Today and To Do

Abstract

If Coleridge’s poem was kidnapped by a “Romantic Ideology” whose seeds lie in a poetic tradition firmly established before 1850, a return to poets who have written outside that tradition since at least the 1940s and 1950s illustrates the available “mental space” for it in our own time. The argument rests on a distinction alluded to several times in previous chapters: for instance, in Chaps. 4 and 5 where Wordsworth pursued an ambitious role for poetry as a profession and Coleridge ingenuously, and no less ambitiously, measured the value of what he wrote by means other than public recognition. “To do” is simply to recognise the Coleridgean alternative for what it is and that other poets like Prynne and Howe have successfully attempted the same.

She said

What I like more than anything

Is to visit other islands . . .

George Oppen ¹