Abstract
In this chapter, it is argued that Coleridge’s letters, including those that contain drafts of his lyric poems, might best be read as what I call ‘epistolary pathographies’, disclosing a rich process of generic and linguistic experimentation provoked by attempts to articulate the ill body. In both its epistolary and published forms, ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ figures injury as an experience that enables revelatory creative production. In the poem, Coleridge depicts a dialectical interplay between the pained body and the imagination that, I argue, continues to characterize his acts of textual creation for years to come. Coleridge’s 1797 autobiographical letters to Tom Poole, his self-diagnostic letters, and the letters that contain drafts of ‘Dejection: An Ode’ and ‘The Pains of Sleep’ bear witness to an increasingly antagonistic struggle between his unruly, ill body, on the one hand, and his (potentially) transcendent mind and imagination, on the other.
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- 1.
Alan Vardy reads the long passage I have quoted from Sara’s “Introduction” as indicating that, to her mind, the acts of “thinking and composition” were “palliative” for her father (107). I wish to put the matter more pointedly and make a broader claim, that here Sara indicates her father’s bodily states (and the states of his bodily mind) created the circumstances in which his thinking and writing would take the shape they took. One effect of this was that thinking and writing became palliative acts, but the consequences of his body for his modes of thought and textual production are also, I will demonstrate, aesthetic and social. Also see Vardy on Sara’s embodied sympathy for her father.
- 2.
For Budge, Coleridgean thought is a process of digestion in which perceptions are “assimilat[ed] … into the living whole which is the mind”—and the imagination is the faculty that allows this to happen (82). He argues for a reading of Coleridge as a “materialist” insofar as “the focus of his attention is the materially embodied situation in which human thought takes place” (97). As I detailed in Chapter 4, Budge views this as a point of connection between Tom Wedgwood and Coleridge; Wedgwood’s distinctive approach to materialism is one of several important ways he may have influenced Coleridge.
- 3.
G. Thomas Couser (Recovering Bodies: Disability, Illness, and Life Writing) and Arthur Frank (The Wounded Storyteller) are other foundational voices in the study of illness narrative.
- 4.
Henceforth I will abbreviate Collected Letters, Volume I as “CL.”
- 5.
This is not unlike the way that the “strange / And extreme silentness” of the cottage in “Frost at Midnight” provokes Coleridge’s exploration of present sounds (the “owlet’s cry” and Hartley’s “gentle breathings, heard in this dead calm”), as well as sounds of memory (the church bells, which I discussed in Chapter 3) (9–10, 2, 50, 34–8).
- 6.
The letters are dated within the span of approximately one year: 6 February 1797, March 1797, 9 October 1797, endorsed 16 October 1797, and endorsed 19 February 1798. The length it took Coleridge to accomplish this narrative project indicates that it was more than a caprice, but rather an undertaking of some significance.
- 7.
Coleridge cultivated the notion of himself as a prodigious talker. In some instances he even attributed a kind of separate life and agency to his speech. In an October 1803 letter to Tom Poole, for example, Coleridge writes,
Yet I talk so much & so variously, that doubtless I say a thousand Things that exist in the minds of others, when to my own consciousness they are as if they had never been. I lay too many Eggs in the hot Sands with Ostrich Carelessness & Ostrich oblivion—And tho’ many are luckily trod on & smashed; as many crawl forth into Life, some to furnish Feathers for the Caps of others, and more alas! to plume the Shafts in the Quivers of my Enemies and of them “that lie in wait against my Soul.” (CL 1011)
Stories about Coleridge the talker were also frequent among his friends. Charles Lamb recounted an especially vivid (if fabricated) story in which Coleridge cornered him, “brimful of some new idea.” Lamb “quietly severed the button from my coat,” which Coleridge had taken in hand, and left the garden. When he returned five hours later he found Coleridge still talking with “closed eyes” and “the button in his fingers,” and with no sense that his friend had been absent (Lucas, Life II: 267–8). If Lamb was prone to humorous exaggeration, it was usually in relation to deep truths.
- 8.
Coleridge’s father’s death in 1781 leads to what may well be the first time that he observed symptoms in such a way as to be able to make a retrospective diagnosis. Coleridge writes confidently, “some said it was the Gout in the Heart—probably, it was a fit of Apoplexy” (CL 355).
- 9.
Food is also how he judges his early institutional experiences. Of his first school, Hertford, he says “I was very happy, on the whole; for I had plenty to eat & drink, & pudding & vegetables almost every day.” Here he measures his state of mind by his state of body. At Christ’s Hospital, Coleridge recounts, “Our diet was very scanty,” and in detailing his dissatisfaction with the school he goes so far as to detail its weekly menu. “[E]xcepting on Wednesdays,” Coleridge notes, “I never had a belly full. Our appetites were damped never satisfied—and we had no vegetables” (CL 388–9).
- 10.
This scene resembles the scene of Mary Lamb’s murder of her mother closely enough that I have long wondered if Coleridge’s reaction to the “day of horrors” could have been partly shaped by his own knife-wielding memory, which easily could have led to injuring Frank were it not for luck and the successful mediation of their mother. Conversely, Mary Lamb’s murder could have reflected back on the crumbly cheese incident, giving it additional emotional resonance for Coleridge.
- 11.
In Wallen’s reading, Coleridge’s opium addiction, as well as his desire to keep it private, account for his appeal to medical discourse. It was a time in Coleridge’s life, Wallen explains, when he “struggled … to create an acceptable public character whose parts made up a constitutional whole” (53). All of this may be true, but if hiding his addiction was one of Coleridge’s motivations in seeking out scrofula, it was by no means his only motivation—nor do I think it was his primary motivation.
- 12.
This may just be another attempt on Coleridge’s part to find a medical framework to help him interpret his body, but his interest in pain may well have been heightened by his developing friendship with Tom Wedgwood, whose metaphysical preoccupation with pleasure and pain I examined in Chapter 4.
- 13.
What was called “gout” during the Romantic era was roughly the same disease as it is now, except that it was thought that, although the big toe was the most common site of disease, it could attack a much wider range of body parts—hence Coleridge’s mention that his father’s cause of death was said to have been “Gout in the Heart.” Scrofula is a condition defined by swelling of the lymph nodes, especially of the neck, but also sometimes of the armpits and groin. It is usually caused by tuberculosis. As with gout, scrofula in the Romantic era was less site-specific than it is now, and also was associated with a much broader and less defined symptomology.
- 14.
In the Gospel of Mark, 5, Jesus meets a “man with an uncleane spirit,/Who had his dwelling among the tombs” in Gadarenes (242). This is an unusually potent image of simultaneous moral taint and moral absolution—not only because of Jesus’s exorcism, but also because the man is possessed, a passive form of corruption.
- 15.
In Greek mythology Tartarus houses those who had sinned against the gods; in the Bible it appears in the Gospel of Peter as a realm to contain sinning angels.
- 16.
Hygëia was published in 1802, and we know Coleridge to have read it soon after publication. Given their relationship, Coleridge would have been familiar with Beddoes’s take on scrofula and gout much earlier.
- 17.
Grinnell has written about Hygëia that, “[r]ather than committing the care of the people to the people, Beddoes imagines for a moment a much more disciplinary environment of maximal surveillance, even and especially if the authority of the physician is not present” (238).
- 18.
Vickers notes that “analogies between human and vegetable life were the special province of the materialists,” and observes, “It is perhaps not insignificant that Coleridge had long been in the habit of comparing Wordsworth with a flourishing tree” (Doctors 90).
- 19.
Neil Vickers has traced the poem’s engagement with contemporaneous ideas of epilepsy, primarily those of Erasmus Darwin (who considered it a disease of volition) and the Swiss epileptic K. W. L. von Drais (Doctors 134–60). Common explanations of the condition included physiological and mental or moral causes, but, as Beddoes notes, “No other disease is so strongly marked as a subject of terror by the language of mankind,” in part because of the “ancient” belief “that it was a punishment inflicted upon offending mortals by angry divinities or daemons” (Hygëia IX: 17).
- 20.
In this letter, written on his thirtieth birthday (as he announces at the outset), Coleridge prefaces his offer of companionship and sympathy with details of his domestic strife, which recently has been resolved because of a bout of illness during which both Coleridge and his wife thought he might die. In this letter Coleridge also quotes from “Dejection: An Ode.” These circumstances help to explain his eagerness to join Wedgwood.
- 21.
This point is driven home by the fact that he reports he has had such a pleasant time at Cresselly, the home of Wedgwood’s sister, that “the best Blessing … is a placid Sleep—no difficulties in my Dreams, no pains, [no Desires]—” (CL 890). The phrase “no Desires” is crossed out, according to Griggs. If the phrase was not quite right, it could indicate that Coleridge did feel desire in the presence of the Wedgwoods, or that his desires were fulfilled rather than non-existent. Coleridge requests that, if the child Sara then carried were a boy, he should be named Cresselly in commemoration of his time with the Wedgwood family. It was a request he repeated, but when Sara gave birth it was to the girl whom they christened Sara.
- 22.
Also see Timo Pfaff on Coleridge, Wedgwood, touch, and double-touch. It is also worth mentioning that, because both Wedgwood and Coleridge regularly took opium, their symptoms often were strikingly similar.
- 23.
In his note to “Kubla Khan” Coleridge writes that “[o]n awaking” from what was presumably an opium-fueled dream “he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved” (Poetry and Prose 181).
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Stanback, E.B. (2016). Between the Author “Disabled” and the Coleridgean Imagination: STC’s Epistolary Pathographies. In: The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51140-9_5
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