Abstract
Charlotte Poole, who had disapproved of Coleridge from the beginning and been horrified at the thought of his living so close to her cousin Tom, was ‘shocked to hear that Mr Thelwall has spent some time at Stowey this week with Mr Coleridge, and consequently with Tom Poole’. ‘Alfoxden house’, she heard, ‘is taken by another of the fraternity’: ‘To what are we coming?’1 To what indeed. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Thelwall might have thought of themselves as disaffected with politics in their different ways, but the report of the special agent, James Walsh, dispatched by the Home Office in August 1797 to investigate their activities saw them as ‘a mischiefuous gang of disaffected Englishmen’ and a ‘Sett of violent Democrats’.2 Anxiety about a French invasion along the west coast was high after French ships landed 1200–1400 soldiers at Fishguard in Wales earlier in the year and rumours about the seditious activities of Poole’s friends’ were rife in the district.3 Thelwall, after all, had been arrested for treason and spent time in the Tower. In a largely comic account in the Biographia of the suspicions they aroused, Coleridge recalls that his topographical jottings for a long poem to be entitled ‘The Brook’ were misinterpreted as laying plans for an enemy invasion and that the ‘government spy’ misheard a reference to Spinoza in their conversation as ‘Spy nosey’ and took it as a reference to himself. If the paranoia they generated was more serious than Coleridge later allowed, it was certainly ironic, given that the three of them were seeking asylum in what Thelwall described to his wife as an ‘enchanting retreat (the Academus of Stowey)’.4
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Notes
Walsh’s reports to the Home Office are quoted by Nicholas Roe in his Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), pp. 258–60.
On the French ‘invasion’ of 22 February 1797 – an invasion largely of ‘Irish exiles, prison convicts, emigres on probation and other French undesirables’ – see Jennifer Mori, Britain in the Age of the French Revolution 1785–1820 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), p. 72; Roe discusses it at some length in Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years, pp. 251–7.
William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 228.
See Leigh Hunt: ‘He recited his Kubla Khan one morning to Lord Byron, in his lordship’s house in Piccadilly, when I happened to be in another room. I remember the other’s coming away from him, highly struck with his poem, and saying how wonderfully he talked. This was the impression of everybody who heard him’, Autobiography, ed. J. E. Morpurgo (London, 1949), p. 288.
Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, World’s Classics, ed. J. P. Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 78.
Camille Paglia, ‘The Daemon as Lesbian Vampire’, in her Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 317–46 (p. 317).
William Hazlitt, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, in William Hazlitt: Selected Writings, World’s Classics, ed. Jon Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 211–30 (p. 217).
In a note dictated to Isabella Fenwick, reprinted in Coleridge: The Ancient Mariner and Other Poems: A Casebook, eds Alun R. Jones and William Tydeman (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 24–5 (p. 24).
Wordsworth added this in a note to the second, 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads – see Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth and Coleridge, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, second edition (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 276.
The classic study of Coleridge’s sources for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner remains John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study of the Ways of the Imagination, revised edition (London: Constable, 1930).
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), pp. 62–3.
As quoted in Inquiring Spirit: A New Presentation of Coleridge from His Published and Unpublished Prose Writings, ed. Kathleen Coburn, revised edition (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 56–7.
A convenient modern compilation of rhetorical devices can be found in Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, second edition (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1991).
Richard Holmes, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Poetry (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 311.
David Beres, ‘A Dream, A Vision, and a Poem’, International Journal of Psycho-analysis, XI–XII, no. 2 (1959), pp. 97–116,
as quoted in The Annotated Ancient Mariner, ed. Martin Gardner (Cleveland and New York: C. N. Potter, 1965), 215–17.
For an important discussion relating the different levels of interpretation in the poem to biblical criticism, see Jerome McGann, ‘The Ancient Mariner: The Meaning of Meanings’, in his The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), pp. 135–72.
Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 4.
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© 2007 William Christie
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Christie, W. (2007). ‘The Poet, Described in Ideal Perfection’: Annus Mirabilis. In: Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627857_5
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