Abstract
A poet seen by his readers and a poet writing poems are worlds apart, and the crusty truism applies to Coleridge no less than to others. The two worlds can appear similar and adjacent, as with Robert Frost or Seamus Heaney, or separate as in the case of Wallace Stevens. The striking accidents that mark Coleridge’s public career—the notice he attracted from the beginning and the failings at odds with his great gifts—confuse the issue. If a person’s reputation follows him like a shadow, as Lincoln said, Coleridge’s overtook and completely subsumed his poetical self. The irony is the greater because the space Coleridge occupied when he composed—even during the time when he sat at the same table and walked the same paths as Wordsworth—is private indeed. It resembles the mental space Spenser kept separate from his public duties in Ireland, where he dwelt on concerns that occupied his mind on another level from colonization and petty administration.
I think of poetry as it was said
of Alanbrooke’s war diary: a work done
to gain, or regain, possession of himself,
as a means of survival and, in that sense,
a mode of moral life.
—Geoffrey Hill
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Notes
Geoffrey Hill, “Citations I” in A Treatise of Civil Power (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 2.
William Hazlitt, “Mr. Wordsworth” in The Spirit of the Age: or Contemporary Portraits (London: Henry Colburn, 1825), 235–36; The Complete Works of William Hazlitt ed. P. P. Howe (21 vols. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930–34), 11:88.
The quoted phrases and the burden of the following sentence are from pp. iv–vi of Meynell’s pithy introduction to her 1905 selection for The Wallet Library; reprinted in The Wares of Autolycus: Selected Literary Essays of Alice Meynell ed. P. M. Fraser (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 154–57. They draw on her 1897 essay in the Pall Mall Gazette.
A generous remark at the time, when he was the better-known poet and had more to lose by the generally unfavorable reception of Lyrical Ballads, as H. W. Garrod emphasizes in his lecture “Coleridge” in The Profession of Poetry and Other Lectures (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), 66–67.
Lamb’s defense appears in letters to Southey (November 8, 1798) and Wordsworth (January 30, 1801): The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1796–1817 ed. Edwin W. Marrs (3 vols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975–78), 1:142 and 266. For protests against the tide of twentieth-century criticism on behalf of this category of feeling, see John F. Danby, The Simple Wordsworth: Studies in the Poems 1797–1807 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), and Norman Fruman, “Romanticism and the Decay of the Affections,” in Aspects du Romantisme Anglais: Mélanges Offerts a Jacques Blondel ed. Bernadette Bertrandias et al. (Clermont: Université de Clermont II, UER Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Centre du Romantisme Anglais, 1980). Cottle is not a reliable witness but he had no reason to invent trivial circumstantial details. He omitted the anecdote in his more focused abbreviated account (compare Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey [London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1847], 137–38), like others he considered less relevant to his main theme. I comment on the complicated beginnings of STC’s myth about himself involving Frank and his other brothers in my Coleridge’s Father: Absent Man, Guardian Spirit (Nether Stowey, Som: The Friends of Coleridge, forthcoming), para 10.7.7.
J. S. Hill pointed out that the last phrase here is borrowed from Milton’s preface to The Reason of Church Government (John Beer, Coleridge’s Play of Mind [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010], 154n). Milton is significant because he prompted a good deal of Coleridge’s thinking about music and poetry.
Edward Bostetter, “Coleridge’s Manuscript Essay on the Passions,” Journal of the History of Ideas 31(1970), 108.
In M. H. Abrams, The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism ed. Jack Stillinger (New York: Norton, 1984), 76–108 (chapter 4).
Ben Jonson ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (11 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925–52), 8:242–47.
James Vigus, Platonic Coleridge (London: Legenda, 2009), is very good—surely definitive—on Coleridge’s ambivalent feelings
“Aire and Angels,” in Elegies and Songs and Sonnets ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 75–76 at 75.
Life Supports: New and Collected Poems (San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, 1981), 211. For other poems by Bronk containing similarly explicit statements of this theme, see “The Ignorant Lust after Knowledge” and “Ontology Offers a Hindrance To Humanism” (Life Supports, 136, 184). Reflections on these poems by Henry Weinfield in his Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009) are particularly helpful in bridging the gap between Coleridge’s time and the secular present.
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© 2013 J. C. C. Mays
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Mays, J.C.C. (2013). A Poet Making. In: Coleridge’s Experimental Poetics. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137350237_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137350237_3
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