Abstract
Wordsworth remembered Coleridge as “quite an epicure in sound” and elaborated thus: “When he was intent on a new experiment in metre, the time and labour he bestowed were inconceivable.” Likewise, Sara Coleridge remembered that, “if people admired ‘Christabel,’ as it were, by nature, he was never easy till he had put them in the way of admiring it more scientifically.”2 The gist of the matter in Coleridge’s mind lay in adjusting the claims of two rival systems of understanding and organizing verse: one of them counts syllables and arranges them in set patterns, as in the Greek and Latin verse then taught in school; the other maintains an equal number of stresses in each line, regardless of the number and pattern of syllables, as in the English vernacular tradition. In theory, the gulf is enormous. Classical prosody measures duration by eye and English prosody judges accent by ear, so that an analogy proposed by Hartley Coleridge is quaint but apposite:
The Roman metres, in our Country, stand much in the praedicament of the Roman law: Accent is the common, Quantity is the civil law. Hexameters and Pentameters are the Admiralty Courts and Doctors Commons, where the practice must be directed by the Roman Code, and yet in conformity to the English.3
Mallarmé and Rimbaud have suffered quite enough already by being interpreted. My own view is that to demand an interpretation of a poem is evidence of misunderstanding of the nature of poetry. All one can ask is admission to the world of the poem, and permission to explore.
—Elizabeth Sewell 1
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Notes
The transition to the new accentualism is charted by Paul Fussell Jr., Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England (New London: Connecticut College, 1954).
The point lies at the heart of the argument made by Audrey Elizabeth McKim, “‘An Epicure in Sound’”: Coleridge on the Scansion of Verse,” English Studies in Canada (Edmonton, AB) 18 (1992), 287–300 at 293 (and I echo her words here). See also her dissertation, An Epicure in Sound: Coleridge’s Theory and Practice of Versification (PhD dissertation, York University Toronto, submitted May 1990). McKim’s understanding of how Coleridge’s allegiance to the two traditions of prosody was differently weighted is, I feel, particularly valuable.
See for example his conventional scansion of Samson Agonistes lines 80–150 in October 1807 (CN 2:3180) and of part of “The Knight’s Tomb” (303)—of all poems!—in October 1824 (CL 5:381).
Prospectus for the school at Ottery attached to John Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Dissertations on Judges XVII and XVIII (London: for the Author, 1768), 273–75 at 275. John Coleridge cites Foster’s “learned Treatise” (2nd ed. 1763) in his A Critical Latin Grammar; etc. (London: for the Author, 1772), 36 and 161; for his son on the same topic, also citing Foster, see SW&F 1:50–57 and the references there to articles by George Whalley and C. I. Patterson.
For commentary on this circuitous line of interconnected reading and writing, in which poetry merged with politics, see Ernest BernhardtKabisch, “ ‘When Klopstock England Defied’: Coleridge, Southey, and the German/English Hexameter,” Comparative Literature 55 No. 2 (Spring 2003); Joseph Patrick Phelan, “Radical Metre: The English Hexameter in Clough’s Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich,” Review of English Studies N.S. 50 (1999); and John David Hall, “Popular Prosody: Spectacle and the Politics of Victorian Versification,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 62 (2007).
See my Coleridge’s Father: Absent Man, Guardian Spirit (Nether Stowey, Som: The Friends of Coleridge, forthcoming), paras. 12.1.7 and 12.3.2 for Coleridge and his father on Psalms and singing at Ottery. The matter clearly connects with Coleridge’s particular interest in Pindar as rhapsode and metrist, for which see CM 2:89 and note, TT 2:12.
Thelwall the accentualist is given his due by Omond, English Metrists, Being a Sketch of English Prosodical Criticism from Elizabethan Times to the Present Day (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), 125–28. The radical connection of the same prosodical cause bears on the figures with asses’ ears in James Gillray’s 1798 cartoon, New Morality, who wave papers labeled “Coleridge Dactylic” and “Southey Sapphics.”
Where it was discovered by Coventry Patmore and absorbed into his groundbreaking essay: see Coventry Patmore’s “Essay on English Metrical Law”: A Critical Edition with a Commentary ed. Mary Roth (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1961), 56–57 passim.
Fussell, Attridge, and others regard this application of Latin terminology to English scansion as one of Coleridge’s primary contributions, although it should be noted that the most impressive examples were not published until long after his death. Others—Edmund Gosse in his article on Swinburne in Encyclopædia Britannica 11th ed. (21 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 26: 235A-B, and Stanley Leathes in his Rhythm in English Poetry (London: William Heinemann, 1935), 133–43—praise Swinburne for doing exactly the same thing. Even though most of Coleridge’s exercises on the subject were unpublished, his practice evidently encouraged Swinburne to return to the quantitative prosody he learnt at Eton with new understanding.
Purves repeatedly insists on this point with particular reference to the blank verse poems: see Verse Technique, 6, 41–42, 68–69, etc. Similarly, “Lines Written at Elbingerode” (200) is often taken as a confident assertion of Coleridge’s nascent transcendentalism, yet that position took another 10 years to secure—as for example, “Dejection: An Ode” (293) and “To William Wordsworth” (401) make evident.
A study that is valuable not least for its survey of the music available to be heard by the authors discussed is Erland Anderson’s Harmonious Madness: A Study of Musical Metaphors in the Poetry of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats (Salzburg, Austria: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur Universität Salzburg, 1975).
See for example the several excellent essays by David Masson listed in the Bibliography.
Michael John Kooy provides an admirably succinct summary of Coleridge’s debt to Schiller for this concept in his study, Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education (Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave, 1988), 86–88. Schiller’s persuasive formulation of the ideal interrelation between emotion and will—and its working out in drama—buttressed Coleridge’s understanding of the proper relation between rhythm and meter as “gentle and unnoticed,” “laxis effertur habenis [carried on with slackened reins]” (BL 2:16).
Published Philadelphia, 1930. The author was the brother of Alice D. Snyder, who made a number of permanent contributions to Coleridge scholarship.
Theodore Watts-Dunton, Poetry and the Renascence of Wonder (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1916), 15. Charles Tomlinson’s poem, “The Chances of Rhyme” in The Way of a World (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), provides another demonstration of what can be done.
See Geoffrey Grigson on Hardy: “his forms, in spite of his study of Barnes, have an intricate tight roughness like a clump of brambles” (“William Barnes, 1800–1886” in The Mint: A Miscellany of Literature, Art and Criticism ed. Geoffrey Grigson (London: Routledge and Sons, 1946), 92–93; and reprinted in his Harp of Aeolus and Other Essays on Art, Literature and Nature (London: Routledge, 1948), 116.
These last words are quoted from George Oppen’s poem, “If It All Went Up In Smoke” in Primitive (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1978), 18; New Collected Poems ed. Michael Davidson (New York: New Directions, 2002), 274.
“Imagination and Speculation in Coleridge’s Conversation Poems,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 64 (1965), 692.
A rare and somewhat neglected example of the first kind is Max F. Schulz, The Poetic Voices of Coleridge: A Study of His Desire for Spontaneity and Passion for Order (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1963). Examples of the second kind are legion.
For example, from David Perkins in “How the Romantics Recited Poetry,” Studies in English Literature (Houston, TX) 31 (1991).
“My First Acquaintance with Poets” (1823) in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt ed. P. P. Howe (21 vols. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930–34), 17:118; Collier in Lects 1808–1819 2:476.
“Reflections on ‘Vers Libre’ ” (1917) in To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), 183–89 at 187.
I use the word “covenant” advisedly, but see Robert J. Barth, Coleridge and Christian Doctrine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 180–81 and notes for references and another interpretation. What is not in doubt is that Coleridge’s commitment to marriage was more than legalistic. Eric Griffiths, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 238–40 meditates on the relation between metrical law and marriage law in, for example, Coventry Patmore.
James Sutherland, The Medium of Poetry (London: The Hogarth Press, 1934), 79–80; and cited by D. W. Harding, Words into Rhythm: EnglishSpeech Rhythm in Verse and Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 97.
“Essay on Coleridge” prefixed to Christabel and the Lyrical and Imaginative Poems of S. T. Coleridge (London: Sampson Low; New York: Scribner, Welford, 1869), viii.
Edwin Guest, A History of English Rhythms (2 vols. London: William Pickering, 1838), 2:249.
And failed to complete the antistrophe even so. Guest, History of English Rhythms, 2:263 suggests a reason: “Coleridge’s rhythm in the three first lines of his Antistrophe, agrees so ill with his subject, as barely to escape the charge of burlesque.”
John Jones, The Egotistical Sublime: A History of Wordsworth’s Imagination (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960), 204–05.
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© 2013 J. C. C. Mays
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Mays, J.C.C. (2013). Matters of Style. In: Coleridge’s Experimental Poetics. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137350237_4
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