‘Hare and Hound’: Ends and Means in Coleridge’s Letters

Leadbetter, Gregory

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_6

Gregory Leadbetter⁵

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print ((PERCP))

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Abstract

‘The End is in the Means’, Coleridge wrote to his son Hartley, in a telling aside: ‘Southey once said to me: You are nosing every nettle along the Hedge, while the Greyhound (meaning himself, I presume) wants only to get sight of the Hare, & FLASH!—strait as a line!—he has it in his mouth! […] But the fact is—I do not care twopence for the Hare; but I value most highly the excellencies of scent, patience, discrimination, free Activity; and find a Hare in every Nettle, I make myself acquainted with’ (CL V. p. 98). The blend of apologia and unapologetic assertion is characteristic of the man and the writer, as is the fact that elsewhere Coleridge could confess himself envious of Southey’s greyhound-like directness. The aside within the aside, on Southey’s meaning, is also a parenthesis in parenthesis: almost the entire paragraph in which these words appear is a bracketed digression, of which he was immediately and amusedly self-conscious (‘Digress? or not digress? That’s now no question’ (CL V. p. 99)). It was a trait he had long recognised in himself, as he admitted to his friend Thomas Poole:

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Notes

1.
The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), for which I use the in-text abbreviation CL throughout.
2.
Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 101.
3.
Quoted in Leigh Hunt, Autobiography, rev. ed. (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1870), p. 253. See Gregory Leadbetter, ‘The Comic Imagination in Lamb and Coleridge’, The Charles Lamb Bulletin 159 (2014), pp. 11–19.
4.
The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn et al., 5 double vols (London and (vols. III–V) Princeton: Routledge and (vols. III–V) Princeton University Press, 1957–2002), II. 2431; the English numerals relate to the entry number.
5.
To Marilyn Butler, his sentences ‘tend to be laboured and tortuous’: Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 69. In ‘The Spirit of the Age’ (1825), Hazlitt, continuing over years his inimitable fusion of hatchet job and mythologisation, damned Coleridge’s prose as ‘utterly abortive’: The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1930–34), XI. p. 35.
6.
Notebooks, I. 1623.
7.
Marginalia, ed. George Whalley (vols. I and II), H. J. Jackson and George Whalley (vols. III–VI), 6 vols (London and Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1980–2001), I. p. 61n.
8.
The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr., 3 vols (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975–78), I. p. 183. The emphasis is Lamb’s.
9.
Marrs, I. p. 183, p. 189.
10.
Prelude (1805) VI. 312 in The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1979), p. 202. See my Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 35–39.
11.
Henry Crabb Robinson: On Books and their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols (London: J.M. Dent, 1938), II. p. 487.
12.
Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (London and Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1983), II. p. 126. Hazlitt dates this critique to spring 1798, at the height of Coleridge’s closest collaboration with Wordsworth: see Howe IX. p. 104. Coleridge raises his unease with Wordsworth’s tendency to ‘strict adherence to matter of fact’ in poetry to Southey in a letter of 1802 (CL II. p. 830).
13.
On Books and their Writers, II. p. 632.
14.
S.T. Coleridge: Interviews and Recollections, ed. Seamus Perry (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 126.
15.
John Clare’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Eric Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 137.
16.
Interviews and Recollections, p. 127. Compare Southey’s letter to Coleridge of 28 October 1809, in The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part Three: 1804–1809, ed. Carol Bolton and Tim Fulford (Romantic Circles, 2013): https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters/Part_Three/HTML/letterEEd.26.1704.html
17.
Poems, ed. John Beer (London: Everyman, 1986), p. 167.
18.
On the nature of this mythopoesis, see Leadbetter, Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination, pp. 183–200.
19.
The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Middle Years, 1806–1820, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2nd ed., rev. Mary Moorman, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), II. p. 664.
20.
Biographia Literaria, II. p. 5, p. 65.
21.
Ibid., II. p. 126, p. 127 (Coleridge’s italics).
22.
1794; published in his 1796 collection as ‘Lines on a Friend’.
23.
Biographia Literaria, I. p. 168 (Coleridge’s italics).
24.
In 1809, Wordsworth wrote privately that ‘he has no voluntary power of mind whatsoever, nor is he capable of acting under any constraint of duty or moral obligation’: Middle Years, I. p. 352. In 1814, Coleridge himself diagnosed his condition as ‘an utter impotence of the Volition’, that is ‘the faculty instrumental to the Will, and by which alone the Will can realize itself’ (CL III. p. 477, p. 489).
25.
Poems, ed. Beer, p. 321.
26.
‘Whirled about without a center—as in a nightmair’: Notebooks, III. 3999.
27.
Letters of John Keats: A Selection, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 157.
28.
Tom Paulin, ‘Writing to the Moment: Elizabeth Bishop’, Writing to the Moment: Selected Critical Essays 1980–1996 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 215–39, p. 216.
29.
Virginia Woolf, ‘The Man at the Gate’, Collected Essays, vol. III (London: The Hogarth Press, 1967), p. 219, p. 221; Seamus Perry, ‘The Talker’, The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. Lucy Newlyn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 103–25, p. 113.
30.
Notebooks, III. 3325.
31.
‘Essay on Faith’, Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H.J. Jackson and J.R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols (London and Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1995), II. p. 837.
32.
Biographia Literaria, II. p. 21.
33.
‘Introduction: “For What is a Letter?”’, Letter Writing Among Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Jonathan Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 10.
34.
For an overview of Coleridgean self-representation more generally, see Anya Taylor, ‘Coleridge’s Self-Representations’, The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Fred Burwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 107–24.
35.
See Leadbetter, Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination, pp. 10–11 et seq.
36.
‘The Eolian Harp’, ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’ and ‘To the Rev. George Coleridge’ preceded it.
37.
The term was coined by George McLean Harper in ‘Coleridge’s Conversation Poems’, Spirit of Delight (London: E. Benn, 1928).
38.
Notebooks, III. 4066.
39.
Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 7.
40.
For a very brief summary of this relationship, see John Worthen, The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 33; for an extended discussion, see Gene W. Ruoff, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Making of the Major Lyrics, 1802–1804 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989).
41.
J.C.C. Mays, Coleridge’s Experimental Poetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 163.
42.
The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols (London and Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1969), II. pp. 149–53, p. 152.
43.
Ibid., II. p. 17.
44.
Biographia Literaria, I. p. 124.
45.
Ibid., I. pp. 300–04.
46.
Ibid., I. p. 301, p. 302.
47.
See Leadbetter, Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination, pp. 160–62.
48.
Biographia Literaria, II. pp. 159–233.
49.
Notebooks, I. 1515.
50.
Woolf, ‘The Man at the Gate’, p. 217.
51.
See Gregory Leadbetter, ‘Coleridge and the “More Permanent Revolution”’, The Coleridge Bulletin 30 (NS) (2007), pp. 1–16.
52.
Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer (London and Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 244–45.
53.
Notebooks, V. 6810.
54.
W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand ([1963]; London: Faber and Faber, 2012), Foreword.
55.
Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Letters, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), p. 332, p. 544. As John Beer points out, Coleridge’s work has a way of ‘stimulating others to be themselves’: Coleridge’s Play of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 241. For a fine discussion of Bishop’s own letter-prose and the form more generally, see Vidyan Ravinthiran, Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (Lanham, MD: Bucknell University Press, 2015), pp. 83–124.
56.
Interviews and Recollections, p. 192.
57.
Aids to Reflection, p. 10.
58.
Notebooks, IV. 4777.
59.
Biographia Literaria, II. p. 84.
60.
Notebooks, III. 4066, I. 1016.
61.
Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature, ed. R.A. Foakes, 2 vols. (London and Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1987), I. p. 222, p. 223.
62.
Biographia Literaria, II. p. 14.

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Gregory Leadbetter

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University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Madeleine Callaghan
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Anthony Howe

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Leadbetter, G. (2020). ‘Hare and Hound’: Ends and Means in Coleridge’s Letters. In: Callaghan, M., Howe, A. (eds) Romanticism and the Letter. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_6
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