Introduction: A Character in the Antithetical Manner

Abstract

This chapter sets up the biographical, textual, and contextual parameters of Coleridge’s compulsion to publish matters of an extraordinarily sensitive personal nature in the unambiguously public space of the newspaper. The focus is on Coleridge’s personal and poetical relationships between 1799, when he returned from Germany, and 1802, when he published ‘Dejection. An Ode’ in the Morning Post newspaper on 4 October, the wedding day of his best friend William Wordsworth and the seventh anniversary of his own unhappy marriage. In the newspaper Coleridge found an outlet for his personal frustrations and his poetic disappointments about Sara Hutchinson and William Wordsworth, for his ideas about reciprocity, and for his own experiments with poetry and poetics. My study blurs the distinction between private and public spheres by considering how Coleridge communicated private matters publicly.