his Times in the Morning Post and the Courier (1978) in 3 vols;
The
Friend (1969) in 2 vols;
Lectures,
1808–1819, on Literature (1987) in 2 vols;
Lay
Sermons (1972);
Biographia
Literaria (1983) in 2 vols;
Lectures
1818–1819 on the History of Philosophy (2000) in 2 vols;
Aids
to Reflection (1993);
On
the Constitution of the Church and State (1976);
Shorter
Works and Fragments (1995) in 2 vols;
Marginalia
(1980 and following) in 6 vols;
Logic
(1981);
Table
Talk (1990) in 2 vols;
Opus
Maximum (2002);
Poetical
Works (2001) in 6 vols (part 1 – Reading Edition in 2 vols; part 2 – Variorum
Text in 2 vols; part 3 – Plays in 2 vols).
In addition, Coleridge's letters are available in:
The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1956–71), ed. Earl Leslie
Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
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