The Language of Politics

Abstract

The origins of Coleridge’s engagement with the idea of language lie in his response to the public rhetoric of the 1790s. His generation was confronted early in life with the chaotic spectacle of revolution in France. This was to be the defining scene in the formation of their political understanding and of the new writing that would be called Romantic. First elation, then a great fear swept Britain in the years following 1789 with the cycle of violence known as the Terror. As it grew more brutal, early enthusiasts of the events in France were suspected of sedition. Coleridge was believed to entertain radical sympathies, and a government spy was dispatched to report on his and Wordsworth’s activities. An avid reader since his student years at Cambridge of the pamphlets of Edmund Burke, Coleridge reacted viscerally to the elder statesman’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which took an unfashionably principled stand against the revolutionists while their cause was still popular. Though an influential apologist for the right of the American colonies to political self-determination, Burke withheld his support from the French cause.¹