‘Fragments from the universal’: Hartley Coleridge’s Poetics of Relationship

Abstract

The poems most often associated with Hartley Coleridge are those which suggest a self-pitying outlook on his life and ability; the phrases ‘No hope have I to live a deathless name’, ‘For I have lost the race I never ran’, ‘Long time a child’ and Let me not deem that I was made in vain’ have subsequently become inextricably linked with his poetic reputation (CPW, p. 91, l. l; p. 7, ll. 11, 1; p. 112, l. 1). While such mournful phrases offer glimpses into the psychological complexity of Hartley’s struggle towards self-realization, both personally and poetically, such pessimism forms only a small part of what is a wide and varied literary ouevre. And, as Don Paterson recognizes, it is exactly Hartley’s poetic proficiency that has caused such fatalistic phrases to be taken literally by critics: ‘[Hartley] was so eloquently convincing on the matter of his own literary inferiority that he managed to be partly complicit in his own oblivion’ (Paterson, 2006, p. 491). Many poets submit to self-doubt, rigorous self-criticism and admissions of personal and poetic failure — as Yeats states, it is this very ‘quarrel with ourselves’ that makes poetry — yet Hartley’s fears have been taken literally by critics as his only legacy. He has been accepted as an immature, introverted poet largely because this accords with the ‘little Child’, ‘limber Elf / Singing, dancing to itself’ learnt from STC’s ‘Christabel’, and the eternal child figure of William Wordsworth’s ‘To H. C., Six Years Old’ (PW, I.1, p. 503, ll. 656-7).