Samuel Taylor Coleridge, New Edition (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views

Samuel Taylor Coleridge New Edition

Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom

Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Samuel Taylor Coleridge—New Edition Copyright © 2010 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2010 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any informa­tion storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Samuel Taylor Coleridge / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed.    p. cm.—(Bloom’s modern critical views)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-60413-809-2   1. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834—Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold.   PR4484.S26 2010   821'.7—dc22 2009048103 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com. Contributing editor: Pamela Loos Cover design by Alicia Post Composition by IBT Global, Troy NY Cover printed by IBT Global, Troy NY Book printed and bound by IBT Global, Troy NY Date printed: February 2010 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

Contents

Editor’s Note

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Introduction 1 Harold Bloom The Biographia Literaria and the Contentions of English Romanticism Jerome J. McGann

17

The Imaginative Vision of Kubla Khan: On Coleridge’s Introductory Note David Perkins The Politics of “Frost at Midnight” Paul Magnuson

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The Ancient Mariner: An Answer to Warren William Empson

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Coleridge: Prescience, Tenacity and the Origin of Sociology 99 Thomas McFarland “Between Poetry and Oratory”: Coleridge’s Romantic Effusions J. Douglas Kneale

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Contents

Coda: The Incomprehensible Mariner Seamus Perry Pictorialism and Matter-of-Factness in Coleridge’s Poems of Somerset Jack Stillinger Christabel and the Origin of Evil William A. Ulmer Chronology

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Contributors

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Bibliography

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Acknowledgments Index

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157 171

Editor’s Note

My introduction concerns Coleridge’s anxiety of influence and its effect on his poetic genius. Jerome J. McGann presents a refreshingly new account of the relation of the Biographia Literaria to the agon of romanticism. David Perkins returns us to “Kubla Khan” ’s “the person from Purlock,” after which Paul Magnuson hazards a political approach to “Frost at Midnight.” The famous reading of The Ancient Mariner by Robert Penn Warren is disputed by William Empson, while Thomas McFarland uncovers in Coleridge a prolepsis of sociology. J. Douglas Kneale explores Coleridge’s poetic rhetoric, after which Seamus Perry brings us back to The Ancient Mariner. The complex dialectics of Coleridge’s poetry are learnedly expounded by Jack Stillinger, while in this volume’s final essay, William A. Ulmer meditates on Christabel.

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H arold B loom

Introduction

C

oleridge, the youngest of 14 children of a country clergyman, was a precocious and lonely child, a kind of changeling in his own family. Early a dreamer and (as he said) a “character,” he suffered the loss of his father (who had loved him best of all the children) when he was only nine. At Christ’s Hospital in London, soon after his father’s death, he found an excellent school that gave him the intellectual nurture he needed, as well as a lifelong friend in the future essayist Charles Lamb. Early a poet, he fell deeply in love with Mary Evans, a schoolfellow’s sister, but sorrowfully nothing came of it. At Jesus College, Cambridge, Coleridge started well, but temperamentally he was not suited to academic discipline and failed of distinction. Fleeing Cambridge and much in debt, he enlisted in the cavalry under the immortal name of Silas Tomkyn Comberback but kept falling off his horse. Though he proved useful to his fellow dragoons at writing love letters, he was good for little else but stable cleaning, and the cavalry allowed his brothers to buy him out. He returned to Cambridge, but his characteristic guilt impeded academic labor, and when he abandoned Cambridge in 1794 he had no degree. A penniless young poet, radical in politics, original in religion, he fell in with the then equally radical bard Robert Southey, remembered today as the conservative laureate constantly savaged in Byron’s satirical verse. Like our contemporary communards, the two poetical youths projected what they named a “pantisocracy.” With the right young ladies and, hopefully, other choice spirits, they would found a communistic agrarian-literary settlement on the banks of the Susquehanna River in exotic Pennsylvania. At Southey’s





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urging, Coleridge made a pantisocratic engagement to the not very brilliant Sara Fricker, whose sister Southey was to marry. Pantisocracy died aborning, and Coleridge in time woke up miserably to find himself unsuitably married, the greatest misfortune of his life. He turned to Wordsworth, whom he had met early in 1795. His poetry influenced Wordsworth’s and helped the latter attain his characteristic mode. It is not too much to say that Coleridge’s poetry disappeared into Words­ worth’s. We remember Lyrical Ballads (1798) as Wordsworth’s book, yet about a third of it (in length) was Coleridge’s, and “Tintern Abbey,” the crown of the volume except for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, is immensely indebted to Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight.” Nor is there much evidence of Words­worth admiring or encouraging his friend’s poetry; toward The Ancient Mariner he was always very grudging, and he was discomfited (but inevitably so) by both “Dejection: An Ode” and “To William Wordsworth.” Selfless where Wordsworth’s poetry was concerned, Coleridge had to suffer his closest friend’s neglect of his own poetic ambitions. This is not an easy matter to be fair about, since literature necessarily is as much a matter of personality as it is of character. Coleridge, like Keats (and to certain readers, Shelley), is lovable. Byron is at least always fascinating, and Blake in his lonely magnificence is a hero of the imagination. But Words­ worth’s personality, like Milton’s or Dante’s, does not stimulate affection for the poet in the common reader. Coleridge has, as Walter Pater observed, a “peculiar charm”; he seems to lend himself to myths of failure, which is astonishing when the totality of his work is contemplated. Yet it is his life, and his self-abandonment of his poetic ambitions, that continue to convince us that we ought to find in him parables of the failure of genius. His best poetry was all written in the year and half in which he saw Wordsworth daily (1797–98), yet even his best poetry, with the single exception of The Ancient Mariner, is fragmentary. The pattern of his life is fragmentary also. When he received an annuity from the Wedgwoods, he left Wordsworth and Dorothy to study language and philosophy in Germany (1798–99). Soon after returning, his miserable middle years began, though he was only 27. He moved near the Wordsworths again and fell in love, permanently and unhappily, with Sara Hutchinson, whose sister Mary was to become Wordsworth’s wife in 1802. His own marriage was hopeless, and his health rapidly deteriorated, perhaps for psychological reasons. To help endure the pain he began to drink laudanum, liquid opium, and thus contracted an addiction he never entirely cast off. In 1804, seeking better health, he went to Malta but returned two years later in the worst condition of his life. Separating from Mrs. Coleridge, he moved to London and began another career as lecturer, general man of letters, and periodical editor, while his miseries

Introduction



augmented. The inevitable quarrel with Wordsworth in 1810 was ostensibly reconciled in 1812, but real friendship was not reestablished until 1828. From 1816 on, Coleridge lived in the household of a physician, James Gillman, so as to be able to keep working and thus avoid total breakdown. Prematurely aged, his poetry period over, Coleridge entered into a major last phase as critic and philosopher, on which his historical importance depends; but this, like his earlier prose achievements, is beyond the scope of an introduction to his poetry. It remains to ask, What was his achievement as a poet, and extraordinary as that was, why did his poetry effectively cease after about 1807? Wordsworth went on with poetry after 1807 but mostly very badly. The few poems Coleridge wrote, from the age of 35 on, are powerful but occasional. Did the poetic will not fail in him, since his imaginative powers did not? Coleridge’s large poetic ambitions included the writing of a philosophic epic on the origin of evil and a sequence of hymns to the sun, moon, and elements. These high plans died, slowly but definitively, and were replaced by the dream of a philosophic Opus Maximum, a huge work of synthesis that would reconcile German idealist philosophy with the orthodox truths of Christianity. Though only fragments of this work were ever written, much was done in its place—speculations on theology, political theory, and criticism that were to influence profoundly conservative British thought in the Victorian period and, in quite another way, the American transcendentalism led by Emerson and Theodore Parker. Coleridge’s actual achievement as poet divides into two remarkably diverse groupings—remarkable because they are almost simultaneous. The daemonic group, necessarily more famous, is the triad of The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and “Kubla Khan.” The “conversational” group includes the conversation poem proper, of which “The Eolian Harp” and “Frost at Midnight” are the most important, as well as the irregular odes, such as “Dejection” and “To William Wordsworth.” The late fragments, “Limbo” and “Ne Plus Ultra,” are a kind of return to the daemonic mode. For a poet of Coleridge’s gifts to have written only nine poems that really matter is a sorrow, but the uniqueness of the two groups partly compensates for the slenderness of the canon. The daemonic poems break through the orthodox censor set up by Coleridge’s moral fears of his own imaginative impulses. Unifying the group is a magical quest pattern that intends as its goal a reconciliation between the poet’s self-consciousness and a higher order of being, associated with divine forgiveness; but this reconciliation fortunately lies beyond the border of all these poems. The Mariner attains a state of purgation but cannot get beyond that process. Christabel is violated by Geraldine, but this, too, is a purgation



Harold Bloom

rather than a damnation, as her utter innocence is her only flaw. Coleridge himself, in the most piercing moment in his poetry, is tempted to assume the state of an Apollo rebirth—the youth with flashing eyes and floating hair—but he withdraws from his vision of a poet’s paradise, judging it to be only another purgatory. The conversational group, though so immensely different in mode, speaks more directly of an allied theme: the desire to go home, not to the past but to what Hart Crane beautifully called “an improved infancy.” Each of these poems, like the daemonic group, verges on a kind of vicarious and purgatorial atonement in which Coleridge must fail or suffer so that someone he loves may succeed or experience joy. There is a subdued implication that somehow the poet will yet be accepted into a true home this side of the grave if he can achieve an atonement. Where Wordsworth, in his primordial power, masters the subjective world and aids his readers in the difficult art of feeling, Coleridge deliberately courts defeat by subjectivity and is content to be confessional. But though he cannot help us to feel, as Wordsworth does, he gives us to understand how deeply felt his own sense of reality is. Though in a way his poetry is a testament of defeat, a yielding to the anxiety of influence and to the fear of selfglorification, it is one of the most enduringly poignant of such testaments that literature affords us. “Psychologically,” Coleridge observed, “consciousness is the problem”; and he added somberly: “Almost all is yet to be achieved.” How much he achieved Kathleen Coburn and others are showing us. My concern here is the sadder one of speculating yet again about why he did not achieve more as a poet. Walter Jackson Bate has meditated, persuasively and recently, on Coleridge’s human and literary anxieties, particularly in regard to the burden of the past and its inhibiting poetic splendors. I swerve away from Bate to center the critical meditation on what might be called the poetics of anxiety, the process of misprision by which any latecomer strong poet attempts to clear an imaginative space for himself. Coleridge could have been a strong poet, as strong as Blake or Words­ worth. He could have been another mighty antagonist for the Great Spectre Milton to engage and, yes, to overcome, but not without contests as titanic as those provided by Blake’s The Four Zoas and Wordsworth’s The Excursion, and parental victories as equivocal as those achieved with Blake’s Jerusalem and Wordsworth’s The Prelude. But we have no such poems by Coleridge. When my path winds home at the end of this introduction, I will speculate as to what these poems should have been. As critical fathers for my quest, I invoke first Oscar Wilde, with his glorious principle that the highest criticism sees the object as in itself it really is not, and second, Wilde’s critical father,

Introduction



Walter Pater, whose essay of 1866 on “Coleridge’s Writings” seems to me still the best short treatment of Coleridge, and this after a century of commentary. Pater, who knew his debt to Coleridge, knew also the anxiety Coleridge caused him, and Pater therefore came to a further and subtler knowing. In the organic analogue, against which the entire soul of the great epicurean critic rebelled, Pater recognized the product of Coleridge’s profound anxieties as a creator. I begin therefore with Pater on Coleridge, and then will move immediately deep into the Coleridgean interior, to look on Coleridge’s fierce refusal to take on the ferocity of the strong poet. This ferocity, as both Coleridge and Pater well knew, expresses itself as a near-solipsism, an egotistical sublime, or Miltonic godlike stance. From 1795 on, Coleridge knew, loved, envied, was both cheered and darkened by the largest instance of that sublime since Milton himself. He studied constantly, almost involuntarily, the glories of the truly modern strong poet, Wordsworth. Whether he gave Wordsworth rather more than he received, we cannot be certain; we know only that he wanted more from Wordsworth than he received, but then it was his endearing though exasperating weakness that he always needed more love than he could get, no matter how much he got: “To be beloved is all I need, / And whom I love, I love indeed.” Pater understood what he called Coleridge’s “peculiar charm,” but he resisted it in the sacred name of what he called the “relative” spirit against Coleridge’s archaizing “absolute” spirit. In gracious but equivocal tribute to Coleridge he observed: The literary life of Coleridge was a disinterested struggle against the application of the relative spirit to moral and religious questions. Everywhere he is restlessly scheming to apprehend the absolute; to affirm it effectively; to get it acknowledged. Coleridge failed in that attempt, happily even for him, for it was a struggle against the increasing life of the mind itself. . . . How did his choice of a controversial interest, his determination to affirm the absolute, weaken or modify his poetic gift.

To affirm the absolute, Pater says—or, as we might say, to reject all dualisms except those sanctioned by orthodox Christian thought—is not materia poetica for the start of the nineteenth century, and if we think of a poem like the “Hymn Before Sun-Rise, in the Vale of Chamouni,” we are likely to agree with Pater. We will agree also when he contrasts Wordsworth favorably with Coleridge, and even with Goethe, commending Wordsworth for “that flawless temperament . . . which keeps his conviction of a latent intelligence in nature within the limits of sentiment or instinct, and confines it to those delicate



Harold Bloom

and subdued shades of expression which perfect art allows.” Pater goes on to say that Coleridge’s version of Wordsworth’s instinct is a philosophical idea, which means that Coleridge’s poetry had to be “more dramatic, more selfconscious” than Wordsworth’s. But this in turn, Pater insists, means that for aesthetic success ideas must be held loosely, in the relative spirit. One idea that Coleridge did not hold loosely was the organic analogue, and it becomes clearer as we proceed in Pater’s essay that the aesthetic critic is building toward a passionate assault on the organic principle. He quotes Coleridge’s description of Shakespeare as “a nature humanized, a genial understanding, directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.” “There,” Pater comments, with bitter eloquence, “‘the absolute’ has been affirmed in the sphere of art; and thought begins to congeal.” With great dignity Pater adds that Coleridge has “obscured the true interest of art.” By likening the work of art to a living organism, Coleridge does justice to the impression the work may give us, but he “does not express the process by which that work was produced.” M. H. Abrams, in his The Mirror and the Lamp, defends Coleridge against Pater by insisting that Coleridge knew his central problem “was to use analogy with organic growth to account for the spontaneous, the inspired, and the self-evolving in the psychology of invention, yet not to commit himself as far to the elected figure as to minimize the supervention of the antithetic qualities of foresight and choice.” Though Abrams calls Pater “short-sighted,” I am afraid the critical palms remain with the relative spirit, for Pater’s point was not that Coleridge had no awareness of the dangers of using the organic analogue but rather that awareness, here as elsewhere, was no salvation for Coleridge. The issue is whether Coleridge, not Shakespeare, was able to direct “self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper than consciousness.” Pater’s complaint is valid because Coleridge, in describing Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton, keeps repeating his absolute formula that poems grow from within themselves, that their “wholeness is not in vision or conception, but in an inner feeling of totality and absolute being.” As Pater says, “that exaggerated inwardness is barren” because it “withdraws us too far from what we can see, hear, and feel,” because it cheats the senses and emotions of their triumph. I urge Pater’s wisdom here not only against Coleridge, though I share Pater’s love for Coleridge, but against the formalist criticism that continued in Coleridge’s absolute spirit. What is the imaginative source of Coleridge’s disabling hunger for the absolute? On August 9, 1831, about three years before he died, he wrote in his notebook: “From my earliest recollection I have had a consciousness of Power without Strength—a perception, an experience, of more than ordinary power with an inward sense of Weakness. . . . More than ever do I feel this now, when all my fancies still in their integrity are, as it were, drawn inward and by their

Introduction



suppression and compression rendered a mock substitute for Strength—” Here again is Pater’s barren and exaggerated inwardness, but in a darker context than the organic principle provided. This context is Milton’s “universe of death,” where Coleridge apprehended death-in-life as being “the wretchedness of division.” If we stand in that universe, then “we think of ourselves as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind, as object to subject, thing to thought, death to life.” To be so separated is to become, Coleridge says, “a soul-less fixed star, receiving no rays nor influences into my Being, a Solitude which I so tremble at, that I cannot attribute it even to the Divine Nature.” This, we can say, is Coleridge’s countersublime, his answer to the anxiety of influence, in strong poets. The fear of solipsism is greater in him than the fear of not individuating his own imagination. As with every other major romantic, the prime precursor poet for Coleridge was Milton. There is a proviso to be entered here; for all these poets—Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge (only Keats is an exception)— there is a greater sublime poetry behind Milton, but as its author is a people and not a single poet, and as it is far removed in time, its greatness does not inhibit a new imagination—not unless it is taken as the work of the Prime Precursor Himself, to whom all creation belongs. Only Coleridge, among these poets, acquired a double sublime anxiety of influence. Beyond the beauty that has terror in it of Milton was beauty more terrible. In a letter to Thelwall, December 17, 1796, Coleridge wrote: “Is not Milton a sublimer poet than Homer or Virgil? Are not his Personages more sublimely cloathed? And do you not know, that there is not perhaps one page in Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which he has not borrowed his imagery from the Scriptures?—I allow, and rejoice that Christ appealed only to the understanding & the affections; but I affirm that, after reading Isaiah, or St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, Homer & Virgil are disgustingly tame to me, & Milton himself barely tolerable.” Yet these statements are rare in Coleridge. Frequently, Milton seems to blend with the ultimate influence, which I think is a normal enough procedure. In 1796, Coleridge also says, in his review of Burke’s Letter to a Noble Lord: “It is lucky for poetry, that Milton did not live in our days. . . .” Here Coleridge moves toward the center of his concern, and we should remember his formula: “Shakespeare was all men, potentially, except Milton.” This leads to a more ambiguous formula, reported to us of a lecture that Coleridge gave on November 28, 1811: “Shakespeare became all things well into which he infused himself, while all forms, all things became Milton—the poet ever present to our minds and more than gratifying us for the loss of the distinct individuality of what he represents.” Though Coleridge truly professes himself more than gratified, he admits loss. Milton’s greatness is purchased at the cost of something dear to Coleridge, a principle of difference he knows



Harold Bloom

may be flooded out by his monistic yearnings. For Milton, to Coleridge, is a mythic monad in himself. Commenting on the apostrophe to light at the commencement of the third book of Paradise Lost, Coleridge notes: “In all modern poetry in Christendom there is an under consciousness of a sinful nature, a fleeting away of external things, the mind or subject greater than the object, the reflective character predominant. In the Paradise Lost the sublimest parts are the revelations of Milton’s own mind, producing itself and evolving its own greatness; and this is truly so, that when that which is merely entertaining for its objective beauty is introduced, it at first seems a discord.” This might be summarized as: where Milton is not, nature is barren, and its significance is that Milton is permitted just such a solitude as Coleridge trembles to imagine for the divine being. Humphry House observed that “Coleridge was quite unbelievably modest about his own poems; and the modesty was of a curious kind, sometimes rather humble and over-elaborate.” As House adds, Coleridge “dreaded publication” of his poetry, and until 1828, when he was 56, there was nothing like an adequate gathering of his verse. Wordsworth’s attitude was no help, of course, and the Hutchinson girls and Dorothy no doubt followed Wordsworth in his judgments. There was Wordsworth, and before him there had been Milton. Coleridge presumably knew what “Tintern Abbey” owed to “Frost at Midnight,” but this knowledge nowhere found expression. Must we resort to psychological speculation in order to see what inhibited Coleridge, or are there more reliable aids available? In the Biographia Literaria Coleridge is not very kind to his pre-Words­ worthian poetry, particularly to the “Religious Musings.” Yet this is where we must seek what went wrong with Coleridge’s ambitions—here, and if there were space, in “The Destiny of Nations” fragments (not its arbitrarily yokedtogether form of 1817), and in “Ode to the Departing Year,” and in “Monody on the Death of Chatterton” in its earlier versions. After Wordsworth had descended on Coleridge, supposedly as a “know-thyself ” admonition from heaven but really rather more like a new form of the Miltonic blight, then Coleridge’s poetic ambitions sustained another kind of inhibition. The Miltonic shadow on early Coleridge needs to be studied first, before a view can be obtained of his maturer struggles with influence. With characteristic self-destructiveness, Coleridge gave “Religious Musings” the definitive subtitle: “A Desultory Poem, Written on the Christmas Eve of 1794.” The root meaning of “desultory” is “vaulting,” and though Coleridge consciously meant that his poem skipped about and wavered, his imagination meant “vaulting,” for “Religious Musings” is a wildly ambitious poem. “This is the time . . .” it begins, in direct recall of Milton’s “Nativity” hymn, yet it follows not the hymn but the most sublime

Introduction



moments of Paradise Lost, particularly the invocation to Book III. As with the 1802 “Hymn Before Sun-Rise,” its great fault as a poem is that it never stops whooping; in its final version I count well more than 100 exclamation points in just more than 400. Whether one finds this habit in Coleridge distressing or endearing hardly matters; he just never could stop doing it. He whoops because he vaults; he is a high jumper of the sublime, and psychologically he could not avoid this. I quote the poem’s final passage with relish and with puzzlement, for I am uncertain as to how good it may be, though it seems awful. Yet its awfulness is at least sublime; it is not the drab, flat awfulness of Wordsworth at his common worst in The Excursion or even (heresy to admit this!) in so many passages of The Prelude—passages that we hastily skip by, feeling zeal and relief in getting at the great moments. Having just shouted out his odd version of Berkeley—that “life is a vision shadowy of truth”—Coleridge sees “the veiling clouds retire” and God appears in a blaze on his throne. Raised to a pitch of delirium by this vision, Coleridge soars aloft to join it: Contemplant Spirits! ye that hover o’er With untired gaze the immeasurable fount Ebullient with Creative Deity! And ye of plastic power, that interfused Roll through the grosser and material mass In organizing surge! Holies of God! (And what if Monads of the infinite mind?) I haply journeying my immortal course Shall sometime join your mystic choir! Till then I discipline my young and novice thought In ministeries of heart-stirring song, And aye on Meditation’s heaven-ward wing Soaring aloft I breathe the empyreal air Of Love, omnific, omnipresent Love, Whose day-spring rises glorious in my soul As the great Sun, when he his influence Sheds on the frost-bound waters—The glad stream Flows to the ray and warbles as it flows.

Scholars agree that this not terribly pellucid passage somehow combines an early Unitarianism with a later orthodox overlay, as well as quantities of Berkeley, Hartley, Newton, Neoplatonism, and possibly more esoteric matter. A mere reader will primarily be reminded of Milton and will be in the right, for Milton counts here and the rest do not. The spirits Coleridge invokes

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are Miltonic angels, though their functions seem to be more complicated. Coleridge confidently assures himself and us that his course is immortal, that he may end up as a Miltonic angel and so perhaps also as a monad of the infinite mind. In the meantime, he will study Milton’s “heart-stirring song.” Otherwise, all he needs is love, which is literally the air he breathes, the sunrise radiating out of his soul in a stream of song, and the natural sun toward which he flows, a sun that is not distinct from God. If we reflect on how palpably sincere this is, how wholehearted, and consider what was to be Coleridge’s actual poetic course, we will be moved. Moved to what? Well, perhaps to remember a remark of Coleridge’s: “There are many men, especially at the outset of life, who, in their too eager desire for the end, overlook the difficulties in the way; there is another class, who see nothing else. The first class may sometimes fail; the latter rarely succeed.” Whatever the truth of this for other men, no poet becomes a strong poet unless he starts out with a certain obliviousness of the difficulties in the way. He will soon enough meet those difficulties, however, and one of them will be that his precursor and inspirer threatens to subsume him, as Coleridge is subsumed by Milton in “Religious Musings” and in his other pre-Wordsworthian poems. And here I shall digress massively before returning to Coleridge’s poetry, for my discourse enters now on the enchanted and baleful ground of poetic influence, through which I am learning to find my way by a singular light—one that will bear a little explanation. I do not believe that poetic influence is simply something that happens, that it is just the process by which ideas and images are transmitted from earlier to later poets. In that view, whether or not influence causes anxiety in the later poet is a matter of temperament and circumstance. Poetic influence thus reduces to source study, of the kind performed on Coleridge by Lowes and later scholars. Coleridge was properly scornful of such study, and I think most critics learn how barren an enterprise it turns out to be. I myself have no use for it as such, and what I mean by the study of poetic influence turns source study inside out. The first principle of the proper study of poetic influence, as I conceive it, is that no strong poem has sources and no strong poem merely alludes to another poem. The meaning of a strong poem is another strong poem, a precursor’s poem that is being misinterpreted, revised, corrected, evaded, twisted askew, made to suffer an inclination or bias that is the property of the later and not the earlier poet. Poetic influence, in this sense, is actually misprision, a poet’s taking or doing amiss of a parent-poem that keeps finding him, to use a Coleridgean turn of phrase. Yet even this misprision is only the first step that a new poet takes when he advances from the early phase where his precursor floods him to a more Promethean phase where he quests for his own fire—which must nevertheless be stolen from his precursor.

Introduction

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I count some half-dozen steps in the life cycle of the strong poet as he attempts to convert his inheritance into what will aid him without inhibiting him by the anxiety of a failure in priority, a failure to have begotten himself. These steps are revisionary ratios, and for the convenience of a shorthand, I find myself giving them arbitrary names that are proving useful to me and perhaps can be of use to others. I list them herewith, with descriptions but not examples, as this can only be a brief sketch; I must get back to Coleridge’s poetry, with this list helpfully in hand, to find my examples in Coleridge. 1. Clinamen, which is poetic misprision proper. I take the word from Lucretius, where it means a “swerve” of the atoms so as to make change possible in the universe. The later poet swerves away from the precursor by so reading the parent-poem as to execute a clinamen in relation to it. This appears as the corrective movement of his own poem, which implies that the precursor poem went accurately up to a certain point but then should have swerved, precisely in the direction that the new poem moves. 2. Tessera, which is completion and antithesis. I take the word not from mosaic making, where it is still used, but from the ancient mystery cults, where it meant a token of recognition—the fragment, say, of a small pot which with the other fragments would reconstitute the vessel. The later poet antithetically “completes” the precursor by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its teens but to mean them in an opposite sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough. 3. Kenosis, which is a breaking device similar to the defense mechanisms our psyches employ against repetition compulsions; kenosis then is a movement toward discontinuity with the precursor. I take the word from St. Paul, where it means the humbling or emptying out of Jesus by himself when he accepts reduction from divine to human status. The later poet, apparently emptying himself of his own afflatus, his imaginative godhood, seems to humble himself as though he ceased to be a poet, but this ebbing is so performed in relation to a precursor’s poem-of-ebbing that the precursor is emptied out also, and so the later poem of deflation is not as absolute as it seems. 4. Daemonization, or a movement toward a personalized countersublime in reaction to the precursor’s sublime. I take the term from general Neoplatonic usage, where an intermediary being, neither divine nor human, enters into the adept to aid him. The later poet opens himself to what he believes to be a power in the parent-poem

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that does not belong to the parent proper but to a range of being just beyond that precursor. He does this, in his poem, by so stationing its relation to the parent-poem as to generalize away the uniqueness of the earlier work. 5. Askesis, or a movement of self-purgation that intends the attainment of a state of solitude. I take the term, general as it is, particularly from the practice of pre-Socratic shamans like Empedocles. The later poet does not, as in kenosis, undergo a revisionary movement of emptying but of curtailing: he yields up part of his own human and imaginative endowment so as to separate himself from others, including the precursor, and he does this in his poem by so stationing it in regard to the parent-poem as to make that poem undergo an askesis also; the precursor’s endowment is also truncated. 6. Apophrades, or the return of the dead. I take the word from the Athenian dismal or unlucky days on which the dead returned to reinhabit the houses in which they had lived. The later poet, in his own final phase, already burdened by an imaginative solitude that is almost a solipsism, holds his own poem so open again to the precursor’s work that at first we might believe the wheel has come full circle and we are back in the later poet’s flooded apprenticeship, before his strength began to assert itself in the revisionary ratios of clinamen and the others. But the poem is now held open to the precursor, where once it was open, and the uncanny effect is that the new poem’s achievement makes it seem to us not as though the precursor were writing it, but as though the later poet himself had written the precursor’s characteristic work.

These then are six revisionary ratios, and I think they can be observed, usually in cyclic appearance, in the life’s work of every post-Enlightenment strong poet—which in English means, for practical purposes, every postMiltonic strong poet. Coleridge, to return now to where I began, had the potential of the strong poet but—unlike Blake, Wordsworth, and the major poets after them down to Yeats and Stevens in our time—declined the full process of developing into one. Yet his work, even in its fragmentary state, demonstrates this revisionary cycle in spite of himself. My ulterior purpose in this discussion is to use Coleridge as an instance because he is apparently so poor an example of the cycle I have sketched. But that makes him a sterner test for my theory of influence than any other poet I could have chosen. I return to Coleridge’s first mature poetry and to its clinamen away from Milton, the Cowperizing turn that gave Coleridge the conversation poems, particularly “Frost at Midnight.” Hazlitt quotes Coleridge as having said to

Introduction

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him in the spring of 1798 that Cowper was the best modern poet, meaning the best since Milton, which was also Blake’s judgment. Humphry House demonstrated the relation between “Frost at Midnight” and The Task—a happy one, causing no anxieties, where a stronger poet appropriates from a weaker one. Coleridge used Cowper as he used Bowles, Akenside, and Collins, finding in all of them hints that could help him escape the Miltonic influx that had drowned out “Religious Musings.” “Frost at Midnight,” like The Task, swerves away from Milton by softening him, by domesticating his style in a context that excludes all sublime terrors. When Coleridge rises to his blessing of his infant son at the poem’s conclusion he is in some sense poetically “misinterpreting” the beautiful declaration of Adam to Eve: “With thee conversing I forget all time,” gentling the darker overtones of the infatuated Adam’s declaration of love. Or, more simply, like Cowper he is not so much humanizing Milton—that will take the strenuous, head-on struggles of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats—as he is making Milton more childlike, or perhaps better, reading Milton as though Milton loved in a more childlike way. The revisionary step beyond this, an antithetical completion or tessera, is ventured by Coleridge only in a few pantheistic passages that sneaked past his orthodox censor, like the later additions to “The Eolian Harp” or the veiled vision at the end of the second verse paragraph of “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” With his horror of division, his endless quest for unity, Coleridge could not sustain any revisionary impulse that involved his reversing Milton or daring to complete that sacred father. But the next revisionary ratio, the kenosis or self-emptying, seems to me almost obsessive in Coleridge’s poetry, for what is the total situation of the Ancient Mariner but a repetition compulsion, which his poet breaks for himself only by the writing of the poem and then only momentarily? Coleridge had contemplated an epic on the origin of evil, but we may ask, Where would Coleridge, if pressed, have located the origin of evil in himself? His Mariner is neither depraved in will nor even disobedient, but merely ignorant, and the spiritual machinery his crime sets into motion is so ambiguously presented as to be finally beyond analysis. I would ask the question, What was Coleridge trying (not necessarily consciously) to do for himself by writing the poem? And by this question I do not mean Kenneth Burke’s notion of trying to do something for oneself as a person. Rather, what was Coleridge the poet trying to do for himself as poet? To which I would answer: trying to free himself from the inhibitions of Miltonic influence by humbling his poetic self and so humbling the Miltonic in the process. The Mariner does not empty himself out; he starts empty and acquires a primary imagination through his suffering. But for Coleridge the poem is a kenosis, and what is being humbled is the Miltonic sublime’s account of the origin of evil. There is a reduction from

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disobedience to ignorance, from the self-aggrandizing consciousness of Eve to the painful awakening of a minimal consciousness in the Mariner. The next revisionary step in clearing an imaginative space for a maturing strong poet is the countersublime, the attaining of which I have termed daemonization, and this I take to be the relation of “Kubla Khan” and Christabel to Paradise Lost. Far more than The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, these poems demonstrate a tracking by Coleridge with powers that are daemonic, even though the Rime explicitly invokes Neoplatonic daemons in its marginal glosses. Opium was the avenging daemon or alastor of Coleridge’s life, his dark or fallen angel, his experiential acquaintance with Milton’s Satan. Opium was for him what wandering and moral tale-telling became for the Mariner—the personal shape of repetition compulsion. The lust for paradise in “Kubla Khan,” Geraldine’s lust for Christabel—these are manifestations of Coleridge’s revisionary daemonization of Milton, these are Coleridge’s countersublime. Poetic genius, the genial spirit itself, Coleridge must see as daemonic when it is his own rather than when it is Milton’s. It is at this point in the revisionary cycle that Coleridge begins to back away decisively from the ferocity necessary for the strong poet. He does not sustain his daemonization; he closes his eyes in holy dread, stands outside the circumference of the daemonic agent, and is startled by his own sexual daring out of finishing Christabel. He moved on to the revisionary ratio I have called askesis, or the purgation into solitude, the curtailing of some imaginative powers in the name of others. In doing so, he prophesied the pattern for Keats in “The Fall of Hyperion,” since in his askesis he struggles against the influence of a composite poetic father, Milton-Wordsworth. The great poems of this askesis are “Dejection: An Ode” and “To William Wordsworth,” where criticism has demonstrated to us how acute the revision of Wordsworth’s stance is and how much of himself Coleridge purges away to make this revision justified. I would add only that both poems misread Milton as sensitively and desperately as they do Wordsworth; the meaning of “Dejection” is in its relation to “Lycidas” as much as in its relation to the “Intimations” ode, even as the poem “To William Wordsworth” assimilates The Prelude to Paradise Lost. Trapped in his own involuntary dualisms, longing for a monistic wholeness such as he believes is found in Milton and Wordsworth, Coleridge in his askesis declines to see how much of his composite parent-poet he has purged away also. After that, sadly enough, we have only a very few occasional poems of any quality by Coleridge, and they are mostly not the poems of a strong poet—that is, of a man vaulting into the sublime. Having refused the full exercise of a strong poet’s misprisions, Coleridge ceased to have poetic ambitions. But there are significant exceptions—the late manuscript fragment “Limbo” and the evidently still-later fragment “Ne Plus Ultra.” Here, and I think here

Introduction

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only, Coleridge experiences the particular reward of the strong poet in his last phase—what I have called the apophrades or return of the dead: not a countersublime but a negative sublime, like the Last Poems of Yeats or The Rock of Stevens. Indeed negative sublimity is the mode of these Coleridgean fragments and indicates to us what Coleridge might have become had he permitted himself enough of the perverse zeal that the great poet must exhibit in malforming his great precursor. “Limbo” and “Ne Plus Ultra” show that Coleridge could have become, at last, the poet of the Miltonic abyss, the bard of Demogorgon. Even as they stand, these fragments make us read Book II of Paradise Lost a little differently; they enable Coleridge to claim a corner of Milton’s chaos as his own. Pater thought that Coleridge had succumbed to the organic analogue because he hungered too intensively for eternity, as Lamb had said of his old school friend. Pater also quoted De Quincey’s summary of Coleridge: “He wanted better bread than can be made with wheat.” I would add that Coleridge hungered also for an eternity of generosity between poets, as between people—a generosity that is not allowed in a world where each poet must struggle to individuate his own breath and this at the expense of his forebears as much as of his contemporaries. Perhaps also, to modify De Quincey, Coleridge wanted better poems than can be made without misprision. I suggest then that the organic analogue, with all its pragmatic neglect of the processes by which poems have to be produced, appealed so overwhelmingly to Coleridge because it seemed to preclude the anxiety of influence and to obviate the poet’s necessity not just to unfold like a natural growth but to develop at the expense of others. Whatever the values of the organic analogue for literary criticism—and I believe, with Pater, that it does more harm than good—it provided Coleridge with a rationale for a dangerous evasion of the inner steps he had to take for his own poetic development. As Blake might have said, Coleridge’s imagination insisted on slaying itself on the stems of generation—or, to invoke another Blakean image, Coleridge lay down to sleep on the organic analogue as though it were a Beulah-couch of soft, moony repose. What was our loss in this? What poems might a stronger Coleridge have composed? The Notebooks list The Origin of Evil, an Epic Poem; Hymns to the Sun, the Moon, and the Elements—six hymns; and, more fascinating even than these, a scheme for an epic on “the destruction of Jerusalem” by the Romans. Still more compelling is a March 1802 entry in the Notebooks: “Milton, a Monody in the metres of Samson’s Choruses—only with more rhymes /—poetical influences—political-moral-Dr. Johnson /.” Consider the date of this entry—only a month before the first draft of “Dejection”— and some sense of what Milton, a Monody might have been begins to be

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generated. In March 1802, William Blake, in the midst of his sojourn at Hayley’s Felpham, was deep in the composition of Milton: A Poem in 2 Books, To Justify the Ways of God to Men. In the brief, enigmatic notes for Milton, a Monody Coleridge sets down “—poetical influences—political-moral-Dr. Johnson,” the last being, we can assume, a refutation of Johnson’s vision of Milton in The Lives of the Poets, a refutation that Cowper and Blake would have endorsed. “Poetical influences,” Coleridge says, and we may recall that this is one of the themes of Blake’s Milton, where the shadow of the poet Milton is one with the covering cherub, the great blocking agent who inhibits fresh human creativity by embodying in himself all the sinister beauty of tradition. Blake’s Milton is a kind of monody in places, not as a mourning for Milton, but as Milton’s own, solitary utterance as he goes down from a premature eternity (where he is unhappy) to struggle again in fallen time and space. I take it though that Milton, a Monody would have been modeled on Coleridge’s early “Monody on the Death of Chatterton” and so would have been Coleridge’s lamentation for his great original. Whether, as Blake was doing at precisely the same time, Coleridge would have dared to identify Milton as the covering cherub, as the angel or daemon blocking Coleridge himself out from the poet’s paradise, I cannot surmise. I wish deeply that Coleridge had written the poem. It is ungrateful, I suppose, as the best of Coleridge’s recent scholars keep telling us, to feel that Coleridge did not give us the poems he had it in him to write. Yet we have, all apology aside, only a double handful of marvelous poems by him. I close therefore by attempting a description of the kind of poem I believe Coleridge’s genius owed us and that we badly need and always will need. I would maintain that the finest achievement of the High Romantic poets of England was their humanization of the Miltonic sublime. But when we attend deeply to the works where this humanization is most strenuously accomplished—Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem, Wordsworth’s Prelude, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Keats’s two Hyperions, even in a way Byron’s Don Juan— we sense at last a quality lacking, a quality in which Milton abounds for all his severity. This quality, though not in itself a tenderness, made Milton’s Eve possible, and we miss such a figure in all her romantic descendants. More than the other five great romantic poets, Coleridge was able, by temperament and by subtly shaded intellect, to have given us a High Romantic Eve, a total humanization of the tenderest and most appealing element in the Miltonic sublime. Many anxieties blocked Coleridge from that rare accomplishment, and of these the anxiety of influence was not the least.

J erome J . M c G ann

The Biographia Literaria and the Contentions of English Romanticism

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I he Biographia Literaria is one of the chief documents of English Romantic theory, and in recent years, thanks to the work of various critics, we have also begun to see the book as a more coherently developed text than it was earlier thought to be. This new scholarship has proved eminently Coleridgean in character, for out of it has emerged a reconciliation of much material in the Biographia which had before seemed rather opposite and discordant in its qualities. Today we see the book more clearly, I think, than we have ever seen it before; and the consequence of this new clarity is that we may also begin to see in exactly what ways the Biographia is crucial to an understanding of English Romanticism. First of all, it is not crucial because it is the central theoretical document—not, at any rate, if by “central” we mean the one that incorporates all the major lines of thought associated with English Romanticism. Indeed, my present inquiry will try to decenter the Biographia in precisely this respect, to contrast it with two other important theoretical approaches that emerged in the Romantic movement. But in decentering Coleridge’s book, I shall also be arguing its seminal importance for the development of the original strands of English Romanticism, as well as for our understanding of the movement as a whole. A careful look at the Biographia in its contemporary setting, even in the restricted terms I am proposing for

From Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria: Text and Meaning, edited by Frederick Burwick, pp. 233–54, 306–08. © 1989 by Ohio State University Press.

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this essay, brings the variety and richness of Romantic thought and practice into sharp relief. The first thing we need to see is what Coleridge himself thought about the form and purpose of his book. It is the author of the “Essays on Method” who glanced intramurally at the Biographia as an “immethodical . . . miscellany”,1 yet the same author was to say a bit later, and extramurally, that the work “cannot justly be regarded as a motley Patchwork, or Farrago of heterogeneous Effusions”.2 Following the recent work of McFarland, Jackson, Christensen, Wheeler, and Wallace, however, we have learned to see the kind of order that underlies Coleridge’s often wayward and digressive procedures—indeed, to see that Coleridge’s “mosaic” or “marginal” or “miscellaneous” manner of composition is precisely what is needed, in his view, if one is to execute a truly methodical and theoretically sound critical operation.3 None of this is to say, of course, that the Biographia is a formal masterpiece, or even that all of the interlaced topics are equally interesting, or handled with equal skill. What we are bound to see, however, if we want to read the book profitably, is the truth in Coleridge’s own account of what he had written. “Let the following words”, he said, “be prefixed as the Common Heading” of the work: An attempt to fix the true meaning of the Terms, Reason, Understanding, Sense, Imagination, Conscience & Ideas, with reflections on the theoretical & practical Consequences of their perversion from the Revolution (1688) to the present day, 1816— the moral of the whole being that the Man who gives to the Understanding the primacy due to the Reason, and lets the motives of Expedience usurp the place of the prescripts of the Conscience, in both cases loses the one and spoils the other. . . . 4

This is a fair enough description, generally speaking, but troublesome because Coleridge said that it applied just as well to The Statesman’s Manual, A Lay Sermon, and the three-volume Friend (1818). Yet this general application by Coleridge was both shrewd and correct. On the one hand, it called attention to the coherence of his purposes and preoccupations in these different works, and on the other it implied that the differences between them involved shifts in emphasis and in the relations established between the several topics. We need only glance at the “Essays on Method” to be clear about Coleridge’s meaning. The Biographia moves by a process that Coleridge called “progressive transition.” This is no “mere dead arrangement”5 but an accumulating set of interrelations which develop gradually (with references backward and

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anticipations forward) under the guidance and direction of a leading Idea, or what Coleridge called a “preconception” and “Initiative”: Lord Bacon equally with ourselves, demands what we have ventured to call the intellectual or mental initiative, as the motive and guide of every philosophical experiment; some well-grounded purposes, some distinct impression of the probable results, some selfconsistent anticipation as the grounds of the “prudens quaestio” (the fore-thoughtful query), which he affirms to be the prior half of the knowledge sought. . . . 6

The Biographia takes up all of the same topics handled in The Lay Sermons and The Friend but disposes of them in a biographical field of relations. The emphasis of the work is therefore “literary,” although literary in the broadest sense because Coleridge’s literary life encompassed (besides poetry and plays) journalism, political pamphleteering, and philosophy. The Biographia is no different from Coleridge’s other works in being committed to a critical procedure based upon what he liked to call “principles.” Thus, when he speaks of an investigation or a discourse of “well-grounded purposes,” the term “well-grounded” glances at the need for an initiative established on a priori “principles” rather than on a posteriori generalizations arrived at and refined through cumulative observation. What then—to come to my leading idea—are Coleridge’s “purposes” in the Biographia, what is his “distinct impression of the probable results” of this most famous of English literary lives? They are generally the same as those he specified for the Appendix to The Statesman’s Manual: “The Object was to rouse and stimulate the mind—to set the reader a thinking—and at least to obtain entrance for the question, whether the [truth of the] Opinions in fashion . . . is quite so certain as he had hitherto taken for granted.”7 Coleridge set this attitude as the motto of most of his work, and it plainly applies to the whole thrust of the Biographia—in its critique of the reigning empirical school of philosophy; reviews and ideas about poetry; and gossip about Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the so-called Lake School of poetry. The Biographia opposed the “Opinions in fashion” on all these matters—indeed, opposes the idea that any truth at all could ever be found in fashion or grounded in opinion. More particularly, Coleridge’s purpose was to set forth a theory of poetry grounded in the distinction between imagination and fancy, for were it once fully ascertained, that this division is . . . grounded in nature . . . the theory of the fine arts, and of poetry in particular,

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could not, I thought, but derive some additional and important light. It would in its immediate effects furnish a torch of guidance to the philosophical critic; and ultimately to the poet himself. In energetic minds, truth soon changes by domestication into power; and from directing in the discrimination and appraisal of the product, becomes influencive in the production. To admire on principle, is the only way to imitate without loss of originality. (1:85)

This passage, which culminates the introductory four chapters of the Biographia, sets forth the “well-grounded purposes” and hoped-for “results” that Coleridge anticipated for his book. On the one hand, the Biographia was to be a model of literary criticism that would be represented in the practical discussions of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Maturin; and that would be polemicized in the critique of Jeffrey and the reviewing institution of the period. On the other hand, the Biographia was to establish guidelines for the writing of poetry. Both of these practical aims were to succeed because Coleridge’s was a work of “philosophical” criticism which could be a model for critics, on the one hand, and which could show poets, on the other, how “to imitate without loss of originality” the work of other poets and of nature itself. Coleridge’s “well-grounded purposes” would be, finally, set forth as a man of letters’ intellectual biography. The significance of the biographical frame for Coleridge’s work cannot be too greatly emphasized, for the story he tells reveals a person whose work was steadfast in its principles—more, was steadfast in principles as such, was steadfast (that is to say) in God—from the beginning, but who only grew into his developing self-conscious grasp of the operation of these principles in his own life’s work and practice. Like every human being in a world made by God, Coleridge was born a child of truth, but only gradually did he raise himself from an ignorance of what that meant to a methodical and active assent to its reality. In the Biographia he comes forth as the person he calls in The Friend the “well-educated man,” of whom he goes on to say: “However irregular and desultory his talk, there is method in the fragments.”8 The ultimate myth, or faith, of the Biographia is, therefore, that the “principles” of all things, including the principles of a benevolently dynamic human self-consciousness, are “grounded in nature.” Coleridge’s life and its narrative are important because together they “furnish a torch of guidance” to others. According to Coleridge, the intellectual dynamic that has been his life is the birthright of every human being—every Christian human being, at any rate. We need to be clear about Coleridge’s explicit aims and purposes in the Biographia if we are to begin an accurate assessment of its achievements. The accusations of incoherence and disorganization, installed with the early

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reviews, have grown to seem much less important, and in certain respects misguided, as readers have tended to favor an aesthetic or hermeneutical method of reading the work over a positive and critical approach. To the degree that scholars have been interested in judging the correctness of Coleridge’s various ideas and positions in philosophy, politics, and literary criticism, the consensus seems to be that (a) his critique of the empirical tradition and of materialism, and his correlative defense of Idealist positions, leaves that old debate more or less where it has always been (undecided, exactly where his German mentors in philosophy had left it); (b) his political views are independent and conservative, with both characteristics deriving ultimately from his religious and theological convictions; (c) the representation of his views on all matters, in order to be objectively understood, have to pass through the filter of Coleridge’s subjectivity, and Coleridge himself must be the vehicle but not the master of that subjectivity (that is to say, Coleridge is not always candid, even with himself ); (d) the literary criticism, both practical and theoretical, is the great achievement of the work. For the remainder of this essay I shall be concentrating on Coleridge’s literary criticism in the Biographia. I have spent some time on the general structure and method because the literary theory and criticism is of a piece with the rest of the book. Thus, Coleridge’s argument that poetry is essentially ideal relates directly to his account of Idealist philosophy. Similarly, his critique of associationism and empirical philosophy connects just as directly with his critique of Wordsworth’s poetry, and especially the principles which underly that poetry. Finally, the history of his own life from his early radicalism to his achieved religious conservatism—and culminating in the Biographia itself—argues the social and political importance of a correct view of poetry and criticism. Coleridge repeatedly associates radical political thought with the philosophic positions he attacks directly and at length. Indeed, much of this kind of “philosophical” political commentary in the Biographia is simply jingoism, as we see very clearly in his discussion of associationism. “Opinions fundamentally false” on these academic matters are not, he says, “harmless” at the political and social level: the sting of the adder remains venomous. . . . Some indeed there seem to have been, in an unfortunate neighbour-nation at least, who have embraced this system with a full view of all its moral and religious consequences; some who deem themselves most free, When they within this gross and visible sphere Chain down the winged thought, scoffing assent,

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Proud in their meanness; and themselves they cheat With noisy emptiness of learned phrase, Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences, Self-working tools, uncaus’d effects, and all Those blind omniscients, those Almighty slaves, Untenanting Creation of its God! Such men need discipline, not argument; they must be made better men, before they can become wiser. (1:122–23)

These are the contexts in which Coleridge engages the question of poetry and of literary criticism—to his credit, let it be said that whatever one may think of his reactionary cultural and social views, he struggled to maintain a holistic approach to all human studies. The question of the excellences and defects of Wordsworth’s poetry, and of Wordsworth’s theoretical justification of that poetry, was important for Coleridge not simply for personal reasons, but because he felt that the poetry (in particular, the Lyrical Ballads) occupied a nexus of great importance for English, and even for European, society. Today we take it for granted that Coleridge won the argument with Words­ worth.9 I want to reconsider this question again by examining Coleridge’s position for what it is, a polemical set of ideas about the nature and function of poetry. Specifically, I want to examine it in relation to the antithetical positions of Wordsworth and Byron. II Coleridge said that, although the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads was half the product of his own brain, and although he and Wordsworth shared many of the same ideas about poetry, a fundamental difference of opinion about poetry separated them. He was right. Both men talked equally about the interchanges of mind and nature, but in each the emphasis was different; and this difference of emphasis, in the end, proved radical. In the Biographia Coleridge traced the source of this difference to eighteenth-century theories of association and sensation, which he came to reject but which Words­ worth—if one is to judge by the “preface” to Lyrical Ballads—remained committed to. Chapters 17–22 of the Biographia argue that the defects of Wordsworth’s poetry are the consequence of a defective, ultimately an associationist, theory of mind.10 One of the root problems with associationist thought, in Coleridge’s view, was that it based itself not on “principles,” or a priori categories, or “innate ideas,” but on observation. A poetry founded on such a theory would therefore have to be in error, for “poetry as poetry is essentially ideal, [and]

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avoids and excludes all accident ; . . . its apparent individualities . . . must be representative . . . and . . . the persons of poetry must be clothed with generic attributes” (2:45–46). Again and again Coleridge returns to this theme in his critique of Wordsworth’s theoretical and practical defects. Laying so much stress on the language of people in low and rustic life as a model for poetic language, Wordsworth “leads us to place the chief value on those things on which man differs from man and to forget or disregard the high dignities, which . . . may be, and ought to be, found in all ranks” (2:130). Wordsworth’s is a levelling poetry, perhaps even a democratic or Jacobinical poetry: a poetry which proposes that a “rustic’s” mode of experience and discourse is a more appropriate norm for poetical experience and discourse than is the experience and discourse of “the educated man” (2:52–53). Coleridge vigorously opposes such an idea. In actual fact, Coleridge says, the rustic, from the more imperfect development of his faculties, and from the lower state of their cultivation, aims almost solely to convey insulated facts, either those of his scanty experience or his traditional belief; while the educated man seeks to discover and express those connections of things, or those relative bearings of fact to fact, from which some more or less general law is deducible. For facts are valuable to a wise man, chiefly as they lead to the discovery of the indwelling law, which is the true being of things. . . . (2:52–53)

The rustic is here used as a figure of what Coleridge called elsewhere “the ignorant man,” the man who lacks the requisite self-consciousness to raise up out of his experience an image or reflex of subsistent harmony. For Coleridge, that image or reflex is the ground of imagination, and hence the essential feature of poetry; and it comes, he says, from “meditation, rather than . . . observation” (2:82). Wordsworth’s views not only place entirely too much emphasis upon details and particulars, on what Coleridge calls “matters-of-fact”; they suggest that the subject of poetry lies outside the mind, somehow in “reality” or “the world.” On the contrary, Coleridge insists that the poet’s eye is not the observer’s eye but the mind’s eye, and further, that the mind’s eye is directed inward, to the ideal world created and revealed through the imagination (both primary and secondary). This aspect of Coleridge’s views has been insisted upon by all of his best readers: “The reality that poems ‘imitate,’ ” as Catherine Wallace has recently put it, “is not the objective world as such but, rather, the consciousness of the poet himself in his encounters with the objective world. . . . the poet’s only genuine subject matter is himself, and the only ideas he presents will be ideas about the activity of consciousness in the world around him.”11

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Finally, by emphasizing observation rather than meditation, and mattersof-fact rather than the ideal, Wordsworth suggests that his theory of imagination is mechanistic and associationist rather than creative and idealist. This difference which Coleridge observes leads him to stress the volitional character of poetic imagination. The whole point of chapters 5–8 of the Biographia is to insist upon the primacy of conscious will in the human being, and to attack associationist thought as a “mechanist” philosophy which undermines the concept of the will. Poetry is and must always be a product of what he calls “the conscious will” (1:304). When the poet “brings the whole soul of man into activity,” the power of imagination is “first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, controul” (2:15–16). In his best practice, and recurrently in his theory as set forth in the “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth (according to Coleridge) illustrates Coleridge’s own ideas about the ideal, the conscious, and the volitional character of poetry and imagination. The defects in Wordsworth’s poetic work are traceable to certain defects in his principles, in his theory of poetry as set forth in his famous preface. Coleridge scrutinizes the preface for residual traces of Wordsworth’s associationist ideas, and he then argues that the faults in the poems in the Lyrical Ballads are the consequence of these residual—and, so far as Wordsworth’s true genius as a poet is concerned—inessential ideas. This is the method of Coleridge’s critique of Wordsworth in the Biographia. And in point of fact he was right; Wordsworth’s poetic theory and practice remained committed to certain associationist positions as Coleridge’s did not. Where Coleridge would always stress the poet’s will and selfconsciousness—indeed, where Coleridge would suggest that the poet’s (or at least the modern poet’s) central subject ought to be the act of the conscious will itself—Wordsworth’s poetic impulses drove him toward insights and revelations that stood beyond the limits of the conscious will. In contemporary terms, Coleridge’s is a theory of poetry as a process of revelation via mediations—indeed, a poetry whose subject is the acts and processes of mediation. Wordsworth, on the other hand, sets out in quest of an unmediated poetry, and in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads he offers a theoretical sketch of what such a project involves. Briefly, what Wordsworth aspires to is a direct perception of what he calls “the subject.” This is his primary aim as a poet: “I have at all times endeav­ oured to look steadily at my subject; consequently, there is I hope in these poems little falsehood of description. . . .”12 This purpose, apparently so simple, is reiterated in more emphatic and explicit terms in 1815: “The powers requisite for the production of poetry are: first, those of Observation and Description,—i.e., the ability to observe with accuracy things as they are in

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themselves, and with fidelity to describe them, unmodified by any passion or feeling existing in the mind of the describer” (Prose Works 3:26). Coleridge, however, in his distinction between “copy” and “imitation,” vigorously opposes Wordsworth’s ideas on this matter, and later commentators—particularly 20th century critics and academics—have sided with Coleridge, and have even come to believe that his is the more innovative view. The most influential contemporary scholarship of Wordsworth’s poetry—the line established through the work of Geoffrey Hartman—has armed itself with Coleridge’s vision in order to save Wordsworth’s poetry from the poet himself. Wordsworth, we are now urged to think, was no mystic, and least of all was he a poet of nature. He is the poet of the mind, the revealer of the operations of the consciousness. He is, in short, what Coleridge said he was and ought to be. In trying to understand the importance of the differences that separate Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s ideas about poetry, we must not abandon what we have come to learn about Wordsworth’s poetry of consciousness. What we have to see, however, is that all his poetry—”The Idiot Boy” as much as The Prelude—is a poetry based in a commitment to unmediated perception, on the one hand, and to a theory of nonconscious awareness on the other (what Wordsworth calls “habits”). Both aspects of his ideas about poetry are intimately related to each other. In his critique of Wordsworth, Coleridge argued that Wordsworth’s attack on poetic diction in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads was not, could not have been), fundamental, but was rather directed to peculiar circumstances which had developed in English poetry in the eighteenth century (2:40–42). This is a very conservative reading of Wordsworth’s ideas, and in the end it is wrong. Wordsworth’s whole argument that there neither is nor can be any real or essential difference between poetry and prose is grounded in an impulse to avert altogether the grids, the Kantian “categories,” and all the complex mediations which stand between the act of perception and the objects perceived. It did not matter to Wordsworth whether the “subject” of the poet was an idiot boy, a broken pot, an abstract reality (nature, social classes or conventions, psychological events like “fidelity”), God, or even “the mind of man” itself and all its complex states of consciousness. The ideal was to set these matters free of the mediations which necessarily conveyed them, either to one’s self or to others. This could be done, Wordsworth believed, by grounding poetry not in “the conscious will” but in “spontaneous” and “powerful feelings,” on the one hand, and “habits of meditation” on the other (1:127): Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.

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For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; and, as by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each other, we discover what is really important to men, so, by the repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings will be connected with important. subjects, till at length . . . such habits of mind will be produced, that, by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits, we shall describe objects, and utter sentiments . . . that the understanding of the Reader must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and his affections strengthened and purified. (1:127)

This is a highly pragmatic, even a tactical, way of stating his position. Not until Shelley would reformulate Wordsworth’s ideas more than twenty years later would the theory insinuated by Wordsworth receive a comprehensive and adequate formulation. This would happen when Shelley provided Wordsworth’s ideas with a broad social and political dimension, a comprehensive theory of culture in which poetry was revealed as a set of various related, and imaginatively grounded, social practices. That subject is, however, beyond the scope of my present concerns. Here I want only to indicate how consciousness and the structure of all forms of mediation are viewed by Wordsworth. Simply, they are impediments to clear vision. For Wordsworth, to show (in practice) or argue (in theory) that the mediations are themselves the subject of the poet is to abandon the ground of any nonsubjective experience, and hence to abandon the ground of all human intercourse and social life, which involve sympathetic relationships between persons distinct and different. To Wordsworth, Coleridge’s position also involves a theoretical contradiction: for we cannot have knowledge of anything, not even knowledge of the mediations, unless an unmediated consciousness is at some point admitted to acts of knowledge and perception. In effect, Coleridge’s Kantian position, by resituating the problem of knowledge, has merely reopened it at the level of epistemology. Coleridge’s position stands under threat to the critique of an infinite regress: what will mediate the mediations? Coleridge’s eventual response to this question, developed out of Schelling, was to argue for a continuous and self-developing process of mediated knowledge—that is to say, it was to make a virtue of necessity and turn the infinite regress into an organic process. It was also, needless to say, to have literally postponed both the problem and the answer to the problem. The move was a brilliant finesse. Wordsworth took a different course—less spectacular and intellectually brilliant but in the end perhaps more daring and profound, at least so far as

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poetry is concerned. Observing and describing without the intervention of consciousness or subjective mediations, following blindly and mechanically the unself-consciously meditated directions of unselfconscious feeling and thought: these are Wordsworth’s remarkable procedures. Their object, as he says in various ways, is to avoid the veils of familiarity—the mediations— through which we experience the world. Unlike Coleridge, Wordsworth is seeking for a poetry, and a mode of perception, which will lay the mortal mind asleep in order that it may see into the life of things—in order that it may transcend the limits of experience laid down by Coleridge’s self-conscious will and Kant’s categorical imperatives. This program, needless to say, is anything but supernaturalist; it is in fact a deeply materialist and mundane program. What it seeks to transcend is not this world or concrete experience but the ideologies of this world and our modes of perceiving it. Coleridge was quite right to oppose this program on principle, for Wordsworth’s ideal, in principle, is toward a poetry in which the mind transcends its own volitions and categories; in which the mind, following not consciousness but “feelings,” “impulses,” and “sensations,” is suddenly confronted with the unknown, the revelation of what is miraculous. Wordsworth calls his ideal “sympathy,” an experience in which passions and thoughts and feelings are . . . connected with our moral sentiments and animal sensations, and with the causes which excite these; with the operations of the elements, and the appearances of the visible universe; with storm and sunshine, with the revolutions of the seasons, with cold and heat, with loss of friends and kindred, with injuries and resentments, gratitude and hope, with fear and sorrow. (1:142)

At such moments—glimpsing a hedgehog or a flower, observing a peculiar encounter between two people, being wrapped in a specific atmospheric moment, perhaps of wind and humidity—the mind will be led to feel that it suddenly understands, that it has been brought to some moment of ultimate knowledge. In Wordsworth we are gently led on to these moments by the affections; it is not the conscious will that controls experiences of primary or secondary imagination, it is “habit,” “impulse,” and “feeling.” Consciousness follows experience, not the other way round. When Coleridge linked Wordsworth’s poetry to materialist and associationist principles, then, his insight was acute. Equally acute was the way he attacked Wordsworth’s “matter-of-factness.” The “laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representation of objects, and . . . the insertion of accidental circumstances” (2:126) infects the poetry with what Coleridge sees as a sort

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of misplaced concreteness. Wordsworth’s insistence upon treating peculiar experiences puts at risk the Coleridgean ideal of poetic harmony and the reconciliation of opposite and discordant qualities. In Wordsworth, Coleridge is constantly being brought up against resistant particulars, details that somehow evade—or rather, details that seem determined to evade—the necessary poetic harmony and reconciliation. Coleridge calls this Wordsworth’s “accidentality,” and he says that it contravenes “the essence of poetry,” which must be, he adds, “catholic and abstract” (2:126). “Accidentality” works against Coleridge’s idea that poetry is the most philosophical of discourses because it alone can reveal the general in the especial, the sameness in the differences. To Wordsworth, however, accidentality was precisely the means by which feelings and impulses outwitted the mind’s catholic and abstracting censors. “I am sensible,” he says, that my associations must have sometimes been particular instead of general, and that, consequently, giving to things a false importance, I may have sometimes written on unworthy subjects; but I am less apprehensive on this account, than that my language may frequently have suffered from those arbitrary connections of feelings and ideas with particular words and phrases, from which no man can altogether protect himself. . . . Such faulty expressions . . . I would willingly take all reasonable pains to correct. But it is dangerous to make these alterations on the simple authority of a few individuals, or even of certain classes of men; for where the understanding of an Author is not convinced, or his feelings altered, this cannot be done without great injury to himself: for his own feelings are his stay and support. . . . To this may be added, that the critic ought never to forget that he is himself exposed to the same errors as the Poet, and, perhaps, in a much greater degree. . . . (1:153)

Once again the ground of Wordsworth’s decisions, both as regards his subject matter and his choice of words, is determined by “feelings.” He means to act, as Blake said of Jesus, by impulse, and not by rules. The critical mind—even the poet’s own conscious and critical operations—may suspect accidentality and arbitrariness in the poem’s subject matter or language, but if the feelings which led the poet to his choices cannot be shown to be factitious, then the choices must be maintained. It is not merely that the heart has its reasons; the choice must be maintained because the consciousness has its reasons. The mind directs itself to the ordering of experience, to the establishment of harmonies; the feelings direct themselves to the enlarging of experience itself.

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Wordsworth’s “feeling” is what Blake called “the Prolific”: judge and censor of the judgmental and censorious consciousness, the feelings and their concomitant train of accidentalities refuse to let the mind settle into its a priori harmonies. Coleridge is an ideologue, and his theory of poetry is not merely an ideology of poetry; it finally argues that poetry is the perfect form of ideology (more philosophical than philosophy, more concrete than history). Poetry is the revelation and expression of the Ideal, of the idea and what is ideational, of the world as a play of the mediations of consciousness. It is the product of the conscious will. But to Wordsworth, the true human will is not located in the ego or the superego, it lies in the unconscious; it is a form of desire, an eros, not a form of thought, an eidolon. A poetry of sympathy rather than a poetry of consciousness, it covets irrelevant detail and “accidentality” as the limit and test of its own imaginative reach. Insofar as it is a poetry of the mind and consciousness, Wordsworth’s work is strongest and most characteristic when it represents mind at the moment of its dawning and self-discovery, consciousness falling upon itself in its instants of wonder and surprise. In such poetry—The Prelude is the preeminent example—consciousness is rendered as an experience rather than as a knowledge or form of thought. The difference between Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s theorizing on these matters reflects, then, a small but in the end crucial difference of emphasis: for Coleridge, poetry is an idea and is to be understood via the networks of intellectual mediations which are poetry’s ultimate ground and “principles”; for Wordsworth poetry is an experience and is to be understood primarily in the event itself, but in any case only through the rhetorical and sympathetic networks which the poems set in motion. It is a matter, as Wordsworth’s “Preface” says, of contracts and arrangements, not—as Coleridge insists—of a priori ideas and “principles.” Ultimately, Coleridge’s theory of poetry sees it as a continuous play of signifiers and signifieds, and its object is to provide, in the traces left by this play, glimpses of the ordering process which is the ground of the play. For Wordsworth, however, the semiotic dance traces a referential system back into the material world. In the play of language, the dance of the signifiers and the signifieds, we glimpse the structure in which the system of symbols and the order of references hold themselves together. Coleridge, too, says that poetry affords a glimpse of a superior reality lying behind the appearances of things. But for Coleridge this superior reality is nonmaterial, in the order of platonic or ideal forms. For Wordsworth, by contrast, the order is emphatically concrete and material, an order of actual sympathies and arrangements which we have, in our getting and spending, only neglected or forgotten. In Wordsworth, the play of the signifiers and the signifieds,

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the spectacle of the mediations, lies under judgment to a superior reality, the order of the referents. Wordsworth’s poetry is a symbolic system which aims to disappear, but with a flash that reveals the invisible world—which is to say, this material and human world, the very world of all of us that has too regularly “been disappeared” (so to speak) in the symbols and ideas we have made of it. III In the Biographia, Coleridge sought to replace what he felt to be an outmoded theory of poetry and poetic perception with a more adequate and advanced theory. Wordsworth’s famous Preface was his point of attack, first, because he felt that Wordsworth’s actual practice as a poet went far beyond his theory; and second, because he felt that insofar as the practice was weak, it reflected the poverty of Wordsworth’s theory. This well-known and important theoretical struggle about the nature of poetry has had, and continues to have, weighty consequences for scholars and for poets alike. Its importance looms even larger, however, if we reflect upon an equally relevant but (so far as I can see) completely unknown fact: that Byron’s Don Juan was consciously conceived as a response to the Biographia. Scholars are of course well aware that Byron began his masterwork by lashing out at Wordsworth, Southey, and the Lake School in general. What is not realized, however, is the extent to which the Biographia inspired Byron’s Don Juan. The story begins in the autumn of 1817, when Byron received and read Coleridge’s literary autobiography. In a letter to Murray of October 12, Byron refers contemptuously to the Biographia’s treatment of the program of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the enthusiasts of the Lake School. His disparaging remarks on the book are concentrated, however, on the review of Maturin’s play Bertram, which Coleridge had savaged in chapter 23.13 This letter to Murray is also important because it contains Byron’s first announcement that he had just “written a poem (of 84 octave Stanzas) humourous, in or after the excellent manner of Mr. Whistlecraft . . . on a Venetian anecdote.” Let us begin with Coleridge’s attack on Bertram. Critics who write about Coleridge’s great book rarely spend any time on chapter 23, probably because it is one of the least creditable passages, in several senses. But in fact it is one of the most interesting chapters in the book, because it shows Coleridge’s literary criticism operating at its most polemical moral level. Coleridge’s attack on Bertram begins with two critical indirections: first, Coleridge’s argument that this kind of so-called Gothic (or “German”) drama is English in origin and fundamentally Jacobinical in its moral tendencies; and second, Coleridge’s extended discussion of the Don Juan tradition in drama, and in particular of “the old Spanish play, entitled

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Atheista Fulminato . . . which . . . has had its day of favour in every country throughout Europe” (2:212). The point of these indirections is to erect a model for the treatment of evil in theatrical productions. What places the Atheista Fulminato “at a world’s distance from the spirit of modern jacobinism” in plays like Bertram is the following: The latter introduces to us clumsy copies of these showy instrumental qualities [i.e., appearances of virtue] in order to reconcile us to vice and want of principle; while the Atheista Fulminato presents . . . them for the sole purpose of displaying their hollowness, and in order to put us on our guard by demonstrating their utter indifference to vice and virtue. . . . (2:221)

Unlike the ideologically correct Atheista Fulminato, Bertram is typical of recent Gothic drama for “representing . . . liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour” in people that tradition teaches us are wicked, and for “rewarding with all the sympathies which are the due of virtue, those criminals whom law, reason, and religion have excommunicated from our esteem” (2:221). Coleridge was attacking Bertram, but he might as easily have made the same charge against all of Byron’s famous tales and against Byron’s recent Gothic drama Manfred as well. In an earlier version of this passage printed as part of “Letter II” of “Satyrane’s Letters,” Coleridge declared that “the whole System” of dramas like Bertram “is a moral and intellectual Jacobinism of the most dangerous kind.”14 It is difficult to resist the impression that the very subject of Don Juan was chosen as an antithetical move against Coleridge’s discussion of Jacobinical drama in this chapter of the Biographia. In the first place, his letter to Murray shows that he took personal offense at Coleridge’s critique of Bertram. His anger was partly the consequence of his sense that Coleridge had behaved meanly and ungratefully toward both himself personally, and the Drury Lane theatre committee in general.15 Nor could Byron have been insensible to the import of Coleridge’s critique of Bertram, which was as much an attack on Byron’s sympathetic treatment of bad men in his poetry. Equally impressive are certain other internal connections between what Coleridge wrote in the Biographia and what Byron wrote in Don Juan. The first line of Coleridge’s direct attack on Bertram is aimed at “the prodigy of the tempest at Bertram’s shipwreck” (2:222). Coleridge ridicules the treatment of the storm for its absurd lack of probability. The events are inherently hyperbolical and beyond belief (“The Sicilian sea coast: a convent of monks: night: a most portentous, unearthly storm: a vessel wrecked: contrary to all human expectation, one man saves himself by his prodigious powers as a

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swimmer”); besides, when one of the characters gives his “theory of Sicilian storms,” it is, Coleridge says, “not apparently founded on any great familiarity of his own with this troublesome article” (i.e., Sicilian storms) (2:222–23). Anyone familiar with Canto II of Don Juan will recognize some of its essential features anticipated here: in Byron’s poem we will not only see once again that “prodigious . . . swimmer” who alone escapes his shipwreck; the entire treatment of the event will emphasize the accuracy and truthfulness of its circumstantial details. I could expatiate on a number of other specific intertextual connections between the early cantos of Don Juan and the Biographia, but I shall have to relegate them to a footnote, for the sake of maintaining the larger train of the argument.16 Coleridge’s principal criticism of Bertram is that it is indecent and immoral. Coleridge searches out the scenes in the play which demonstrate its apparently fixed intention to display evil and vice in a favorable or at least in a sympathetic light. Perhaps nowhere else has Coleridge’s literary criticism lapsed so badly. His diatribe culminates in the discussion of Act IV, where the disasters that attend the illicit love of Bertram and Imogine begin to unfold in the play’s series of deaths and madness. “I want words to describe the mingled horror and disgust, with which I witnessed the opening of the fourth act. . . . The shocking spirit of jacobinism seemed no longer confined to politics” (2:229). What Coleridge means is that “The familiarity with atrocious events and characters” seemed to “have poisoned the taste” of the people watching the play. The event leaves Coleridge in a state of moral breathlessness: that a British audience could remain passive under such an insult to common decency, nay, receive with a thunder of applause, a human being supposed to have come reeking from the consummation of this complex foulness and baseness, these and the like reflections . . . pressed as with the weight of lead upon my heart. . . . (2:229)

It is against this sort of bourgeois moralism that Don Juan was written; indeed, it is against this simplistic and narrow attitudinizing—one can call it nothing better—that all of Byron’s poetry was conceived. It was a tone which Byron caught in the work of most of the Lake School writers, but especially in Southey. It is rare in Coleridge, but its appearance in the critique of Bertram is important to remember, for Coleridge’s ideology of poetry—that is, his conviction that poetry should be the vehicle of the willed acts of a reconciling consciousness—necessarily implies the specifics of his critique of Bertram. Coleridge was entirely correct, and—as always—entirely consistent when he said that his work was founded on principles. The critique of Bertram displays the principles in an applied and specific form.

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If chapter 23 suggested to Byron that he might usefully make the Don Juan legend the focus of an attack upon the Lake School and middle-class ideology in general, and if it also influenced Byron’s choice of subject and approach in Canto II of his masterwork, chapter 16 seems to have brought into focus the central stylistic issues. In this chapter Coleridge establishes a contrast between “the materials and structure of modern poetry” (2:32) and “the more polished poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, especially . . . of Italy” (2:33). This contrast prepares specifically for the extended discussion of Wordsworth which begins in chapter 17. Coleridge’s critique of Wordsworth’s matter-of-factness, of the meanness of his diction, of the excessive particularity, is based in his praise of the contrasting manner of the earlier Italian poets. In the modern period, Coleridge says, “few have guarded the purity of their native tongue with that jealous care, with which the sublime Dante, in his tract ‘De la nobile volgare eloquenza,’ declares to be the first duty of a poet” (2:30). The manner of these early poets and their “dolce stil nuovo” provides, in Coleridge’s view, a challenge and critical model for the poets of the present: The imagery is almost always general: sun, moon, flowers, breezes, murmuring streams, warbling songsters, delicious shades, lovely damsels, cruel as fair, nymphs, naiads, and goddesses, are the materials which are common to all, and which each shaped and arranged according to his judgement or fancy, little solicitous to add or to particularize. If we make an honorable exception in favor of some English poets, the thoughts too are as little novel as the images; and the fable of their narrative poems, for the most part drawn from mythology, or sources of equal notoriety, derive their chief attractions from the manner of treating them: from impassioned flow, or picturesque arrangement. In opposition to the present age, and perhaps in as faulty an extreme, they placed the essence of poetry in the art. The excellence, at which they aimed, consisted in the exquisite polish of the diction, combined with perfect simplicity. This their prime object, they attained by the avoidance of every word, which a gentleman would not use in dignified conversation, and of every word and phrase, which none but a learned man would use. (2:33)

Such stylistic purity passes a judgment on the characteristic faults and defects of modern poetry, which Coleridge summarizes this way: “a downright simpleness, under the affectation of simplicity, prosaic words in feeble metre, silly thoughts in childish phrases, and a preference of mean, degrading, or at best trivial associations, and characters” (1:75).

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In Byron’s critique of Wordsworth’s poetry in Don Juan he follows Coleridge’s line fairly closely. Most critics have assumed that Byron was recalling Jeffrey’s strictures in the Edinburgh Review, and in fact he may well have been. But Coleridge’s critique of his friend does not disagree with the particulars of Jeffrey’s criticisms, it simply dissents from the general tone and attitude. To Coleridge, Wordsworth is a great poet whose defects are “characteristic” of his place and epoch. In the Biographia Coleridge summarizes very well the typical negative judgments brought against Wordsworth by contemporary reviewers, and it may well be that Don Juan’s criticisms and travesties of Wordsworth’s poetry owe more to Coleridge’s summary presentation than to his recollection of Jeffrey and the other reviewers. However that may be, Don Juan is certainly responding directly to the stylistic challenge laid down in chapter 16 of the Biographia. We should recall that Byron’s first reference to the Biographia occurs in the letter which announced the completion of the first draft of Beppo. The latter was specifically written in imitation of “the new style of poetry very lately sprung up in England”17 in the work of Rose, Merivale, and especially Frere. This “new style” returned to fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy for its models—that is, to the work of Boiardo, Ariosto, Pulci, and Berni. Byron adopted (and adapted) this stylistic reformation in various ways between 1817–24. His defense of Pope against his Romantic detractors was part of his program to reform and purify the language and its poetic possibilities: “There is no bearing [the atrocious cant and nonsense about Pope] any longer, and if it goes on, it will destroy what little good writing and taste remains among us” (BLJ 7:61). His experiments in drama were part of this effort to restore greater correctness to English poetry, his translations from Dante and Pulci were exercises and acts of homage, as were The Lament of Tasso and The Prophecy of Dante, but Don Juan was the capstone and masterwork in Byron’s new stylistic program. No one can read Byron’s letters of 1817–24 and not be aware that he looked upon his poetical work during these years as all of a piece, and that one of its principal aims was to “[guard] the purity of [his] native tongue with that jealous care, which the sublime Dante . . . declares to be the first duty of a poet”: you know that [Beppo] is no more than an imitation of Pulci & of a style common & esteemed in Italy. I have just published a drama [Marino Faliero], which is at least good English—I presume—for Gifford lays great stress on the purity of its diction. (BLJ 8:114)

It was probably Rose and Kinnaird who gave Byron a copy of the Biographia to read in September 1817, at the same time that they brought him Frere’s imitation of Pulci. Thus, the following famous passage in Byron’s

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letters—in which he first declares his intention to set off on a new course in poetry—is haunted by the two books he was reading at that time, Frere’s “Whistlecraft” and Coleridge’s Biographia: With regard to poetry in general I am convinced the more I think of it—that he and all of us—Scott—Southey—Wordsworth—Moore— Campbell—I—are all in the wrong—one as much as another—that we are upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system—or systems—not worth a damn in itself—& from which none but Rogers and Crabbe are free—and that the present & next generations will finally be of this opinion—I am the more confirmed in this—by having lately gone over some of our Classics—particularly Pope—whom I tried in this way—I took Moore’s poems & my own & some others—& went over them side by side with Pope’s—and I was really astonished (I ought not to have been so) and mortified—at the ineffable distance in point of sense—harmony—effect—and even Imagination Passion—& Invention—between the little Queen Anne’s Man—& us of the lower Empire—depend upon it [it] is all Horace then, and Claudian now among us—and if I had to begin again—I would model myself accordingly—(BLJ 5:265)

In the years that were to follow, Byron defended Don Juan on a number of fronts, not the least of which was stylistic. When he fought against the accusations of immorality and indecency, he was also arguing for the purity (in both senses) of his new work. In the Biographia Coleridge had called for the reintroduction of linguistic correctness into contemporary English poetry, and had taken his contemporaries to task—even the greatest of them—for lapses from such standards of correctness, indeed, for lapses which were the “characteristic defects” of a new “system” of poetry. Don Juan picks up on both of these arguments and gives them a further range of meaning not contained in Coleridge’s position. Here is Byron on the “wrong revolutionary poetical system” we now call Romanticism: You are taken in by that false stilted trashy style which is a mixture of all the styles of the day—which are all bombastic (I don’t except my own—no one has done more through negligence to corrupt the language) but it is neither English nor poetry.—Time will show. (BLJ 7:182)

As for writing poetry which exhibited “exquisite polish of diction” and “perfect simplicity,” poetry in a language “which a gentleman would not use in

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dignified conversation, and . . . which none but a learned man would use,” it all depended upon what one meant by the terms “conversation,” “gentleman,” and “learned.” Don Juan—as Byron well knew, and as all later scholars have recognized—is an impeccable rendering of aristocratic conversational idiom. This is the discourse of well-bred gentlemen who are “learned” not in bookish and academic ways, but in what Byron called “the world.” A letter to Douglas Kinnaird of October 26, 1819, states his views in that prose—at once simple, polished, and expressive—which many regard as the finest ever written in the English language. As to “Don Juan”—confess—confess—you dog—and be candid— that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing—it may be bawdy— but is it not good English?—it may be profligate—but is it not life, is it not the thing?—Could any man have written it—who has not lived in the world?—and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis?—on a table?—and under it?—I have written about a hundred stanzas of a third Canto—but it is damned modest—the outcry has frightened me.—I had such projects for the Don—but the Cant is so much stronger than Cunt—now a days—that the benefit of experience in a man who had well weighed the worth of both monosyllables—must be lost to despairing posterity. (BLJ 6:232)

This is the prose of a man who has well-weighed the worth of all his monosyllables. Its lightness of touch, its wit, and even its outrageousness cannot, should not, disguise its precision and purity. This is also a prose which finds its poetical equivalent in the musa pedestris of Don Juan. At this point certain generalizations seem in order. In the first place, we see in all three of these men—Wordsworth, Byron, and Coleridge—a shared interest in renovating the medium of poetic work. Each worked consciously, even programmatically, toward that end, but in each case the end took on a different appearance. Byron and Wordsworth stand opposed to Coleridge in their stylistic empiricism, if I may so call it: that is to say, both Wordsworth and Byron set as their linguistic standard a real and current idiomatic usage. The language of poetry reflects, is modelled on, an actual linguistic practice which the poet takes to be a critical standard for his own work. This stylistic empiricism stands in sharp contrast to Coleridge’s idealistic—ultimately, his academic—approach to poetic discourse. Lest this characterization of Coleridge’s program seem invidious, I should point out that its offspring in later work is to be found in some of the richest traditions of symbolist poetry.

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Of course, Byron reflects the idiom of the aristocracy whereas Words­ worth’s poetry is modelled on the usage of the “lower and middle orders” of “rustic” society. Coleridge’s critique of Wordsworth’s linguistic standard— that it is a usage that often reflects no more than the unself-consciousness and even the ignorance of the classes it is drawn from (2:42–55)—helps to explain the significance of the different choices made by Wordsworth and Byron. Wordsworth precisely wants a language which can be seen to say, or to imply, or to know, more than it understands at a self-conscious level. Byron, on the other hand, chooses an idiom which reflects language being used at the very highest pitch of self-consciousness. This difference between Wordsworth and Byron brings into sharp relief a similarity in the positions of Coleridge and Byron. In contrast to Words­ worth, both laid a premium on the self-conscious and voluntarist dimensions of poetic discourse, just as they both praised the polished and artful work of Renaissance Italian poetry. Byron was as consciously ideological in his work as Coleridge. They differed, however, not only in their politics and class allegiances, but in the salient that their poetic self-consciousness took. Where Coleridge is working toward balances, reconciliations, and a harmony of elements that might otherwise remain discordant, Byron covets surprises and the upsetting of balance, antithetical moves of every kind, and what he called, in a wonderful portmanteau word, “opposition.” Much more could and should be said on these matters. We need to specify, in a detailed way, how these different theoretical positions work themselves out in actual poetic practice. Equally important would be to incorporate the related views of Shelley, Keats, and Blake—especially Shelley. Obviously this is not the occasion for such a demonstration. In a series of unpublished papers, however, I have worked through these lines of inquiry at considerable length and depth. The Biographia, however, is the obvious place to begin an investigation of the variances and differentials of Romantic stylistics because it is—as scholars have always known—the key text in this area. I hope the present essay has helped to clarify precisely why and how Coleridge’s greatest work was and is so crucial.

No t e s   1. Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) 1:88. This edition is used throughout and page references are given in the text.   2. See Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 114n.   3. For Coleridge’s “marginal” method of proceeding in Biographia see Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

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1969), 27; and Jerome Christensen, Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), ch. 3.   4. Lay Sermons, 114n.   5. The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969) 1:457.   6. The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71) 2:812.   7. Lay Sermons, 114 n.   8. The Friend, 1:449.   9. Even John Crowe Ransom, in his excellent discussion of Wordsworth’s position, grudgingly agrees that Coleridge’s views have been—in contrast to Wordsworth’s—a “permanent influence on poetic theory” (see Ransom’s “William Wordsworth: Notes Toward an Understanding of Poetry,” in Wordsworth: Centenary Studies, ed. Gilbert T. Dunklin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 92. A strong case for Wordsworth’s theoretical importance has been made by Gene Ruoff, “Wordsworth on Language: Towards a Radical Poetics of English Romanticism,” The Wordsworth Circle (1972), 204–11. 10. Compare Blake: Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 782–84. 11. C. M. Wallace, The Design of Biographia Literaria (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), 113. 12. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 1:133. References hereafter will be cited in the text to this edition. 13. Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1973–82), 5:267. (References hereafter will be cited as BLJ). Byron had been instrumental in getting Drury Lane to produce Coleridge’s Remorse in 1813, and he tried—unsuccessfully—to get Coleridge to write another play for the theater. He encouraged and praised Coleridge’s poetry and also provided him with financial assistance. See BLJ 4:285–86, 318–19 and 5:16 and n. 14. The Friend, 2:220. 15. For Byron’s financial and literary help to Coleridge see above, n. 13, as well as BLJ 9:206–08. 16. Certain other small textual details illustrate Byron’s recollection of Coleridge’s text when he was writing Don Juan. For example, the unusual phrase “olla Podrida” appears in ch. 23 of the Biographia as well as in Byron’s (later rejected) prose Preface to Don Juan (see Biographia, p. 211 and Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann. Vol. 5 (Don Juan) (London: Oxford University Press 1986), 83. Similarly, the conclusion of stanza 2 of Byron’s “Dedication” to Don Juan glances at Coleridge’s defensive remarks about his “metaphysics,” especially in Biographia ch. 24. Compare also Biographia 2, pp. 126–35 with Byron’s treatment of Wordsworth in the rejected prose preface to Don Juan. See the discussion by McGann, 5:668. 17. Lord Byron. Complete Poetical Works, 4: 247.

D avid P erkins

The Imaginative Vision of Kubla Khan: On Coleridge’s Introductory Note

C

oleridge’s introductory note to Kubla Khan weaves together two myths with potent imaginative appeal. The myth of the lost poem tells how an inspired work was mysteriously given to the poet and then dispelled irrecoverably. The nonexistent lines haunt the imagination more than any actual poem could. John Livingston Lowes used to tell his classes, W. Jackson Bate remembers, “If there is any man in the history of literature who should be hanged, drawn, and quartered, it is the man on business from Porlock.” He has become, as Elizabeth Schneider remarks, a byword for Philistine intrusion upon genius. Coleridge’s self-portrait in the introductory note is another source of fascination, one that anticipates, as Timothy Bahti observes, the image of the poet later propagated by the symbolistes and L’art pour l’art.1 The note describes the poet as a solitary, a dreamer, and a reader of curious lore, such as Purchas His Pilgrimage. He is not portrayed as a habitual taker of drugs but rather the opposite: an “anodyne” had been prescribed for an illness and had the profound effect the note describes because, as the reader is supposed to infer, Coleridge was not used to the drug. But the motif of being drugged is also part of the symboliste myth of the poet. Only to a poet of this kind, withdrawn in dreams and uncertain in his inspiration, could the person from Porlock be a serious intrusion. That the man from Porlock comes “on business” is From Coleridge, Keats, and the Imagination: Romanticism and Adam’s Dream, edited by J. Robert Barth, S.J., and John L. Mahoney, pp. 97–108. © 1990 by the Curators of the University of Missouri.

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also typical of the symboliste ethos, in which ordinary life and “business” were viewed as antithetical to poetry. How the introductory note should be printed has not been much discussed, but editors have disagreed in practice. In popular anthologies it may be omitted altogether. If it is, the poem may not be read with the assumption that it is unfinished, particularly when, as is generally done, the editor also deletes Coleridge’s 1834 subtitle, “Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment.”2 Since in Romantic poetry “Vision,” “Dream,” and “Fragment” are practically genres, a reader’s experience of the poem must be quite different when the expectations evoked by these terms are not activated. In many anthologies Coleridge’s introduction is printed as a footnote, usually without the first paragraph and the conclusion (the note usually stops at “without the after restoration of the latter,” deleting the self-quotation from The Picture and the paragraphs that follow it). This editorial decision gives the introductory note less importance and suppresses several of its themes: that Coleridge is reluctant to publish the poem, that he offers it only as a “psychological curiosity,” and that he is dependent on involuntary inspiration. After the poem was first “given” to him and then lost, he says in the penultimate paragraph, he could not restore or finish it “for himself,” though he frequently tried. When Coleridge’s lines from The Picture are not included, the theme of lost inspiration loses one of its counterpointing developments. Or editors may place the note before the poem as an introduction, as Coleridge did. My purpose in this essay is to inquire what difference it makes. The introductory note guides our reading of the poem from start to finish. Without it, most readers would interpret the poem as asserting the power and potential sublimity of the poet, who can be compared to the great Khan. With the introductory note, this assertion is still present, but it is strongly undercut; the poem becomes richer and more complex, and the theme of lost inspiration is much more heavily weighted. Since many critics have stressed that the introductory note apologizes for the poem and minimizes its significance, there is no need to dwell further on these points. Instead, I shall emphasize that the introductory note gives the poem a plot it would not otherwise have, indicates genres to which the poem belongs, and presents images and themes that interrelate with those in the poem. In previous articles and books, the only critics who have discussed the problems I take up are Irene H. Chayes, Kathleen M. Wheeler, and JeanPierre Mileur.3 For Chayes, the introductory note is a “literary invention” that “serves as an improvised argument” of the poem; it informs the reader that “the unacknowledged point of view” in the first thirty-six lines of the poem “is that of a man asleep, probably dreaming”; and it offers a “general structural parallel” to the poem, since in both the introductory note and the poem

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“poetic composition of one kind occurs in the past but in some way is imperfect, and poetic composition of another kind is planned for the future but remains unachieved” (pp. 2–4). Wheeler agrees with Chayes that the introductory note is “a highly literary piece of composition” and that it has thematic similarities to the last eighteen lines of the poem. She thinks that the speaker of the introductory note is not to be taken as Coleridge but as a literal-minded and naive persona whom Coleridge creates “as a model to the reader of how not to respond to the poem” (p. 28). Once the reader recognizes himself in the persona, Wheeler argues, he feels a revulsion and becomes more imaginative and perceptive. Since Coleridge intended all this, his ironic representation of himself in the persona as a “laughingstock” was “a gesture of incalculable generosity” (p. 38). She arrives at this theory because she wants to make the introductory note analogous to the glosses of the Ancient Mariner.4 Mileur also believes that the introductory note is a “self-conscious fiction” with literary quality. It “constitutes an interpretation of the poem” and itself “cries out for interpretation” (p. 26). He makes specific suggestions to which I am indebted, but his interest is less in the relation of the introductory note to the poem than in general issues this relation poses or illustrates—“immanence” and “presence” versus “revision” and “belatedness.” Complex parallels and contrasts link the introductory note and the poem. There is a sharp difference in scene and tone. The introductory note is realistic, everyday, faintly humorous, and prose, while the poem is romantic, exotic, sublime, and verse. The action of the one is located in contemporary England, between Porlock and Linton, while the other is in ancient China. But they have a similar theme: the character and power (or weakness) of the poet. In the introductory note the poet is a drugged dreamer; his momentary inspiration is dismissed as a psychological anomaly. He takes “pen, ink, and paper” to record his lines, and his poem dissolves when the ordinary world intrudes. In the concluding lines of the poem, however, the poet is an awful figure of supernatural inspiration. His poetry is voiced, spoken rather than written, and imposes itself on the ordinary world, for in the conclusion of the poem the man from Porlock is represented by the poet’s auditors (“all”), who are compelled to hear the poet and see his vision. Nevertheless, both the poet of the introductory note and the one of the concluding lines of the poem have lost their inspiration; the difference between them is that the modest, rueful writer of the introductory note scarcely hopes to recover it, while the speaker of the poem imagines himself as possibly doing so and creates a sublime image of himself as poet. We might be tempted to say that the introductory note and the concluding paragraph ironize one another, so that in neither can the representation of the poet’s character and relation to the world be read with naive faith.5 But when brought into contact with Romantic conventions, whatever

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is expressed in realistic conventions, as is the introductory note, always preempts our sense of truth. Everything about the introductory note—its tone, its description of the poet, the world it portrays—emphasizes by contrast that the poem is Romantic in the sense of unreal. In his “lonely farm-house” the author of the introductory note may also be compared with Kubla Khan behind his walls; since no other persons are mentioned in the first thirty-six lines of the poem, the reader imagines Kubla as alone. Though it is not unconscious and inspired,6 Kubla’s creativity is similarly effortless; he decrees and the palace is built. Coleridge’s reference in the introductory note to “images on the surface of the stream” has reminded some readers of lines 31–32;7 in these lines the image or “shadow” of the dome of pleasure would similarly be in fragments, since it would be broken by the waves,8 as also is the image reflected on the stream in The Picture. The word anodyne sounds a little like “Xanadu,” suggesting that Kubla’s palace is located in opium-land. This brings me to the very interesting quotation in the introductory note from Coleridge’s The Picture. The introductory note implies that a stone has been thrown into a stream. A youth, who is gazing into the stream, can no longer see the images reflected in it, since they are dispersed by the waves from the stone. The youth is a version of the poet in the introductory note. If we read only the extract from The Picture that Coleridge quotes, we cannot known what “lovely forms” are reflected in the stream. In the context of the whole episode in The Picture, they are the forms of natural objects along the bank and of a “stately virgin,” who has coyly obliterated the reflection of herself, at which the youth was gazing, by dropping not a stone but blossoms into the stream. Coleridge’s theme in this part of The Picture is the familiar Romantic one of nympholepsy as expressing attraction to the transcendent and ideal. Like the persons in the concluding paragraph of the poem, who would close their eyes “with holy dread” at sight of the supernaturally inspired poet, the youth hardly dares to look at the maiden directly (“scarcely dar’st lift up thine eyes”). His vision of her is lost (“all that phantom-world so fair / Vanishes”), and just as Kubla hears “Ancestral voices prophesying war,” the “fair” vision seen by the youth becomes one of strife, as each of the “thousand circlets” created by the blossoms falling into the water “mis-shape[s] the other.” But the extract from The Picture has a happier trajectory than the introductory note. For in the extract there is a second person, the poet speaker, who is watching or imagining this scene. He comforts the disconsolate youth by reassuring him that the visions will be restored, and in the lines Coleridge quotes they “Come trembling back,” and the pool is again “a mirror.” Reading only the fragment quoted in the introductory note, we would not know that this episode in The Picture actually ends with the loss of the vision. In the lines

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not quoted, the “shadow” of the maiden can no longer be seen after the stream has again smoothed over. She has departed, and thereafter the youth seeks her through the woods in vain, or gazes into “the vacant brook.” Whether the story Coleridge tells in the introductory note is true has been much debated but makes no difference to my argument. Most critics now doubt that the poem was interrupted by the man from Porlock, that it is a fragment, and that its composition was as involuntary as the introductory note suggests.9 (On the Crewe manuscript Coleridge noted that it was “composed, in a sort of Reverie.”) However, the state of the argument leaves one free to credit or question Coleridge’s story at any of these points, and the main reason for denying that Kubla Khan is a fragment is the possibility of interpreting it as a coherent whole. If Coleridge’s story is not true—or even if it is—one naturally asks why he told it. The usual answer is that Coleridge was embarrassed by the poem. He had “little confidence” in it (McFarland), wished to defend himself against the charge of obscurity (Yarlott), and was ashamed to publish another fragment (Schneider).10 He wrote the introductory note to deflect judgment, for we cannot form a critical opinion of a fragment, or if we can, we cannot hold Coleridge responsible for a poem composed in a dream. Beer, Bate, Brisman, Patterson, and others argue that the meaning of the poem made Coleridge uneasy; hence in the introductory note he both abdicated responsibility for the poem and tried to minimize its significance.11 I shall come back to this point later, but for the moment I shall assume that Coleridge wrote the introductory note for reasons quite different from those that have been suggested. He wished to impose a “plot” upon the poem and to invoke appropriate formal expectations. Without the introductory note Kubla Khan would not have a plot but would consist of two separate passages, the second referring in some lines to the first but not continuing from it. Bate has argued that this structure corresponds to a common one in the greater Romantic lyric, in which the first part, the “odal hymn,” postulates a “challenge, ideal, or prototype that the poet hopes to reach or transcend,” and the “second part, proceeding from that challenge, consists of ” a concluding “credo,” a “personal expression of hope or ambition.”12 Bate cites Keats’s Ode to Psyche and Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind as examples. In these examples, however, the two parts are much more closely interconnected than in Kubla Khan, and Coleridge was strongly committed to the principle that a good poem is organically unified. He could hardly have been pleased with the structure he had created. By writing the introductory note he both explained the structure and converted the poem into the dramatic enactment of a story. The story told in the introductory note and enacted in the poem is that Coleridge, having taken an “anodyne,” fell asleep while reading Purchas His

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Pilgrimage. In his sleep he composed “from two to three hundred lines.” He remembered them when he awoke, and wrote them down as far as line 30. At this point a person called on business from Porlock and stayed above an hour. When, thereafter, Coleridge tried to continue the poem, he found that “with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images,” he could no longer remember it. He wrote down the “scattered lines and images,” which make up lines 31–36 of the poem, and at some later time composed lines 37–54 as a conclusion. Since the introductory note does not explicitly say that Coleridge appended the “scattered lines” to the ones already set down, a reader could assume that the interruption to the poem, caused by the man from Porlock, comes at line 36. I prefer to locate it at line 31 (“The shadow of the dome of pleasure”) because at that point the continuity breaks and because the poem again seems somewhat discontinuous at line 35 (“It was a miracle of rare device”); thus, to repeat, lines 31–34 and 35–36 can plausibly be viewed as the separate fragments Coleridge could still remember after the visitor from Porlock had left. Wherever the reader locates the interruption, he sees it taking place, but would not see it without the introductory note, which tells him to look for it. Kubla Khan is a poem on the Romantic theme of lost inspiration that represents the loss occurring.13 That the final lines (37–54) are not to be read as among those given in the dream is a necessary inference from their content.14 For otherwise a reader would have to assume that in the very moment when Coleridge was envisioning the Abyssinian maid (“the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the corresponding expressions”) he spoke of this vision in the past tense. Such deliberate confusions are expected in John Ashbery but impossible to imagine in earlier poets. The poet would hardly say “In a vision once I saw” while the vision was present to him. Neither would he desire to revive the vision in the midst of it. Hence the reader must assume that lines 37–54 were written at some time subsequent to the dream composition. The longer we suppose they came after the original experience, the more moving their nostalgia and wish, as we imagine Coleridge still remembering the vision and longing to “rebuild” it. Yet, though the final lines are in the subjunctive mood, the grammatical markers of this (“could,” “would,” “should”) disappear after line 49. The reader half forgets that the lines express only a wish and glories in the sublime poet they describe as though he were present. Thus, though in logic and grammar the poem does not conclude positively, for the imagination it ends triumphantly, as though the dome were rebuilt. In this respect the conclusion develops a possibility given in a different tone in the introductory note through Coleridge’s self-quotation from The Picture, which had promised that the “visions will return” and the “fragments . . . unite.”

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The Abyssinian maid has been the focus of intensive commentary; while nothing in the introductory note, so far as I can see, explains why Coleridge referred to her in particular, the plot to this point makes it plausible that at line 37 the speaker would appeal to some external source of inspiration. For his poem has been interrupted, the vision it reports is lost, and he is unable to revive the vision “for himself.” From his store of memory or imagination, therefore, he invokes the Abyssinian maid as a muse. When in line 38 he says that he once saw the Abyssinian maid in “a vision,” he refers to a different vision from that reported in lines 1–36 and referred to in the introductory note (“he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision”) and in the subtitle, for though a reader might imagine that the vision of the Abyssinian maid was included in the dream, the different associations of Abyssinia and China, Kubla Khan and a singing maiden, suggest otherwise. The formulation of line 38 suggests this also, for if “a vision” referred to the vision just narrated of Kubla Khan’s pleasure grounds and dome, it would more appropriately read “the vision,” and the word once would not be present.15 To sum up: the introductory note says that the poet lost a vision and the final lines express a wish to rebuild this vision, but in order to rebuild the vision of Kubla’s pleasure dome, the poet must first revive a different vision, seen on another occasion, of an Abyssinian maid. Because of the introductory note, we read Kubla Khan as a dream-poem, a genre that appealed strongly in the Romantic period. Among the well-known dream-poems are The Prelude 5.70–140, The Pains of Sleep, Darkness, The Four Zoas, and The Fall of Hyperion; if we conflate “dream” with “vision” we would add many more, including The Triumph of Life and virtually all of Blake. To say just what readers expected in poems in this genre would be a subject for a book, and I can touch only on some main headings. A dream-poem might be “nonsense” (Lamb’s and Hazlitt’s term for Kubla Khan). But it might be veiled revelation, especially when it was also a “vision.” Dreams and visions escaped from realism, predesigned form, orderly sequence, and rational and ethical responsibility and were thus invested with the mystery and wonder also found in primitive myths, folk and fairy tales, and medieval romances. Dreams might embody our secret emotions, and for some Romantic readers dreams might emerge from a reality deeper than ordinary reality, or express a mind within us that is more profound and aware than the conscious mind; dreams might rise from our inmost being where we are one with the all. If, as several commentators assume, Coleridge wished in the introductory note to minimize the import of Kubla Khan, to describe it as a dream was not an effective method. Among the formal characteristics of dreams, and hence of dream-poems, was their concreteness. Except when a character in the dream spoke, a dream

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was made up of images, and a dream-poem lacked discursive language. The images might be peculiarly vivid. This was prized, and the more so when the images were glamorous or exotic. The poetic effusion of Perdita Robinson on Kubla Khan suggests that she found no meaning in the images but was thrilled by them and that they set off similar, supplementary images in her mind. The sequence of dream imagery might be explained by laws of association; moreover, in dreaming such functions of the mind as the external senses, the reason, or the will might be suspended, making dreams more purely associational than the activity of the mind when awake. Or, in another theory, the imagery of dreams was not produced by association but expressed and varied with the emotional state of the dreamer. According to G. H. von Schubert’s Symbolik des Traumes (1814), the images of a dream are metaphorical and symbolic; they achieve a rapidity, economy, and wealth of meaning impossible to words. A few strangely ordered images in a dream can express what it would take hours to say in verbal language.16 But the images of a dream are not experienced as figurative by the dreamer. For as Coleridge explained in connection with stage illusion, a dreamer does not compare the images presented in the dream with others. Each is literal reality during the instant in which it is present. Obviously the persistently concrete, exotic, immediate, unexplained imagery of Kubla Khan would seem dreamlike to a Romantic reader. In other dream-poems the speaker remembers a dream and reports it; since it took place in the past, the dream, we assume, has been worked over by the poet with the intention of creating a poem. In Kubla Khan, according to the introductory note, the words of the poem were part of the dream and were not changed subsequently. That composition was involuntary would have meant to Coleridge that Kubla Khan could not be considered a poem in the full sense and would have justified his description of it as a mere “psychological curiosity.” But for many Romantic readers Coleridge’s introductory note would have suggested that Kubla Khan, as the work of the “poet hidden” within us, in Schubert’s phrase, was a greater work than if the conscious mind and will had helped to create it. What Coleridge conveyed to the reader in calling the poem a “fragment” is more doubtful. It was not, in any case, merely that the poem was incomplete. Of course, Coleridge thus made, as I said, loss of inspiration more emphatically the subject of the poem than it would otherwise have been, and he altered the image of the poet, who became less sublime and more pathetic. But at least in German Romanticism, with which Coleridge was familiar, a “fragment” was a recognized literary from.17 It was valued because it activated the imagination; in fact, a fragment was more suggestive than the same words would be within a larger work, where the context would necessarily limit their implication. According to the theories of the Schlegel brothers, a

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fragment preserves the free, ironic stance of its author as a systematic work would not. And for Romantic feeling in general, as McFarland has shown, any existing particular must seem a fragment in relation to the infinite whole. In McFarland’s Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin attention is also directed to fragmentation within what we naively consider as wholes. For the Romantic sense of things, as McFarland interprets it, poems, personalities, and lives are inevitably “diasparactive” or torn apart. The theme of fragmentation runs through Kubla Khan. There is the subtitle, and the term fragment occurs again in the introductory note; the two to three hundred lines of which the poem originally consisted may or may not have been a fragment; after the person from Porlock has gone, Coleridge can recall only “scattered lines or images”; he quotes (misquotes) a fragment from Purchas His Pilgrimage and another from his own poem The Picture; in the latter quotation the images in the water are said to shatter into “fragments” and then reunite; in the poem “huge fragments” of rocks are hurled up by a “fountain”; the “shadow of the dome of pleasure” would be broken into fragments by “the waves”; and structurally the poem falls into at least two separate fragments. A fragment, as these items suggest, is torn from something larger, and it brings the larger context to mind. Just as the whole of Purchas His Pilgrimage is vaguely invoked by the extract from it, and the entire The Picture by the quotation from it, the original “two to three hundred lines” of Kubla Khan are shadowed forth by the lines we have, not as something we can read or even guess at, but as something we are tempted to guess at. Moreover, a fragment, as the “huge rocks” remind us, can be sublime in itself. Many of these references are to actions and describe things becoming fragmented, fragments being hurled forth, and fragments reuniting. Things become fragmented by accident, as in the introductory note, or deliberately, as in The Picture, or by the action of irresistible forces and pressures, as with the huge rocks. The two latter suggestions, I suspect, are closer than the introductory note to the truth concerning Coleridge’s fragment. Lowes, who gives a source for almost every image in the poem, did not seek one for the man from Porlock, for he did not consider this famous person as a part of the poem but as real. If, taking the opposite point of view, we ask why the man from Porlock came, answers may be: to reestablish everyday, rational consciousness, to end the solitude of the poet and associate him again with ordinary human beings, to turn the poem into a fragment, and to stop a transgression. When Coleridge’s mind was “Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone” (to use Wordsworth’s great metaphor for the mind of Sir Isaac Newton), his speculations, emotions, and mental imagery might become deeply disturbing to him. The person from Porlock serves the same function in the plot as the mildly reproving glance darted from the eye

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of Sara in line 49 of The Eolian Harp; her glance causes the poet to retract the “dim and unhallowd” speculations he has just been pursuing—”shapings of the unregenerate mind”—and to reestablish solidarity with ordinary, good people, “the family of Christ.” The person from Porlock is also somewhat analogous to the “goodly company” with which the Ancient Mariner, at the end of the poem, would wish to walk to church, and he has affinities with the friend, in chapter 13 of the Biographia Literaria, who has read Coleridge’s chapter on the imagination and advises him not to publish it.18 Many critics have suggested what transgression was imminent in the poem. It had to do with the vision of poetry and the poet as rivaling the creative power of God and/or of the demonic. Appendix The Introductory Note The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [Lord Byron], and, as far as the Author’s own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits. In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in “Purchas’s Pilgrimage”: “Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.” The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

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Then all the charm Is broken—all that phantom-world so fair Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread, And each mis-shape[s] the other. Stay awhile, Poor youth! who scarcely dar’st lift up thine eyes— The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon The visions will return! And lo, he stays, And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms Come trembling back, unite, and now once more The pool becomes a mirror. [The Picture; or, the Lover’s Resolution, lines 91–100]

Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him. Σαμερον αδιον ασω: but the to-morrow is yet to come. As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease [“The Pains of Sleep”].

No t e s 1. Timothy Bahti, “Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Fragment of Romanticism,” Modern Language Notes 96:5 (December 1981): 1037. 2. In the earlier printings of 1816, 1828, and 1829 the subtitle was “Kubla Khan; or, a Vision in a Dream,” and the introductory note was entitled “Of the Fragment of Kubla Khan.” 3. Irene H. Chayes, “ ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Creative Process,” Studies in Romanticism 6:1 (Autumn 1966): 1–4; Kathleen M. Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 17–41; Jean-Pierre Mileur, Vision and Revision: Coleridge’s Art of Immanence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 24–33, 80–88. 4. Mileur, Vision and Revision, 66, and Warren Stevenson, Divine Analogy: A Study of the Creative Motif in Blake and Coleridge (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1972) also compare the introductory note with the gloss to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. 5. Mileur, Vision and Revision, 24, also notes that the introductory note and the poem each challenge “the other’s literality.” 6. Though there was a legend, which Coleridge probably knew, that Kubla Khan had envisioned his summer palace in a dream before he built it. See John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1930), 358. 7. Bahti, “Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan,’ ” 1046; Mileur, Vision and Revision, 31; and other commentators. 8. This point was suggested to me in conversation by Judson Watson. 9. Some opinions may be cited without giving complete references: Lowes, Abrams, Hanson, Shaffer, and Piper accept that the poem was produced much as the introductory note says; Schneider, Ober, Watson, Mackenzie, and Stevenson doubt

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that its composition was involuntary. Schneider thinks it is a fragment; House, Bate, Beer, Bloom, and McFarland deny this. 10. Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 225; Geoffrey Yarlott, Coleridge and the Abyssinian Maid (London: Methuen, 1967), 128; Elizabeth Schneider, Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 27. 11. John Beer, “Coleridge and Poetry: I. Poems of the Supernatural,” in S. T. Coleridge, ed. R. L. Brett (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1971), 66–69; Walter Jackson Bate, Coleridge (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 82–84; Leslie Brisman, Romantic Origins (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 26–28; Charles I. Patterson, “The Daemonic in Kubla Khan: Toward Interpretation,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America] 89 (1974): 1039. 12. Bate, Coleridge, 78. 13. Donald Pierce, “ ‘Kubla Khan’ in Context,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 21:4 (Autumn 1981): 581, points out that Kubla Khan is “a poem about suspended powers. The unfinishedness of ‘Kubla Khan’ is integral to the theme.” 14. Most persons who have written about the poem seem to assume this, but I have found in conversation that many Coleridgeans do not. Hence I make the point explicitly. 15. David Simpson, Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1979), 92, points out that “the ‘once I saw’ (l. 38) seems to invoke a time outside of and prior to the vision of Xanadu.” 16. G. H. von Schubert, Symbolik des Traumes, 3d ed. (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1840), 6. Drawing his notions of the formal characteristics of dreams and dream-poems from Freud, John Beer remarks that the poem “has the arbitrariness and reductive economy of much dream work” and “provides a many-faceted example of the ‘over-determination’ that Freud traced in much dream-work” (“The languages of Kubla Khan,” in Coleridge’s Imagination, ed. Richard Gravil, Lucy Newlyn, and Nicholas Roe [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 220, 252). Since I do not know whether or not the poem was actually a dream, but do know that Coleridge wanted it to be read as a dream, I do not compare it with Freudian descriptions of dream form but with the ideas of Coleridge and his contemporaries on this subject. 17. Chayes, “ ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Creative Process,” 2, remarks, “Among the Romantics, ‘fragment’ sometimes has almost generic meaning.” 18. Mileur, Vision and Revision, 14, connects the introductory note with chapter 13 of Biographia Literaria; see also Brisman, Romantic Origins, 34.

P a u l M agn u son

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would like to begin with a quotation, which I take to be representative of common opinion on Coleridge’s Conversation Poems and his mystery poems. In his Clark Lectures, published in 1953, Humphry House remarked: It has been observed by Dr. Tillyard how very unpolitical “The Ancient Mariner” is. “Frost at Midnight” (dated February 1798— that is, while the “Mariner” was being written) is, if possible, less political still. (85–86)

House argues that at the time that these poems were being written Coleridge began to divide his poetical interests, writing some poems with explicit political content and others that do not contain a word of politics. In other words, the comparison of either “Frost at Midnight” or “The Ancient Mariner” with other poems written or published at the same time, “The Visions of the Maid of Orleans” or “Fears in Solitude” for examples, demonstrates that Coleridge was liberating his genius from the mundane impediments of topical literature. I will elaborate an argument that “Frost at Midnight” is a political poem if it is read in the dialogic and public context of Coleridge’s other poems and the political debates of the 1790’s. A comparison of “Frost at Midnight” with From The Wordsworth Circle 22, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 3–11. © 1991 by Marilyn Gaull.

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other Coleridge poems yields a conclusion contrary to House’s. But before I ask about the significance of a Romantic lyric, I want to ask about its location: Where is it? and Who conspired to put it there? The method that I will follow argues that a lyric’s location determines its significance, and to change a poem’s location is to change its dialogic significance, sometimes radically. “Frost at Midnight” was written in late February 1798. It is commonly read as an intensely subjective, meditative lyric written in isolated retirement and reflecting the isolated consciousness of its author; or it is read in the context of Coleridge’s other Conversation Poems such as “The Eolian Harp” and “This Lime-Tree Bower,” and it echoes the themes of those poems with which it was grouped as “Meditative Poems in Blank Verse” in Sibylline Leaves (1817); or it is read in the context of Wordsworth’s lyrics, particularly “Tintern Abbey.” But it was first published in the fall of 1798 as the final poem in a quarto volume that began with two explicitly political poems: “Fears in Solitude” and “France: An Ode.” These two poems were also written early in 1798, and “France: An Ode” was published in the Morning Post, April 16. The quarto was published by Joseph Johnson, the radical bookseller, in the early fall after Coleridge met him in late August or early September while he was on his way to Germany with Wordsworth (CL, I: 417–8, 420). I propose to locate “Frost at Midnight” in the context of the other poems in the volume and to locate the volume in the context of the political debates conducted in the popular press. My more general interest is in the ways in which context determines dialogic significance, and I certainly do not intend to argue that “Frost at Midnight” must be read in these contexts or that the reading that I will suggest is the only, or even the best, reading. In a reading of a poem as an isolated, integral, and individual poem, the process of interpretation relies only upon the poem itself; in the variety of dialogic reading that I am offering, the meaning of a poem depends upon the meanings of its themes and figures that exist in the public discourse before the poem is written. I will be comparing Coleridge’s poems with other written material that is not often considered in a traditional explication; I draw upon the political pamphlets and political journalism, which implies that a Romantic lyric participates in the ordinary language of the day. For this contextual reading there is no distinction between an aesthetic language that is unique and separate from ordinary language. And in dealing with the dialogic relations of lyric poetry and political journalism, my dialogic method differs from the theory of Bakhtin, who [in The Dialogic Imagination] places primary emphasis upon the multiplicity of voices within a single work. To put all this in a simpler way: I will be looking at the public Coleridge and the public location of the poem. Our reconstructions of Coleridge in this century are based upon the publication of his notebooks and letters,

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by our knowledge of the scholarship that has traced his reading, and by our knowledge of his later career. None of these were available to his contemporaries, whose comments make the history of the reception of the poem and whose debates constitute the context of its publication. The story of its public context and reception, I think, is a particularly complex instance of tendentious interpretation and deliberate misrepresentation. To conduct an inquiry into the publication and reception of the poem is not necessarily to develop a clear meaning for it. Significance remains as slippery as it is for other critical approaches. It partakes, in other words, of the rhetoric of public debate rather than the rhetoric of symbolism and allegory by which it is usually discussed. For a reading of “Frost at Midnight” in the public dialogue, the crucial dates are those of the composition of the volume in late August or early September 1798, when Coleridge first met Joseph Johnson. The dates of the writing of the poem are relatively insignificant, because the purposes of publication are more important than Coleridge’s original intentions in drafting the individual poems. To publish, in the 1790’s, was inevitably to enter a public debate. In August, when the volume was composed, both author and publisher were under attack from the press and the government. Joseph Johnson, whose name appeared boldly on the title page, had been placed on trial in the Court of the King’s Bench and convicted on July 17 for selling Gilbert Wakefield’s A Reply to Some Parts of the Bishop of Llandaff ’s Address to the People of Great Britain. His indictment reads in part: “Joseph Johnson late of London bookseller being a malicious seditious and ill-disposed person and being greatly disaffected to our said Lord the King . . . wickedly and seditiously did publish and cause to be published a certain scandalous malicious and seditious libel. . . .” Although he had been found guilty, sentencing was postponed for many months for obvious reasons. At the hearing on his sentence, he would have to produce evidence of his good behavior in any plea for leniency. His sworn statement at the hearing claimed “that where he could take the liberty of doing it, he has uniformly recommended the Circulation of such publications as had a tendency to promote good morals instead of such as were calculated to mislead and inflame the Common people.”1 Since the end of 1797, Coleridge himself had been under attack in the Anti-Jacobin, which began publication as a weekly in November to attack the opposition press. It published on July 9, 1798 a satirical poem called “New Morality, or the promised Installation of the High Priest of the Theophilanthropists,” in which Coleridge was ridiculed along with Southey, Charles Lloyd, and Charles Lamb for being both Jacobins and atheists, followers of the French deist La Réveillère Lépeaux, a member of

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the Directory, who proposed replacing Christianity with a form of Deism called Theophilanthropy. behold . . . The Directorial Lama, Sovereign Priest— Lepaux—whom Atheists worship—at whose nod Bow their meek heads—the Men without a God. Ere Long, perhaps, to this astonished Isle, Fresh from the Shores of subjugated Nile. Shall Buonaparte’s victor Fleet protect The genuine Theo-philanthropic Sect— The Sect of Marat, Mirabeau, Voltaire, Led by their Pontiff, good La Reveillere. Rejoiced our Clubs shall greet him, and install The holy hunch-back in thy Dome, St. Paul While Countless votaries thronging in his train Wave their Red Caps, and hymn this jocund strain. (ll. 314–28)

On August first James Gillray published an elaborate caricature of the worshippers of Lépeaux based on the poem. At one side is the figure of Lépeaux, standing on a footstool preaching to a group of votaries which includes three dwarfs holding copies of the Morning Post, the Courier, and the Morning Chronicle. Behind Lépeaux are three allegorical figures of starving Justice with a raised dagger, Philanthropy squeezing the earth with a deathly embrace, and Sensibility with what appears to be a bleeding heart. Facing Lépeaux is a Cornucopia of Ignorance, from which flows a torrent of pamphlets and journals, two of which are being read by asses and carry the titles “Southey’s Saphics” and “Coleridge’s Dactylics.” Lamb and Lloyd appear in a corner as a frog and toad croaking from a volume called “Blank Verse by Toad and Frog” (I do not know who is toad and who is frog). It is clear from both text and caricature that Southey and Coleridge were the most important Jacobin poets. Wordsworth and Blake were, of course, nowhere to be seen. Thus a volume apparently presenting simultaneously the author and publisher of “Fears in Solitude” as both patriots and Christians would tend to take the heat off both. The volume would be a public defense against attacks upon both that had been made merely weeks before the volume was composed. The public debate that the volume entered was composed of a rhetoric of purposeful duplicity, distortion, and personal attack, and Coleridge was constantly in the sights of the Anti-Jacobin, which contains many attacks on him although often Coleridge is not mentioned by name. One of its major

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aims was to expose the errors in the liberal press, which it ranged under three categories: lies, misrepresentations and mistakes. Its Prospectus promised to present “Lies of the Week: the downright, direct, unblushing falsehoods, which have no colour or foundation whatever, and which at the very moment of their being written, have been known to the writer to be wholly destitute of truth.” Yet its own rhetoric was that of parody and distortion. The early numbers contained essays on Jacobin poetry, whose major targets were Southey and Coleridge. In its number for December 18 it included a parody of Southey’s “The Soldier’s Wife: Dactylics.” First, Southey’s poem printed from his Poems of 1797. Weary way-wanderer languid and sick at heart, Travelling painfully over the rugged road, Wild-visag’d Wanderer! ah for thy heavy chance! Sorely thy little one drags by thee bare-footed, Cold is the baby that hangs at thy bending back, Meagre and livid and screaming its wretchedness. *Woe-begone mother, half anger, half agony, As over thy shoulder thou lookest to hush the babe, Bleakly the blinding snow beats in thy hagged face. *This stanza was supplied by S. T. Coleridge.

The Anti-Jacobin’s parody is prefaced by the following comment: “Being the quintessence of all the Dactylics that ever were, or ever will be written.” Wearisome Sonnetteer, feeble and querulous, Painfully dragging out thy demo-cratic lays— Moon-stricken Sonnetteer, “ah! for thy heavy chance!” Sorely thy Dactylics lag on uneven feet: Slow is the Syllable which thou wouldst urge to speed, Lame and o’erburthen’d and “screaming its wretchedness!”

The next stanza, indicated only by a lines of asterisks, is omitted with the following note: “My worthy friend, the Bellman, had promised to supply an additional Stanza but the business of assisting the Lamp-lighter, Chimneysweeper, &c with Complimentary Verses for their worthy Masters and Mistresses, pressing on him at this Season, he was obliged to decline it.”

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The Bellman is, of course, Coleridge, who had published The Watchman, and the reference to the lamp-lighter may be an allusion to the practice of the French Revolutionaries of hanging their victims on lamp posts. Not only was Coleridge’s poetry parodied in the Anti-Jacobin, but his journalism was ridiculed as well. An article in the Morning Post for February 24, recently identified as Coleridge’s by David Erdman in his edition of Essays on His Times, was quoted in the Anti-Jacobin on March 5. Coleridge had written that “The insensibility with which we now hear of the most extraordinary Revolutions is a very remarkable symptom of the public temper, and no unambiguous indication of the state of the times. We now read with listless unconcern of events which, but a very few years ago, would have filled all Europe with astonishment.” The Anti-Jacobin quoted this passage with some errors and commented: “Where he found this ‘insensibility,’ we know not unless among the Patriots of the Corresponding Society;—for our parts, we have a very lively feeling of the transaction [the entry of the French armies into Rome], which for perfidy and inhumanity, surpasses whatever we have yet seen or heard of.” Later in his article Coleridge had written “In the midst of these stupendous revolutions, the Nobility, Gentry, and Proprietors of England, make no efforts to avert that ruin from their own heads, which they daily see falling on the same classes of men in neighbouring countries.” The Anti-Jacobin sniffed in response to this: “Never, probably, in any period, in any Country, were such efforts made, by the very descriptions of men this worthy tool of Jacobinism has pointed out as making no exertions.” In March and April 1798 government pressure upon dissent forced the radical press to become more circumspect and duplicitous in its rhetoric. When Coleridge published “France: An Ode” as “The Recantation” in the Morning Post, Daniel Stuart’s editorial policy had been shifting against French militarism. Coleridge’s ode was prefaced by this note: “The following excellent Ode will be in unison with the feelings of every friend to Liberty and foe to Oppression; of all, who admiring the French Revolution, detest and deplore the conduct of France toward Switzerland.” As David Erdman says in his introduction to Essays on His Times, “Both editor and poet, in their different ways, recanted while saying that they did not, and oscillated more than they recanted” (EOT, I, lxxxi). One week after Coleridge’s “Recantation” was published, the Anti-Jacobin gloated that the Morning Post “has wisely shrunk from our severity, reformed its Principles in some material points, and in more than one of its last columns, held language which the Whig Club and Corresponding Society will not soon forgive” and concluded “If we could but cure this Paper of its inveterate habits of Lying and Swearing, and give it a few notions of meum and tuum, we should not despair of seeing it one day an English Opposition Paper.”

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The Anti-Jacobin, however, could claim only some of the credit for the changes of the Morning Post. The government had turned up the heat on the paper. The occasion of the government pressure, and the occasion of Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude,” as Erdman recounts it, was the arrest on March 1 of John Binns, of the London Corresponding Society and two members of the United Irishmen. They were apparently in possession of papers proposing a French invasion of Ireland. Within a week the Morning Post printed accounts of the arrest, and Daniel Stuart was summoned before the ministers to reveal his sources of information. Stuart’s editorial policy became more cautious. In these instances the dialogue into which Coleridge’s poems enter is conducted by the affirmations and denials, the accusations and defenses, and the distortions and misrepresentations in the continuing battle between the liberal papers and the Anti-Jacobin. The early attacks against Coleridge did not mention him by name. Some readers, of course, would have recognized that Coleridge was the Bellman in the parody of Southey’s “The Soldier’s Wife.” It would have been more obvious that the Morning Post was responding to various pressures in the shift of its editorial policy and, since Coleridge signed “France: An Ode” with his own name, that he was a part of the shift. But the shift was not his alone. “Fears in Solitude,” which was written at the same time as this exchange between the Morning Post and the Anti-Jacobin, returns the accusations about the rhetoric of public discourse. “Lying and Swearing” were not confined to the liberal press. While Coleridge’s poem attacks Britain for slavery, greed, and war fever, its major theme is the violation of the ninth commandment against bearing false witness, which he called “one scheme of perjury.” In the Sixth Lecture on Revealed Religion, Coleridge had anticipated these complaints by arguing of government itself that There is scarcely a Vice which Government does not teach us—criminal prodigality and an unholy Splendor surrounds it— disregard of solemn Promises marks its conduct—and more than half of the business of Ministers is to find inducements to Perjury! Nay of late it has become the fashion to keep wicked and needy men in regular Pay, who without scruple take the most awful oaths in order to gain the confidence which it is their Trade to betray.2

Coleridge’s immediate target of criticism here is the abuse of the system of government spies, from which he was later to suffer himself, and the bribery of witnesses in criminal cases, but his complaints are resonant of the agitation against the Test Acts which predates the Revolution. Thus both Coleridge and the Anti-Jacobin agreed that political dialogue was conducted by duplicity. The truth of duplicity was adopted by both parties.

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Perhaps the cruelest attack upon Coleridge came in 1799 when the satirical poems from the Anti-Jacobin were republished with a note that Coleridge has “left his country, become a citizen of the world, left his little ones fatherless, and his wife destitute.” Most likely, this is an intentional echo of the accusations made against Rousseau, who ignored and disavowed his natural children. In The Friend for June 8, 1809 Coleridge answers these accusations: Again, will any man, who loves his Children and his Country, be slow to pardon me, if not in the spirit of vanity but of natural self-defence against yearly and monthly attacks on the very vitals of my character as an honest man and a loyal Subject, I prove the utter falsity of the charges by the only public means in my power, a citation from the last work published by me, in the close of the year 1798, and anterior to all the calumnies published to my dishonor.3

Coleridge then includes a lengthy quotation from “Fears in Solitude.” Since he cited the “Fears in Solitude” volume in his defense in 1809, it seems reasonable to me to think that he thought of it in the same way in 1798. If, indeed, Coleridge’s self-defense began in 1798 and not later when he had changed his political allegiances, his later self-defense must be regarded in a different light. His self-defense in 1798 was not, as it later appeared, an effort to change the record to cover up his youthful radicalism, to rewrite his youth, but rather it was a necessary self-defense, done at the moment of pressure from both the press and the government, and done in concert with others who themselves were under similar pressure. That Coleridge’s volume was designed to answer criticisms of himself and Johnson is confirmed by the first notices printed in the Analytic Review (Dec. 1798), which was published by Johnson: “Mr. C, in common with many others of the purest patriotism, has been slandered with the appellation of an enemy to his country. The following passage [from ‘Fears in Solitude’], we presume, will be sufficient to wipe away the injurious stigma, and show that an adherence to the measures of the administration is not the necessary consequence of an ardent love for the constitution.” Of “Frost at Midnight” the reviewer said that the poem does “great honour to the poet’s feelings, as the husband of an affectionate wife, and as the father of a cradled infant.” The review might almost be considered the official publisher’s interpretation of the volume, like the puffs we all conspire to write today. The publisher reads the author as a patriot, who can prove that he is a patriot because he is not an atheist. “Fears in Solitude” calls upon

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his countrymen to rise and defeat the impious French. “France: An Ode” deplores French aggression while retaining admiration for the Revolution. And “Frost at Midnight” concludes with six lines that were later deleted. The “silent icicles” will shine to the moon Like those, my babe! which, ere to-morrow’s warmth Have capp’d their sharp keen points with pendulous drops, Will catch thine eye, and with their novelty Suspend thy little soul: then make thee shout, And stretch and flutter from thy mother’s arms As thou would’st fly for very eagerness.

The public and dialogic significance of “Frost at Midnight” in the fall of 1798 was that it presented a patriotic poet, whose patriotism rested on the love of his country and his domestic affections. Coleridge specifically instructed Johnson to send a copy of the volume to his brother, the Reverend George Coleridge. As the reviewer in the Monthly Review (May 1799) put it, “Frost at Midnight” displays “a pleasing picture of virtue and content in a cottage,” hardly a penetrating critical comment of interest to us in these days of deconstruction and hermeneutics, until one recognizes that the word “content” implies the negation of its opposite. Coleridge is not discontent, not ill-disposed to the existing state of society; he is not, therefore, seditious. Considering the political intentions of the volume, intentions that were present in 1798 and not constructed later to hide a youthful radicalism, is it possible to draw conclusions about Coleridge’s political principles and ideology as they appeared in the public discourse in 1798? Isn’t the public dialogue that “Frost at Midnight” enters full of duplicity? Does not the volume intend to present Coleridge both as a loyal patriot who loves his country and as a devoutly religious man, on the one hand, and on the other as one who continues to support the ideals of liberty that he has always held? The evidence of the volume along with the letter that Coleridge sent to his brother George in March that he had “snapped [his] squeaking babytrumpet of Sedition” (CL, I, 397) suggest that the invasion of Switzerland and government pressure upon Stuart had forced him to change his views. In this private letter he announces that I deprecate the moral & intellectual habits of those men both in England & France, who have modestly assumed to themselves the exclusive title of Philosophers & Friends of Freedom. I think them at least as distant from greatness as from goodness. If I know my

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own opinions, they are utterly untainted with French Metaphysics, French Politics, French Ethics, & French Theology. (CL, I, 395)

Considering Coleridge’s 1795 Lectures, this comment is less of an apology or an announcement of new views as it is a confirmation of his original positions. In the same letter he comments upon his public persona: I am prepared to suffer without discontent the consequences of my follies & mistakes—: and unable to conceive how that which I am, of Good could have been without that which I have been of Evil, it is withheld from me to regret any thing: I therefore consent to be deemed a Democrat & a Seditionist. A man’s character follows him long after he has ceased to deserve it . . . (CL, I, 397)

At the same time that Coleridge claims to have converted to being a loyalist, he admits willingness to be considered a democrat and seditionist. In part, the volume Fears in Solitude wants to have it both ways. Its author as a public figure is both a friend of liberty and a loyal patriot. At the same time that he seemed to recant his former praise of the French Revolution, he continued to publish poems in the Morning Post expressing some sympathy with France. For instance on July 30 he published “A Tale,” the story of the mad ox, which as a note explains, represents the French Revolution: An ox, long fed on musty hay,   And work’d with yoke and chain, Was loosen’d on an April day, When fields are in their best array, And growing grasses sparkle gay   At once with sun and rain. The grass was sweet, the sun was bright   With truth I may aver it; The beast was glad, as well he might, Thought a green meadow no bad sight, And frisk’d,—to show his huge delight,   Much like a beast of spirit. ‘Stop, neighbours, stop, why these alarms?   The ox is only glad!’ But still, they pour from cots and farms—

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‘Hallo!’ the parish is up in arms, (A hoaxing-hunt has always charms)   ‘Hallo! the ox is mad.’

The ox is chased through the town: The frightened beast ran through the town   All follow’d, boy and dad, Bull-dog, parson, shopman, clown, The publicans rush’d from the Crown, ’Halloo! Hamstring him! Cut him down!   They drove the poor ox mad.4

The poem concludes with the admission that now the beast of the Revolution is indeed mad and must be controlled, as does “France: An Ode,” but the attitude toward the Revolution is quite different. “France: An Ode” had portrayed the Revolution rising like the allegorical figure of wrath, not the animal gladness of the ox: When France in wrath her giant limbs uprear’d And with that oath which smote earth, air, and sea, Stamp’d her strong foot and said, she would be free. . . .

The picture of the ox liberated in gladness and goaded to madness displays both a greater sympathy with France and a liberal attitude which, as Carl Woodring points out, [in his Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge, 1961] Whigs and Friends of Freedom had held for some time.5 One wonders at the degree of recantation that has actually gone on. The language of politics in Coleridge’s dialogue with the reactionary press is tempered to suit the intentions of those who use and abuse it. If Coleridge seems to oscillate and to move easily from side to side, it is in part because his writing was entering a public discourse of duplicity, one in which his works were certain to be misread and mistaken. While the conservatives who attacked him and the other radicals could parade without ambiguity their principles and ideology, the radicals including Coleridge were forced to be more cautious. Coleridge’s oscillations could be reread as the acrobatic feat of remaining in the public debates, when other radical voices had been silenced or exiled. At any given moment and with any given utterance in the public debates, its terms are complex and even contradictory. And because of the surrounding context, each utterance is unique in the complexity of its dialogic significance.

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For an obvious example, the word “patriotism” is about as ambiguous as one could want. “Fears in Solitude” was reviewed in the Analytic as displaying the “purest patriotism.” And the Monthly Review (May 1799) echoed the evaluation: “Of his country he speaks with a patriotic enthusiasm, and he exhorts to virtue with a Christian’s ardor . . . no one can be more desirous of promoting all that is important to its security and felicity.” But what does “patriot” mean? In the first edition of his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson defined a patriot as “one whose ruling passion is the love of his country,” but in the fourth edition he added a contrary definition: “a factious disturber of the government.” A correspondent to the Anti-Jacobin, who signed himself “A Batchelor” had his own definition: “By pretty long habit of observation, I have at length arrived at the skill of concluding from a man’s politics the nature of his domestic troubles” ( Jan. 1, 1798). The inflamed passions and gloomy dispositions of those who are discontent are caused by sexual frustration. The Batchelor concludes that “A Patriot is, generally speaking, a man who has been either a Dupe, a Spendthrift, or a Cuckhold, and, not unfrequently, all-together.” Clearly the Batchelor has been reading Swift’s Tale of A Tub and thinks of a patriot as someone whose height of felicity is being a “fool among knaves” and whose acquisitions include the perpetual “possession of being well deceived,” and whose great achievements in new systems and conquests can easily be traced to sexual frustration. Curiously enough, in a somewhat different and Miltonic key, Coleridge agrees with the Batchelor’s analysis. In “Fears in Solitude,” he accused both radicals and conservatives: “We have been too long / Dupes of a deep delusion.” Among those deceived Coleridge includes the radical iconoclasts as well as the conservative idolaters, who demand total submission to the present system of government. The volume thus presents Coleridge as a patriot but what kind of patriot? Both of course, depending which of Coleridge’s readers is doing the reading. Another related, and more complex, set of political keywords surrounds the domestic affections in “Frost at Midnight.” Does the love of landscape and family form the basis of a patriotism similar to Burke’s or does it lead to a love of all mankind that is characteristic of radical writing? The question of the value of patriotism of this sort enters the public discourse on the French Revolution with Dr. Richard Price’s sermon “A Discourse on the Love of our Country, Delivered on November 4, 1789” before the society to “commemorate the Revolution in Great Britain.” Price’s thesis argues that the love of one’s country is not based on “the soil or the spot of earth on which we happen to be born . . . but that community of which we are members . . . who are associated with us under the same constitution of government.” He argues that any love of one’s own country “does not imply any conviction of the superior value of it to other countries, or any particular preference of its

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laws and constitution of government.” Finally he concludes that “in pursuing particularly the interest of our country, we ought to carry our views beyond it. We should love it ardently, but not exclusively. We ought to seek its good, by all the means that our different circumstances and abilities will allow; but at the same time we ought to consider ourselves as citizens of the world, and take care to maintain a just regard to the rights of other countries. . . .”6 In response to Dr. Price, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France countered that the inheritance of monarchy went hand in hand with the inheritance of property, and that the love of one’s country and government is bound to the love of one’s family: By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. . . . In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections, keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars. (Butler, 40)

In Coleridge’s 1795 Introductory Address, he, like Burke, grounds benevolence and patriotism in the domestic affections, but his definition of benevolence as universal is precisely the opposite of Burke’s: The searcher after Truth must love and be beloved, for general Benevolence is a necessary motive to constancy of pursuit; and this general Benevolence is begotten and rendered permanent by social and domestic affections. Let us beware of that proud Philosophy, which affects to inculcate Philanthropy while it denounces every home-born feeling, by which it is produced and nurtured. The paternal and filial duties discipline the heart and prepare it for the love of all mankind. The intensity of private attachments encourages, not prevents, universal Benevolence. (Lect. 46)

The thought is repeated in Lecture Three, where it introduces a criticism of Godwin: Jesus knew our Nature—and that expands like the circles of a Lake—the Love of our Friends, parents, and neighbors lead[s]

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to a love of our Country to the love of all mankind. The intensity of private attachments encourages, not prevents, universal philanthropy—the nearer we approach to the Sun the more intense his Rays—yet what corner of the System does he not cheer and vivify. (Lect. 163)

Coleridge’s immediate criticism in these passages is not of Burke, but of Godwin’s “proud philosophy” and his indifference to personal and domestic affections. In the next paragraph he ridicules the “Stoical Morality which disclaims all the duties of Gratitude and domestic Affection” and addresses Godwinians (like Thelwall, to whom he used the same words in a private letter): “Severe Moralist! that teaches us that filial Love is a Folly, Gratitude criminal, Marriage Injustice, and a promiscuous Intercourse of the Sexes our wisdom and our duty. In this System a man may gain his self-esteem with little Trouble, he first adopts Principles so lax as to legalize the most impure gratification and then prides himself on acting to his Principles” (Lect. 164–65). Coleridge’s consistent rejection of materialism, atheism, and the libertinism in liberty separates him from Godwin, Thelwall and other radicals, but that does not mean that his invocation of the domestic affections places him in Burke’s camp. For Burke the domestic affections form the basis of the British Constitution, a decidedly national allegiance, while Coleridge views them as the basis of a universal benevolence and a love of all mankind. The Anti-Jacobin, not surprisingly, takes Burke’s and not Coleridge’s position. In “New Morality” Coleridge’s image of the sun for the love of mankind is turned against him. The “universal man” through the extended globe his feelings run As broad and general as th’unbounded Sun! No narrow bigot he—his reason’d view Thy interests, England, ranks with thine Peru France at our doors, he sees no danger nigh, But heaves for Turkey’s woes th’impartial sigh; A steady Patriot of the World alone, The Friend of every Country—but his own. (ll. 107–14)

In the eyes of the defenders of tradition and prejudice, Coleridge then should stand in the ranks with Dr. Price and his followers who ask What has the love of their country hitherto been among mankind? What has it been but a love of domination; a desire of conquest,

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and a thirst for grandeur and glory, by extending territory, and enslaving surrounding countries? What has it been but a blind and narrow principle, producing in every country a contempt of other countries, and forming men into combinations and factions against their common rights and liberties . . . ? (Butler 25–26)

Finally, in the first of the series on Jacobin poetry, the Anti-Jacobin ticks off its characteristics: The Poet of other times has been an enthusiast in the love of his native soil. The Jacobin Poet rejects all restriction in his feelings. His love is enlarged and expanded so as to comprehend all human kind. The Old Poet was a Warrior, at least in imagination; and sung the actions of the Heroes of his Country, in strains that ‘made Ambition Virtue,’ and which overwhelmed the horrors of War in its glory. The Jacobin Poet would have no objection to sing battles too—but he would make a distinction. The prowess of Buonaparte indeed he might chaunt in his loftiest strain of exultation. There we should find nothing but trophies, and triumphs, and branches of laurel and olive, phalanxes of Republicans shouting Victory, satellites of Despotism biting the ground and geniuses of Liberty planting standards on mountain-tops.

“Frost at Midnight” as a portrait of the domestic affections enters this debate in 1798, but how was it possible for a reader in 1798 to know whether what the Monthly Review called this “pleasing picture of virtue and content in a cottage” reflects the ideology of Price, or Burke, or Coleridge, or Lépeaux, or Paine, or Priestley, or Bishop Berkeley? Is the public Coleridge the Watchman, the Bellman, or the lamp-lighter, the patriot or the Jacobin, a Christian or a theophilanthropist? Coleridge’s and Johnson’s friends would have read the “content in a cottage” as portraying the domestic affections as the ground for universal benevolence. Coleridge clearly hoped that his brother would have read it in an opposite way, as a rejection of sedition and atheism. The Critical Review (Aug. 1799) wouldn’t buy it at all: “But those who conceive that Mr. Coleridge has, in these poems, recanted his former principles, should consider the general tenor of them. The following passage is not written in

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conformity with the fashionable opinions of the day,” and then the reviewer quotes from “Fears in Solitude.” The Anti-Jacobin may have read the references in “Frost at Midnight” to the “eternal language, which thy God / Utters” as an allusion to Paine’s Age of Reason: “The Word of God is the creation we behold: And it is this word . . . that God speaketh universally to man” (Lect. 95n). In 1799, when the Anti-Jacobin republished “New Morality” it included a footnote that described Coleridge as “an avowed Deist,” which to their Church-and-King crowd meant that Coleridge was an atheist and a follower of Paine. Combined with their ungenerous note about his going to Germany and leaving his family destitute, the note interprets Coleridge as a Jacobin in the camp of Rousseau, Godwin, and Paine. These issues of patriotism, content, and domestic affections have little to do with the facts of biography. They are parts of a crucial political struggle, keywords in an ideological debate. Their various meanings existed long before Coleridge wrote “Frost at Midnight,” and when he did write it, he was certainly aware of their meanings, because he himself had contributed to the debate as early as 1795. To put it another way, Coleridge’s references to the domestic affections had nothing to do with his own domestic affections and everything to do with the public discourse. The language of “Frost at Midnight” in 1798 is the creation of that public discourse, not the creation of private circumstances or private meditation. “Frost at Midnight” is a private poem with public meanings because it has a public location. Its language is defined by the rhetoric of public oratory, not the rhetoric of symbolism and allegory, a language that takes its significance from the allusiveness of the dialogue, not from the referentiality of its figures. Since it was placed in 1798 in the public dialogue, it cannot represent rural retirement as an evasion of political issues, although it is certainly evasive. Nor does it represent a desire to escape from history. Rather, by becoming public, it enters history because it enters the debates that constitute history and that motivate action. It is not the private meditation of an isolated consciousness, but the testimony of a public figure. “Frost at Midnight” is a poem that is changed by its public context. How would “Frost at Midnight” be read with this context in mind? In traditional symbolic readings the images and figures are explicated, first of all, by reference to other figures in the poem itself and perhaps by reference to Coleridge’s other poems or philosophical writings. In the form of dialogic reading that I am suggesting, the images are glossed by their meanings within the public discourse and its political language. If this method is to have any value, it should have a practical effect on the readings of poems, yet all I can do here is to suggest some significantly different readings of portions of the poem that the context provides. The reference to “abstruser

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musings” becomes a problem. In a symbolic reading Coleridge is alone in his cottage in the silence of the night quite removed from the intrusive presence of sensible activity and permitted to think philosophically about the activity of nature, the ministry of frost and its ultimate cause and purpose. Yet in the public context “abstruse” thinking sounds suspiciously like the kind of abstraction and metaphysics that Burke saw as part of the origin of the Revolution: “I cannot stand forward and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction” (Butler 8). What after all could Coleridge be thinking about so abstrusely? He is vexed and disturbed with the extreme calm, a calm that indicates its opposite, activity and audible language. In a symbolic reading of the poem, the language of nature troubles him, and he wishes to be able to read that language symbolically, but his phrase “the numberless goings on of life” signifies that the vitality of natural and human life is indistinct. But “Frost at Midnight” is preceded by two political poems that worry specifically about war and invasion. In the context of those poems, how could the phrase mean anything else but the present political anxieties. Within the poem itself the “numberless goings on of life” are asserted to be present in “Sea, hill and wood”—the elements of nature; but in the context of the first two poems, the potential invasion by sea changes the reference of the phrase. Why is not the relation between the calm and the vexation in “Frost at Midnight” the same as it is at the beginning of “Fears in Solitude” when calm and retired solitude turns abruptly to thoughts of war: “it is a melancholy thing / For such a man, who would full fain preserve / His soul in calmness, yet perforce must feel / For all his brethren.” “Fears in Solitude” concludes with a return to calm that provides a location for continued thoughts of human sympathy: O green and silent dell! And grateful, that by nature’s quietness And solitary musings all my heart Is soften’d, and made worthy to indulge Love, and the thoughts that yearn for human kind.

If one reads the entire volume of “Fears in Solitude” as a single composition, why are not the “abstruser musings” of “Frost at Midnight” precisely the same as the “solitary musings” that conclude “Fears in Solitude”? If the two are the same, and if the thoughts of humanity and universal benevolence at the end of “Fears in Solitude” remain with Coleridge throughout the

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volume, then the “abstruser musings” of “Frost at Midnight” may well be precisely the kind of thinking that Burke feared. Let me select one more example of an important phrase that becomes richer because of the context. Toward the end of the poem Coleridge hopes that Hartley will be able to “see and hear / The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible / Of that eternal language, which thy God / Utters. . . .” God is the “Great Universal Teacher.” But whose universality are we talking about? My preferred traditional answer is that Coleridge is alluding to the divine visible language of nature that Bishop Berkeley writes about in Alciphron and to which Coleridge himself alludes in a note to “This Lime-Tree Bower” when he explains to Southey that “I am a Berkleyan”: the great Mover and Author of nature constantly explaineth Himself to the eyes of men by the sensible intervention of arbitrary signs, which have no similitude or connexion with the things signified; so as, by compounding and disposing them, to suggest and exhibit an endless variety of objects differing in nature, time, and place; thereby informing and directing men how to act with respect to things distant and future, as well as near and present. In consequence, I say, of your own sentiments and concessions you have as much reason to think the Universal Agent or God speaks to your eyes, as you can have for thinking any particular person speaks to your ears.7

For the purposes of my contrast, it is a matter of some indifference whether other traditional readers might wish to quote Spinoza or Priestley as the source of Coleridge’s lines. If the poem is located within a political context, universality becomes a problem. What is the universal teacher teaching? The works of Tom Paine or the works of Edmund Burke? In his review of the Biographia, Hazlitt said of Coleridge’s political writings: “His style, in general, admits of a convenient latitude of interpretation.”8 With some modification Hazlitt’s words can be used to conclude. Coleridge’s latitude wasn’t merely convenient; it was necessary. If Coleridge was dodging, it was because the heat was on him, and his associates Stuart and Johnson, from the government and the hostile press. As we know, it is common for those who try to maintain opposition in times of repression to speak in a kind of double talk; it is the nature of public discourse. The latitude that Hazlitt observed does more than measure the poles of his political oscillations. It also describes a field of possible contexts in which his poetic and political utterances were received and read, the contexts that determined how they would be read, and the context that determined the dialogic significance of “Frost at Midnight” in 1798.

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No t e s 1. Quoted in Gerald P. Tyson, Joseph Johnson: A Liberal Publisher, (Iowa, 1979) 159–61. 2. Lectures on Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (Prince­ ton and London, 1971) 221, hereafter abbreviated Lect. 3. Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton and London, 1983) I: 68n; The Friend, ed. Barbara Rooke (Princeton and London, 1969) II: 23. 4. “A Tale,” later reprinted as “Recantation: Illustrated in the Story of the Mad Ox,” is here reprinted with the corrections listed in David Erdman’s “Unrecorded Coleridge Variants,” Studies in Bibliography 11 (1958): 154. 5. Carl Woodring, Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge (Wisconsin, 1961), 141. 6. Marilyn Butler, ed., Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge, 1984) 25–6. Peter Swaab spoke on some of these same issues in his talk “Wordsworth and Patriotism” at the Wordsworth Summer Conference, July 1990. 7. Berkeley: Essay, Principles, Dialogues, ed. Mary Whiton Calkins (New York, 1929) 370. 8. “Coleridge’s Literary Life,” The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, edited by P. P. Howe (London, 1930–34) 16: 129.

W illiam E mpson

The Ancient Mariner: An Answer to Warren

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Editor’s Note illiam Empson first touched on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in an essay entitled “Marvell’s Garden,” reprinted in Some Versions of Pastoral (London, 1935; also known as English Pastoral Poetry, New York, 1938). But his first substantial piece of writing on Coleridge was “The Ancient Mariner” (Critical Quarterly, 6, 1964; reprinted in Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. J. Haffenden, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987)—a piece which he developed throughout the next decade in order for it to feature as the 100-page “Introduction” to Coleridge’s Verse: A Selection, edited by Empson and David Pirie (London, 1972; recently reprinted as Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Poetry, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1989). In sum, he had been studying The Ancient Mariner, on and off, for no less than forty years by the time he came to publish his mighty revisionist essay on the poet and the poem. He was pleased with his big effort, and satisfied that he had taken stock of recent studies of Coleridge by critics including Walter Jackson Bate, H. W. Piper, and John Colmer. But at some point in the mid-to-late 1970s, while giving a lecture on Coleridge, he was reminded by a questioner of the very influential status of Robert Penn Warren’s “A Poem of Pure Imagination: an Experiment in Reading” (Kenyon Review, 1946; reprinted in Selected Essays, 1964), an essay which is widely regarded as a modern classic. Empson felt doubly challenged: not only From The Kenyon Review 15, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 155–77. © 1993 by William Empson.

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had he failed to discuss Warren’s piece in his own essay, but the thrust of “A Poem of Pure Imagination” had been to treat The Ancient Mariner as an essentially Symbolist production—a procedure which Empson utterly deplored. The Symbolist movement, he averred, is “determinedly anti-intellectual”; Symbolism invites irrationalism in both poet and critic, who satisfy themselves with “apparently ineffable verbal communications.” Symbolist poetry, he alleged in a fighting credo called “Argufying in Poetry” (1963), “is the poetry of the hamstrung, the people who have cut the strings in their legs.” There was nothing for it, he felt, but to answer Robert Penn Warren in definitive detail—for the honorable reason he had enunciated in 1973: “In the learned world, a man loses his standing if he refuses to answer a plain refutation.” In many respects, Warren’s seminal essay was just such a plain (prior) refutation of Empson’s thesis on The Ancient Mariner. Empson was stubborn in his views and pugnacious in answering back; in fact, he could be downright rude to both friend and foe—for reasons set out at the very beginning of his career, in a trial piece dating from 1930: If you attack a view in any detail that proves you to have some sympathy with it; there is already a conflict in you which mirrors the conflict in which you take part; that is why you understand it sufficiently to take part in it. Only because you can foresee and enter into the opposing arguments can you answer them; only because it is interesting to you do you engage in argument about it. For, personally, I am attracted by the notion of a hearty indifference to one’s own and other people’s feelings, when a fragment of the truth is in question . . . (“Obscurity and Annotation,” in Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture).

In such terms, the following essay by Empson amounts to both a bold answer and a tremendous compliment to Robert Penn Warren. Recently discovered in the welter of Empson’s papers, it came to light too late for inclusion in Argufying, and is therefore published here for the first time, some twelve years after it was written. It is of course especially appropriate that it appear in the Kenyon Review. * * * Recently, while co-editing a selection from Coleridge’s poetry,4 I had to try to make sense of the details of the variants in the Ancient Mariner, but I did not much bother about the Symbolist theories which have been prevalent during the last thirty or forty years, feeling sure that they would only darken

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counsel. Having arrived at some conclusions, I feel now that I ought to go back and reconsider the Symbolist argument, lest my case go by default. I can report finding Robert Penn Warren’s essay (“A Poem of Pure Imagination,” 1946) better than it seemed in my vague memory of it. What he calls the “primary theme,” that we need to be somehow in harmony with Nature, and the “secondary,” that our imagination inherently has means of bringing us into such harmony, though it has rules of its own which are liable to be harmful, were pretty certainly in the mind of the poet while composing the first draft (1797); and the more pietistic of the ideas ascribed by the essay were in his mind when preparing the all-but final text (published 1817).2 The details which Mr Warren claims to explain nearly always need explaining; and as a rule, when he is wrong about the poet’s intentions, we can only be sure of it because of the devoted work on the Notebooks and Letters which has been published since he wrote. Besides, Coleridge by 1815 had gone a long way towards inventing the Symbolist theory; and he added to the poem some very misleading “glosses” in the margin which encourage such an interpretation. I expect he would have been shocked by the Warren essay, perhaps even driven back halfway to his earlier health of mind; but one must admit that the corruption of the poem was partly his fault. To read a Symbolist account with sympathy costs me a bit of an effort, but I find it a rewarding one, as it makes even more clear that the Glosses of 1817 need to be removed. The nastiest Gloss receives the highest concentration of theorizing from Mr Warren, who appreciates the difficulty of accepting our standard text. Although the south wind continues to blow, after the Mariner has shot the Albatross, the crew at first blame him “for killing the bird of good luck” (l. 95), who had made it blow. However, in the next verse the weather gets still better; matters continue to improve, and they change their minds. But when the fog clears off, they justify the same, and thus make themselves accomplices in the crime.

(Coleridge wrote cleared; he was in a bad mental condition when he wrote the Glosses. The year before this edition, he tells us, he had a breakdown during which he had to be continually watched to keep him from suicide.) They change their minds again when the ship is becalmed in the tropics, and hang the bird round his neck. The main effect in the poem, I think, is that they all felt the bird to be magical somehow, sure to bring good luck or bad, and assumed that that was why the Mariner had killed it (acting like his source, the “second Captain” [i.e., Lieutenant] in Shelvocke’s Voyages).3 But the bemused Coleridge who wrote Glosses in 1815 wanted to pretend

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that all his early poems had pious morals, and there was a rather striking absence of any moral about killing all the crew except the murderer of the Albatross, so he thought he would look a bit holier if he wrote this greasy bit of sanctimoniousness in the margin. He had once known better. Letter 447 of 1802, referring to John 9.3, says that Jesus Christ had . . . most effectively quashed the pernicious moral error of attributing all afflictions to direct Judgments of God upon the Individual so afflicted.

—whereas the later Coleridge, perhaps I need to explain, felt that he was saving God’s face when he cooked up an accusation against the crew. It is a flimsy one, as the ground for a death penalty. I am not sure of Mr Warren’s position here, because at one point he speaks of . . . the great central fact of the poem, the fact which no reader could miss—the broken tabu, the torments of guilt and punishment, the joy of reconciliation . . . (271)

But there is no tabu. Probably the crew had never even heard of an albatross, let alone seen one. Their views on albatrosses veer to and fro with every change in the weather; we are watching the invention of a superstition about albatrosses. What the crew say here is that the bird habitually caused fog; this might easily prove fatal to them, and every explorer claims the right to kill an animal if his life depends upon doing it. Of course, their logic is tiresomely bad, but surely they are not killed for that. Then again, their sin is the friendly acceptance of an act already done by a comrade, who admittedly acted for the good of the group, and as soon as they decide he was mistaken their acceptance is eagerly withdrawn. Coleridge himself had never been a convinced vegetarian, and at the time when he wrote this Gloss had decided that animals were merely “things” towards which a Christian has no duties.4 The invention of spiteful reasons for arguing that other people deserve their sufferings had merely become one of the habits of his religiosity, with which he expected to gratify his public. Poor Mr Warren feels that to justify this Gloss, and others like it, is a duty to the poet and requires a profound moral and philosophical theory. It must be maintained, to start with, that to kill the Albatross was peculiarly bad: The crime is, symbolically, a murder. . . . It involves the violation of hospitality and of gratitude (pious equals faithful and the bird is “of

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good omen”) and of sanctity (the religious connotations of pious etc.). . . . And the necessary criminality is established, we have seen, in two ways: (1) by making the gravity of the act depend on the state of the will which prompts it, and (2) by symbolically defining the bird as a “Christian soul,” as “pious,” etc. (229)

To do him justice, I thought, the reason why he twice wrote “pious etc.,” among these three uses of the word pious, was that a decent shame made him hide his evidence for the bird’s piety. But he had just dropped a useful hint, that it “partakes of the human . . . devotions” (228). The bird had repeatedly attended evensong, a regular prayer-meeting, presumably held on deck, and that was why Coleridge wrote his Gloss (l. 83): “The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen.” When composing the Glosses he tried to imagine a quaint editor of 1600 or so, writing in the margins of a poem already about seventy years old; and Coleridge himself was peering blearily at an actual poem, nearly twenty years old, written by himself when a very different man. Maybe he actually believed that he had meant a ritual when he wrote “vespers,” but anyway he would consider it quite fair to pretend so. The bird would soon learn that the crew assembled on deck at sunset, and that many of them would be at leisure for play afterwards, proffering biscuit-worms. After its death, the crew might easily remember this habit as a mark of piety. Before studying Mr Warren, I could only see the Old Coleridge as leering at the grown-ups and muttering “Holy lies before the kiddies, eh?”; but this Gloss-writer is a go-between, an educated man who still believed in the Active Universe and can therefore interpret the poem to us; he might just be superstitious enough to believe that the bird had deliberately attended vespers. Of course, not everything can be excused in this way; it does not justify the Gloss about “accomplices of the crime.” As to what Coleridge had meant by the word vespers, the OED speaks very firmly, quoting this line from the poem; it meant “evening.” But the great dictionary is sometimes wrong when it makes these literary decisions, which are anyway ultra vires; the poet was trying to write a pastiche of the English of 1600, so the result cannot be evidence about the English of 1815. The word was always known to derive from Hesperus. There is a telling quotation from Purchas’s Pilgrimage (1613): “From which ninth houre the lewes began their Vespera or evening,” their official evening, and to work “in these Vespers” would bring bad luck, they thought. The use for a religious service, whether Roman Catholic or Anglican, is not found before the seventeenth century. Coleridge however may not have known this, and he certainly intended his Mariner to be a pre-Reformation Christian who makes habitual use of pious phrases. His religion makes all the more baffling to him the reality which he

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so bravely confronts. But the young Coleridge is unlikely to have envisaged a nightly prayer-meeting on board his ship; chiefly because someone would have to read the prayers, usually the captain himself, and the democratic opinions of Coleridge made him unwilling to allow any hierarchy on his ship at all. So the dictionary is right, and the young Coleridge would mean by the word a time of day, though one which was viewed with piety. Also he would not be keen to insist that the Mariner had worn a cross round his neck, till it was snatched away (blasphemously, one would think) to make room for the enormous Albatross. This detail of the story is important to Mr Warren, who might otherwise find himself recommending kindness to animals, a thing he particularly despises under the odd name of Humanitarianism; hence he says: The idea of the crime against God rather than man is further emphasized by the fact that the cross is removed from the Mariner’s neck to make place for the dead bird. . . . (230)

The machine-gun rattle of “On account of the FAC that” is often used to impose a false argument, and “the fact” here is a specially imaginative one. The Mariner need only mean: “People often wear crosses round their necks, and I had the bird hung round mine, as the same sort of thing.” But perhaps, even here, Mr Warren does no more than carry out energetically a systematic misreading of the original poem which the Coleridge of 1815 attempted in a dim and muddled way. If we restore practically all cuts, and omit all Glosses, we get a story of adventure and misunderstanding; such a story is not likely to make any reader suppose that its accidents are punishments calculated by God, least of all when Death in person tosses dice to decide on them. However, I have no wish to deny that a dramatic story inherently insinuates morals, and that these may act upon us in complicated ways. In The Winter’s Tale, for example, Perdita believes that a peasant girl ought not to interbreed with royalty, so she is in despair; the audience is tempted to think her views on genetics a bit exaggerated. Then she turns out to be a princess, so she can have her prince without changing her views; the audience accepts the happy ending, feeling it to be deserved, and need no longer consider what ought to be done in the case first proposed. Rather in the same way, Coleridge held a heretical belief that all life is one, or at least that killing the Albatross was very bad; but he knew that most of his readers would not agree with him. So it was convenient to say, as part of the story, that the bird just happened to be a pet of the powerful Spirit of the South Pole, a thing the Mariner could not have known beforehand. The Mariner himself evidently does not accept this excuse, at any rate after the rest of the crew are dead; and the crew (so far as we can guess) just curse

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him for being a Jonah, the kind of man who is always getting into trouble with the spirits. In this way, the poem can recommend the author’s doctrine without discussing how far it should be taken, while still leaving ample room for the alternative theory that the Mariner is an interesting case of Neurotic Guilt. The poem gives a rather grim picture of Nature, much more so than the Wordsworthian conversation-pieces that Coleridge had been writing just before; indeed, Wordsworth seems to have felt this as a betrayal when he got back from Germany; but Coleridge might have answered that the actual Maritime Expansion had been a good deal grimmer than his picture of it, legends and all. We are now to examine the symbolism of the sun and moon, on which the fame of the essay chiefly rests. I recognise that the symbolism is not treated as important in itself, but as a way to express the doctrines about Nature and Imagination; sure enough, but the effect of it is also to give them a pietistic slant. In the essay, the theory is introduced at the beginning of Part IV, after a discussion of the Latin epigraph from Burnet; this apparently speaks of the great variety of spirits in the world, and then warns us of the uncertainty of the subject, ending: “we must earnestly seek after truth, maintaining measure, that we may distinguish things certain from those uncertain, day from night.” Coleridge makes an “ironical reversal” of the position of Burnet, says Mr Warren (234), treating the things of night as the good ones. There is a certain amount of truth here; actually, Coleridge had altered the quotation to make it express belief in fairies and suchlike, whereas Burnet (who despised them) was expressing belief in angels.5 But the nature-spirits of Coleridge are by no means confined to the night, and to impute this preference to them could not have been his purpose in fudging Burnett: The motto ends on the day–night contrast, and points to this contrast as a central fact of the poem. We may get some clue to the content of the distinction by remembering that in the poem the good events take place under the aegis of the moon, the bad events under that of the sun. (233–34)

Telling us to “remember” it from our own reading is a delicious bit of bounce; even the disciples of the theory find the plausible examples hard to remember. One day after I had said my piece about the Mariner an admirer of Mr Warren told me that I couldn’t get away from the basic facts of his essay, such as that the Albatross was shot by moonlight—awfully tricky shooting, so it couldn’t have been put in for nothing. This indeed was what drove me back to the essay. Mr Warren, I found, does not list the shooting as a good event. He says that the Albatross is “as it were, a moon-bird” (239)

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because always seen by diffused light; it enters the poem in a fog—indeed, its entry is the first we hear of a fog, but a mist had arrived a dozen lines before. Fog is common in the terrible seas south of the Horn, both from the meeting of warm and cold currents and from blizzards making snow hang in the air. Just as the Albatross arrives, an ice-floe cracks apart so that the ship can escape northwards, and a south wind gets up to drive it through; the crew may reasonably call the bird lucky. After that it follows the ship, and will come when called, continuing to eat biscuit-worms; and there were nine days which it spent perched in the rigging, dimly visible by the moonlight through the fog. “God save thee,” says the Guest, after a grim pause while the Mariner’s face works in agony; “why look’st thou so?” . . .”I shot the Albatross.” The answer follows no background or setting to the event, just as it gives no hint of the motive (how very misleading to say that the poem makes “the gravity of the act depend on the state of the will which prompts it” [229]). A pair of happy scenes, by day and night, have just been shown, but this gives no reason for supposing that the bird was shot during either of them; to assume from contiguity that the death came from the second one is to ignore the dramatic way the story is told. Mr Warren does not make this assumption, but it is more plausible than the one he does make; he argues from a juxtaposition forward instead of backward, equally destructive of the drama and the poetry, and is thus able to blame the sun. The next major incident by moonlight is the death of the whole crew. Mr Warren explains that the moon represents the Imagination, which ought to have good effects, but it becomes a torment when misused. Probably, even at an early stage of inventing the poem, Coleridge did want to express this truth, but he could not have hoped to do it by the good effects of the moon. It is interesting, I think, to have Mr Warren tell us that fear came to the Mariner when the moon arose, “as specified by the placement of the Gloss” (242); this shows what extravagant faith he has in the Glosses, even when patently wrong. Here we have the longest verse in the poem, with nine lines; it starts with the fear, then describes an agonizing wait, then says the wait lasted till the moon rose. So the Gloss is put six lines too early. If the Coleridge of 1815 could not even get this placement right, no wonder he left out a verse which he had written long before, much needed to clarify the plot. The incident ought to have interested Mr Warren, because it is the only use made of the moon in the poem. The crew have just heard that they must die, and are indignant with the Mariner for having fetched the Ghost-ship which turned out to have Death in it; but they cannot speak an effective curse (powerful enough to raise spirits against him) because they are dumb through drought; so they curse him, just as they die, by aiming at him the glitter of the moon in their eyes. Such was the first plan, but Coleridge learned, some time after 1800, that a horned moon

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(which he needed so that he could have a bad-luck star between the horns) could not rise just at sunset, but that a waning horned moon could rise during the night; this was what made him write the magnificent verse about waiting in the dark, first found in a notebook entry made just after the return from Malta.6 The crew are heroically refusing to die till the moon gets up, so as to fit in their curse; and the fear of the Mariner is of course felt in the dark of the foggy night, not knowing what they might do. You cannot have this splendid bit of melodrama if you refuse to attend to the story. After a period of torment for the solitary Mariner we have the blessing of the water-snakes, and on this the whole moon-theory was evidently based. The soothing half-veiling moonlight made the creatures of the calm look better than before, and thus (perhaps) the great change in the Mariner’s attitude became possible. The snakes can have bright colours too, when in the shadow of the ship, because they are phosphorescent, in the rotting sea. I think this is the only case in the poem where moonlight presides over a wholly good event. Later, Mr Warren says that another incident recalls “the rising of the great storm after the first redemption scene—a storm which, we must remember, was both terrible and festal in its aspect” (248). I certainly do not remember a party, if that is what “festal” means; the Mariner never speaks to the spirits, nor they to him. However, one may agree that this was a “redemption scene,” and after it the Mariner fell into a trance. The narrative is very concentrated, so the storm comes only a few lines after the blessing; but that does not mean that they happen together and are “symbolically” united. The ship is taken southward round Africa, so that when the Mariner wakes (in rain, not yet in storm) he is far enough south again to see the Aurora Borealis. Storm and a great wind mark the descent from the Aurora of the Spirits of Air and Electricity, who take over the bodies and sail the ship. Already in the second edition (1800) Coleridge spoiled this excellent idea, because Southey wrote a stupid grumble in his review, putting: The loud wind never reached the ship, Yet now the ship moved on! (ll. 363–64)

Most of the other magic winds in the poem are impalpable, so maybe he felt this was consistent, as well as face-saving. But how can the ship start moving before the corpses have stirred, if they are needed to work the ropes? The first version is more vivid and more dream-like, and carries a needed echo in “like a stone,” and above all makes the story intelligible: The strong wind reached the ship: it roar’d   And dropped down like a stone!

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Between the lightning and the Moon   The dead men gave a moan. (ll. 363–66)

To be sure, this is not what winds usually do, but one does not often witness the arrival on board of the Spirits of the Air. And it seems that Coleridge actually had experienced winds that were hardly less peculiar. He writes to Tom Wedgwood, in 1803 (Letter 484): I never find myself alone within the embracement of rocks and hills, a traveller up an alpine road, but my spirit courses, drives, and eddies, like a Leaf in Autumn: a wild activity, of thoughts, imaginations, feelings, and impulses of motion, rises up from within me—a sort of bottom-wind, that blows to no point of the compass, & comes from I know not whence, but agitates the whole of me; my whole Being is filled with waves, as it were, that roll & stumble, one this way, & one that way, like things that have no common master.

The OED quotes a definition of a “bottom-wind,” later in the nineteenth century: “The Bottom-wind has its name from being supposed to arise from the bottom of those lakes which are situated amongst mountains.” This would be the reverse of the wind which fell upon the ship; except that, if you try to explain such a wind, you may suppose that it first falls vertically upon the middle of the lake and then spreads out on all sides. The quotation shows, I think, that the text of the first edition ought to be kept here. The moon is present at this scene, but it plays a minor part beside the lightning and the aurora. However, its presence here is a help to Mr Warren in dealing with the next moon-scene, where to treat the Gloss respectfully is especially difficult. The bemused or hag-ridden Coleridge of 1814, seeing in his old text the words, “And now this spell was snapped” (l. 496), felt he had better be as reassuring as possible, so he added in the margin “The curse is finally expiated.” The curse was just then erupting into a particularly gaudy phase of its long life, but Mr Warren pluckily starts off: The rising of the breeze now, after this second redemption scene, corresponds to the rising of the great storm after the first redemption scene . . . (248)

But there isn’t any second redemption, and the two scenes are unlike at every point. The Mariner wakes up to find the corpses together in an

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indignation-meeting; they glare their curse at him out of eyes which glitter in the moonlight, just as when they died—here there is a correspondence, because a new lot of spirits, who are trying to act on the curse made by the crew (which thus turns out to have been as powerful as they intended), have at last got possession of their corpses. At first the Mariner cannot look away from them, or even pray for help, which is perhaps only a result of horror; then some other compulsion makes him look ahead (apparently he gets a premonition that he is nearing home), so he thinks that the spell of these enemy spirits has been broken. He still feels they are like frightful fiends. Then he feels a tiny private wind on his fevered cheek, which has no external effects such as making a ripple; any magical event rather frightens him now, but this seems meant as an encouragement, and sure enough the home port soon comes into sight. He thanks God and sobs for joy, but what happens next is a battle between two groups of earth-spirits, for possession of him; the deep-red ones (only in the first edition) are on the side of the crew, the crimson ones on the side of the air-spirits and the innocent Mariner. It is the crimson ones, we may now suppose, who broke the weak spell (if there was one) of the deep-red ones and brought the private wind. Though tied to their locality, earth-spirits have a certain range, and thus the supporters of the crew were able to capture the bodies before the Mariner could see land—this is the kind of detail which really does need explaining in a Gloss. The Moon shines all through the battle, but that does not prove it to be on the good side rather than the bad side. At every stage, I think, the effect of ascribing a Symbolism to the moon is to distract attention from what is going on, whereas the action is the most likely source for an allegory. The idea that the sun is a symbol for evil needs viewing more gravely, as it stands for a moral perversion, though Mr Warren merely accepted it as a standard literary doctrine when he wrote. It really does fit the Coleridge of the Sybilline Leaves (1817), who was revolting against the Nature he had revered when he was a great poet, also against Benthamism and the Enlightenment. That is why a parody of Coleridge by Peacock, Mr Flosky in Nightmare Abbey (1818), had “called the sun an ignis fatuus”; Peacock was a very understanding man, and not at all in the business of viewing the Romantics gravely, but I expect he would feel as surprised as I do to find this mental disease treated as especially pious and advanced. We ought to reject any harm it did to the final poem; but the examples from which Mr Warren argued for this part of his theory had already appeared in the first edition of the poem (1798), when Coleridge was certainly free from it. On the voyage southward, at the start of the poem, “The sun came up upon the left,” and shone bright, but did no harm. We next hear of it when

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they are emerging from the antarctic fog, and a parallel verse tells us they are sailing northward: The Sun now rose upon the right; Out of the mist came he, Still hid in mist, and on the left Went down into the sea. (ll. 87–90)

The first version “And broad as a weft upon the left,” which a reviewer found unintelligible, had made the same point; the mist caused a misshapen image of the setting sun, very broad, and the crew felt that was sinister, like a flag calling for help. This verse begins section II, and happens to come next after the line “I shot the Albatross” (l. 86), which ends section I. Mr Warren says: The crime, as it were, brings the sun. Ostensibly, the line simply describes a change in the ship’s direction, but it suddenly, with dramatic violence, supplants moon with sun in association with the unexpected revelation of the crime. . . . (240)

He does not tell us that a new section begins in between, and yet that decides how the verses should be read aloud. After forcing himself to make the abrupt confession, the Mariner gulps down his horrors for a bit before resuming the tone of narrative, and then his first remark is retrospective: “At this stage, the sun was rising on the right every morning.” It had been doing so ever since the Albatross arrived, with a northward channel and a south wind; but the Mariner needs to mention the fact now, to collect himself and introduce the run up to the tropics. Did Mr Warren think the ship had been “simply changing direction” all the time? That method would not have brought it so dangerously far. To read the passage in the Symbolist way, in fact, you must pretend that the words are just shapes on the page, not capable of telling a story, not representing any natural use of the spoken language. I am surprised that anyone has the patience. On his next page, Mr Warren is already pointing out that the sun of the tropical calm is called “bloody”: . . . as though we had implied here a fable of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, whose fair promises had wound up in the blood-bath of the end of the century. (241)

The critic does not risk saying that it was implied, but surely the remark is fairly pointless unless he implies it. I admit that Coleridge changed his view

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of the French revolutionary leaders while writing the poem; he disapproved of their invasion of Switzerland, and this decided him, like a number of other left-wing patriots during 1798, that he would help to defend England if necessary. He announced his position in France, an Ode and Fears in Solitude, both published that year; but it did not mean any change in his basic position. He thought that the atheism of the French had led them astray; this would not make him suspect that his own previous opinions had been wrong. He published Fire, Famine and Slaughter the same year, a poem which means that the insolence of Pitt was what had driven the French leaders to war.7 Of course the Fears say “we have offended,” in a parsonic manner, but that is to show solidarity with England; Coleridge has not committed any of the English crimes that he lists. Later on, he actually reprinted part of the Fears to show he had never been a Jacobin, but Southey said: “If he was not a Jacobine, in the common acceptation of the name, I wonder who the Devil was.”8 There is no evidence here for a profound revulsion against his earlier views, such as might echo unconsciously into the ballad. For a critic to find it in these passages implies a complete indifference to the drama of the story, and the tone of voice of the Mariner. Two verses later the ship had emerged from the mist, so the sun rises clear again, and the Mariner says it was “glorious” and “like God’s own head” (ll. 101–02)—if anybody is condemned for saying such things, it should not be the crew but the Mariner. However, this is the moment when the crew say that it was right to kill the Albatross, as a creature which caused fog; and Mr Warren is deeply committed to the view that they deserved death for saying it. He goes on (240): [H]ere we must observe a peculiar and cunningly contrived circumstance: the mariners do not accept the crime till the sun rises, and rises gloriously “like God’s own head.” The sun is, symbolically speaking, the cause of their acceptance of the crime—they read God as justifying the act on the ground of practical consequence, just as, shall we say, Bishop Paley would have done.

Well, but would Mr Warren have made the Bishop die of thirst for it? I think the Benthamite position is hardly more than common sense, but a discussion of it is often confusing; one needs a definite case. Suppose the ship had to take in water at a town with plague, and the watchman knew that rats carry plague, and saw a rat who had almost succeeded in reaching the ship along a stay-rope; would he be justified in shooting it? Ought he first to inquire whether it had attended evensong, like the Albatross? It could just as easily be taught to. We really do feel it was somehow dreadful

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to shoot the Albatross, but not that it would be dreadful to shoot the rat, and this proves that our reasons are not the ones alleged by Mr Warren. Certainly, we ought to feel a distaste for the false reasoning of the crew, but their logic is not typically scientific or materialist; it is typical of magicians, and Symbolists. That is why Symbolism is liable to become pernicious; it is inherently alien to the tradition of fair play and open public debate. And, of course, no one would trace, or impute, these deductions from the details about the sun unless his mind was full of the anti-rationalist doctrine already. As a “contrived” attack on Rationalism, the sequence would be footling. We next have the crew dying of thirst when becalmed at the Equator, and here the sun really is terrible. But it is not called “bloody,” in a “copper” sky (ll. 115–16) to symbolise an ethical doctrine; The Road to Xanadu showed us long ago that these are details from ships’ captains’ reports. Of course they might also be symbolic, but they occur because a special kind of fog has risen from the rotting sea. It is not admired; though, the last time we had a fog, Mr Warren said it was good. Then the Ghost-Ship arrives, during a sunset, and I think a comment of Mr Boulger, in his Introduction to the Twentieth Century Interpretations of the poem, deserves to be considered first. He supports the symbolism of Mr Warren, but rather incidentally. When the Ghost-Ship moves in front of the sun, he says: This is the image of Satan laughing and cajoling the Mariner to ultimate scepticism and despair; it is the dark night, after custom has been found wanting, and the ultimate test of the spiritual Will that the Mariner survives by an act of faith alone, the blessing of the water-snakes.9

This interpretation needs to be set against the text: The western wave was all a-flame.   The day was well nigh done! Almost upon the western wave   Rested the broad bright Sun; When that strange shape drove suddenly   Betwixt us and the Sun. And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,   (Heaven’s Mother send us grace!) As if through a dungeon-grate he peered   With broad and burning face.

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Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)   How fast she nears and nears! Are those her sails that glance in the Sun   Like restless gossameres? (ll. 175–88)

“A very queer spectacle, likely to portend bad luck, if only because nothing like it has been seen before”—that seems a normal reaction; but the Mariner does just the opposite; he recognises the ship. He can hardly believe it; he is afraid of her coming nearer. When she is near enough he sees that she carries Life-in-Death, a lady, and we gather that he recognises her too; but they do not address one another. There is quite enough going on here without his recognising the Devil as a third old friend; the difference of sex, I agree, is all that prevents Life-in-Death from being the Devil, but that is sufficient. I think she is mainly the bad girl sailors meet in port, but the ship is much more special and much less familiar. The Mariner, at this first magical event in the poem, has a premonition of a Slaver, with its planks rotted off by the insanitary exudations of the dying slaves—that was going to be the final result of his heroic colonial exploration, and well might his heart beat loud. Coleridge really was writing in a Symbolist manner here, for once, and the effect on his readers would be fierce. So much indignation was building up in Bristol against this profitable trade, not really on theoretical grounds, since the abolition of slavery came much later, but because the process was too horrible, that it fairly soon had to be stopped (under Fox’s administration, 1805). Coleridge himself, a year before, had written about these rotting planks, in his Bristol Watchman, and many of his first readers would feel certain he had glanced at the Slave Trade at this point in the poem, even if he had not wanted to.10 But I expect he did want to, at this stage of the poem, before the narrative has established itself, so as to throw the first readers into a receptive condition. The terrible story of the Maritime Expansion had already become his theme. Mr Boulger assumes that the central work of the Devil is to stop you from believing something, but this would not occur to the young Coleridge. It was terrible for him to lose faith in the spirits of Nature, a few years after writing the poem, but there is no foreboding of it here. I grant that the Mariner, only a page after, is being kept from prayer by a wicked whisper, which presumably said: “God is unjust.” But the author was accustomed to see this as a consequence of the type of belief held by the Mariner. Forcing oneself to accept some incredible doctrine, insisted upon as its trademark by some organised Church, had not as yet any obsessive power over the mind of Coleridge; but it is still hag-riding Mr Boulger’s mind when he gets

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to the blessing of the water-snakes. That was decisive because it was done “unaware” (321), not as an act of belief in anything, nor yet as an act of will. If what we see is the Devil recommending scepticism, surely the line ought to be “With leering jeering face,” and that is in itself almost a refutation—it would feel like Alice Through the Looking-Glass (I don’t deny that the angels of the illustrator Doré might have played peekaboo, as well). And then, surely the Image ought to show the Devil at liberty, poking his head into the window to jeer at the imprisoned Mariner. But the iron grating over a groundfloor street window usually bulged out, to enlarge the view of the street from inside, and never bulged inward. The ribs of a wooden ship, of course, bulged out like the ribs of a man, so this Image would put the Devil inside a prison, or at least in a ship. Clearly the first comparison was to a domestic grate, with the sun as the cosy fire; Coleridge must have had some reason for making it a prison window, and the likely one at the time would be to define the Ghost-Ship as a Slaver. The basic purpose of putting the skeleton ship in front of the sun is to demonstrate that it is a skeleton, and no one thinks that the sun is too. A setting sun does better than a rising one, being an analogue for death, but this is only because the absence of the sun is like death. The setting sun here is “broad,” and earlier in the poem it was broad as a weft; as the poem is full of such echoes, we are probably meant to notice this quite simple one—it means that the ship is again meeting a fog, though of a different kind. Any fog would be a relief for the crew by saving it from the full power of the sun, and the word broad calls up calming associations; it certainly does not call up the Devil. In fact, the contrast between the sun and the skeleton is what makes the “emotional” effect too subtle for a Symbolist apparently, but too crude for a normal reader, and a normal reader feels that it “ought to mean something.” I suppose, if a Symbolist heard a sermon devoted to warning him against Hell and recommending Heaven, he would feel that these terms, merely because they had been frequently contrasted, had been “emotionally equated.” I wonder how Hartley’s doctrine of Association got round this obstacle? Perhaps, in a remote way, the misreading is a judgement on the young Coleridge. The essay uses several times a remark by Coleridge in the Biographia, that his early reading of Plotinus and suchlike had done him good even in his period of error: . . . the writings of these mystics acted in no slight degree to prevent my mind from being imprisoned within the outline of any single dogmatic system. They contributed to keep alive the heart in the head; gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and working presentiment,

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that all the products of the mere reflective faculty partook of DEATH. . . . 11

This is a bit of evidence, but what can we do with “mere”? How much Imagination would be enough to save a scientific theory, for example, from partaking of Death? The passage does not imply a very strong preference for obscurantism. In general, Mr Warren assumes that the young poet hated science, because all poets do, and used to do even in early times, but this belief was just a fashion of the thirties. It seems to have been regarded as an act of loyalty to T. S. Eliot, though I do not know that he ever supported it; I came to think it merely expressed the jealousy felt by the Arts dons at the extra money needed to equip the Science dons. Perhaps the most startling example was the belief that Donne, by comparing faithful love to a pair of compasses, meant to jeer at love with Bitter Irony—he must have done, because all scientific equipment is materialistic, new-fangled, and low-class. Compasses felt vulgar because one had been made to use them in school lessons. But God in the Old Testament had used these compasses to create the world, and the aristocratic Greek philosophers had admitted the compasses but no other tool into pure geometry, so the misreading was peculiarly absurd; and indeed I have never found who invented it, having only read about it in critics who tenderly and hesitantly dissociate themselves. The monster seems to have risen of its own accord, from the grass roots of the valley bottoms. The mean-mindedness of this snooty line of talk had always made it a painful obstacle to understanding. The advances of science in our time, though very likely to cause disaster, have been so magnificent that I could not wish to have been born earlier; and I estimate that most of the poets worth study who were in fact born earlier would have felt so if they were alive now. If this is true, a historical critic who hugs the opposite sentiment is badly out of touch with his authors, at a point which may be important to the mental health of an imaginative man. There is another source of confusion here in that the Coleridge of 1815, when he settled our established text of the Mariner, had recently invented the frame of mind dominant among critics in 1930–50, but he was not at all like that when he wrote the poem, almost twenty years before. Perhaps I may seize this opportunity to clear up a bit of nonsense about the line “The sun now rose upon the right.” Herodotus mentions some Phoenician sailors who claimed to have sailed round the southern coast of Africa; he is willing to pass the story on, but doubts their extra claim to have had the sun on their right at some point. All critics agree that Coleridge borrowed his line from Herodotus, and Humphry House added a further poetic thought, saying that the Phoenicians had “doubled the Cape without knowing that

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there was a Cape.”12 Come now, if Herodotus and the Phoenician captain had been as unscientific as these critics are, they could hardly have found their way home across the home farm. The scientific doctrines needed are scarcely more than definitions of words: (a) the sun rises in the east; (b) if you have gone south, and want to go back, you have to go north; (c) when you are going north, the east is on your right. Herodotus could not conceivably have doubted any of them. The claim of the Phoenicians is made quite plain in the Loeb translation, II: 42 (though probably a bit of interpretation has been worked into the text here); they said that, when they were at the very south of Africa, sailing due west, the sun at midday was to the north of them. This proved that they had got to the antipodes, the southern half of the globe; and the doubt of Herodotus gives them credit for understanding the astronomy—if they didn’t know what their story implied, they would have no temptation to invent it. I have observed that women do not like being with a man who is always lost, and even the ladies in the Fairie Queene sometimes grumble at the total incapacity of their knights for orientation; with such encouragement, I really think that the affectation of literary critics to be above all mortal knowledge might be unbuckled an inch or two. Indeed, I hope that has already happened. It is easy nowadays to find out whether Coleridge hated science before 1800, from the first volume of the Collected Letters (ed. E. L. Griggs, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956). In November 1796 he wrote to the father of Charles Lloyd, whom he was to tutor, giving his syllabus: “Languages will engross one or two hours in every day; the elements of Chemistry, Geometry, Mechanics, and Optics the remaining hours of study.” Perhaps, he said, they might reach the study of Man later on (Letter 154). “I love Chemistry” he told Thelwall later in the week (Letter 156). In April 1797 he told his Bristol publisher Cottle how he would set about writing an epic poem (Letter 184): I should not think of devoting less than 20 years to an Epic Poem. Ten to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science. I would be a tolerable Mathematician, I would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine . . .

This appetite for knowledge remained largely unsatisfied, but it was not a side-issue; he thought it part of the great work of understanding man’s place in Nature. In January 1798 he wrote to his adviser [J. P.] Estlin, a Unitarian minister aged about fifty (Letter 221): I regard every experiment that Priestly made in Chemistry, as giving wings to his more sublime theological works.

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The twentieth-century literary attitude, reverencing Nature while refusing to learn what is known about her, would have seemed to him merely unintelligible. The same volume also tells us the essentials about his religious position, though that is less clear-cut. He did call himself a Christian, meaning that he loved the character and precepts of Jesus, but he also maintained (though Mr Warren takes care not to) that the adherents of the established churches were not Christians. They were materialists (for example, they did not admit that every flower enjoys the air it breathes); and, what was worse, they were pretty certain to be devil-worshippers (accepting the Father who was satisfied by the crucifixion of his Son). In November 1794, writing to Southey, he had a spasm of horror at the thought of encountering his mother-in-law on the banks of the Susquehanna (Letter 68): That Mrs Fricker—we shall have her teaching the Infants Christianity,—I mean—that mongrel whelp that goes under it’s name—teaching them by stealth in some ague-fit of superstition!—

She might say that God would send them to Hell if they were naughty. A long letter to Southey in November 1795, which surveys his plan to become a clergyman, recalls how Coleridge had asked him what he would do if the Bishop asked him about the Trinity and the Redemption, and Southey had said: “I am pretty well up to their Jargon” (Letter 93). So these two issues were among the most important ones (they seldom mention their actual heresies)—whether Jesus was God, whether the crucifixion of Jesus has bought off a tiny remnant of mankind from eternal torture by the Father. We should recognise that the orthodox account of the Father excited massive moral indignation; in May 1796, Coleridge wrote to the atheist [John] Thelwall that he liked [Thomas] Holcroft best, of his atheist friends, because he was so benevolent (Letter 127): “he hates God, ‘with all his heart, with all his mind, with all his soul, & with all his strength.’ ” The torturemonster deserved it, so this was one of the points where a worshipper of the true God could sympathize with the atheists. Mr. Warren says (224), with an air of settling the matter, that Coleridge wrote Thelwall a long letter in December 1796 trying to convert him to Christianity; maybe, but the crucial passage beginning “the Religion, which Christ taught, is simply that . . .” does not say a word about buying off a remnant from eternal torture; the Redemption is totally ignored (Letter 164). Even among Unitarians, who deny that Jesus is God, Coleridge found an obstacle in the Lord’s Supper, the chief ceremony of the Redemption; he wrote to Estlin in July 1797 that he would keep silent about this ceremony, but if he himself “performed

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or received” it in his present state of opinion “I should indeed be eating & drinking condemnation” (Letter 198). This gives strong confirmation to a report of Hazlitt, who was present when Coleridge received a letter from the Wedgwood brothers offering him a pension. He had just had an offer to become a Unitarian minister, but told Hazlitt that he would anyway not have accepted it without first clearing with them his views on the Lord’s Supper, and on Infant Baptism.13 His feelings about Baptism are spread out in a letter to Godwin (number 352) of 1800. His third child was feared to be dying, and the second had already died unbaptised; his wife cried, and the neighbours were indignant, and he had already given in but needed to let off steam before an understanding friend. Many people nowadays would call it boorish to reject the charming custom of infant baptism, and Coleridge does not object to absurdity, he says; he could prostrate himself before the dung-pellet of a Lama; but he feels this case to be different. And no wonder: it presumes belief in a God so wicked that he would inflict eternal torture on an infant unless a ritual had been performed that the infant could not understand; when the associates of Coleridge took his refusal so tragically, it became clear that they were worshipping the Devil, and ought to be discouraged. He does not expound the argument, which would be familiar to his reader; what is unexpected in the letter is the intimate loathing he feels for the professionals themselves. Coming from a clerical family, he was at home with the tone of clerical unction, indeed it became a temptation into which he often fell; and yet all the time he would be regarding it with nausea: Shall I suffer the Toad of Priesthood to spurt out his foul juice in this Babe’s Face? . . . while the fat paw of a Parson crosses his Forehead?

Finally, we need to hear Coleridge after he had accepted Anglicanism. In a letter of October 1806 (number 633), written as instruction to a young man [George Fricker], he has got about as near as he ever did towards gulping down the Redemption, “the peculiar doctrine of Christianity” as he calls it: God of his goodness grant, that I may arrive at a more living Faith in these last, than I now feel. What I now feel is only a very strong presentiment of their Truth and Importance aided by a thorough conviction of the hollowness of all other Systems.

Now, a reader may feel that these points of theological difference are remote from his own interests; but they are not remote from the poem, nor yet from

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the Symbolist interpretation of the poem. The trouble is that the two things are totally opposed. Mr Warren writes more moderately than most of his successors, but he has a good deal about the “sacramental” view of Nature, and the mysterious “religious” importance of the killing of the Albatross, which necessitates suffering; indeed: . . . we get a symbolic transference from Christ to the Albatross, from the slain Son of God to the slain creature of God. And the death of the creature of God, like the death of the Son of God, will, in its own way, work for vision and salvation. (230)

If Coleridge had tried to write such a poem, he would have been woken by one of his screaming-fits that same night, probably with hysterical vomiting and bowel action. He did at times feel that the doctrine of Redemption, though mere gross wickedness in the hands of the Churches, concealed some important truth: that was why it was so disturbing. One might suppose that a Freudian opposite was at work; that he had a shameful half-conscious craving to worship the Devil (the Father of the crucifixion), that this craving shaped the poem even though he sincerely pretended to himself that he was writing a parody of the doctrine, and that for the rest of his life the craving and the doctrine took their slow monstrous revenge. But I see no adequate reason to believe this romantic theory; certainly the hints dropped by Coleridge in later life, to the effect that he had written with inspired foreknowledge because he had always been an Anglican at bottom, are not adequate. One must remember that the guilt-haunted hero, Cain or the Wandering Jew, was accepted at the start simply as good material for a ballad, already stock. He might readily be thought to endure “Life-in-Death,” so Mr Pirie and I felt we could keep the line about the associate of Death on the Ghost-Ship, “The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she” (l. 208); though it has often been regarded as the fruit of later wisdom, and Coleridge used it in his own epitaph. The earlier variants, I think, show Coleridge hunting round for this line and failing to hit on it. There are a number of points where the original intention is not satisfactorily carried out till the 1817 edition, and there is no reason why we should be deprived of them; one can believe that, and yet believe that the poem is immensely better once it has been rescued. These general remarks arose from the crucial or central appearance of the sun in the poem, when the ship is becalmed; later in the poem we have two more appearances of the sun, which I have yet to consider. The spirits of the air arrive in a moonlit storm to work the ship, and we are not told that the Mariner fell into trance again, so it is the very next morning

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when the spirits leave the corpses and fly up to greet the sun. Many critics rationalise the story here, perhaps out of courtesy to the poet, who deserves to be saved from absurdity, so they take it that the corpses are the ones who really sing, and the Mariner only imagines that he hears the sound in the sky. This is quite untenable. The arms of the corpses drop (they seem paralysed) while “sweet sounds” (l. 390) emerge from their bodies, through their mouths; in the next verse the “sweet sounds” are observed circling round the ship (l. 392), so they are evidently spirits, audible though not visible. It is odd to reflect that the Mariner could check up on this, feeling that the evidence though astonishing was quite definite, and yet his experience could not be presented on the stage or the cinema or on television. Then the spirits “dart to the sun” (l. 393), a rather confusing phrase though I could not improve upon it. The sun is far away to the east, and its disc will soon appear there, but the quickest way to see it is to fly straight up, as the spirits do. The next two verses, both ringingly good, insist that the source of the sound is high up: a-dropping from the sky. . . . That makes the heavens be mute (ll. 396–404). Having finished their service or tribute, they fly down and resume their humble work, and so the corpses start pulling the ropes again. A reader has nothing to gain by refusing to understand what happens here. Mr Warren pluckily recognises that the sun this time “appears in a ‘good’ association” (I wonder what he can have meant by his inverted commas round good? Maybe he was on the edge of realising that, if the spirits were angels, they would not indulge in pagan worship). He explains that it is “part of the general rejoicing when the proper order has been re-established in the universe” (245–46). Sure enough, the Mariner blessed the water-snakes a page or two before, but he is nowhere near out of his troubles, and surely the whole universe cannot be considered “redeemed” by this one action of the Mariner, just till the curse on him starts operating again? Also I cannot believe that his mind was ever “abstract.” The theory becomes null here, and I think the reason is that Mr Warren genuinely does not think of the universe, in a poem, as being any different from the individual victim. They are both only “Symbols,” anyway. But Coleridge even as late as in Biographia Literaria would have insisted that his reader needs at least to imagine believing in the superstitions, because otherwise he can never learn anything from them. In the final incident concerning the sun I think Mr Warren does give a useful pointer. Coleridge needed to be sufficiently definite about his geography without sounding technical, so each of the three times the ship is at the Equator he says that the sun was above the mast at noon. Crossing it southwards, at the start of the poem, the Guest interrupts because he hears

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the bassoon, but evidently we do not lose much; then the terrible calm in the Pacific is treated at length, and the ship is withdrawn southwards and westwards; finally it crosses the Line on the straight run home. The Mariner has become afraid of this position of the sun, so that he recognises it, but that does not explain what happens next. The poem, not only the Gloss, says that the Spirit of the South Pole has been pushing the ship, so far, but now it stops, on the Line. Some critic has proposed, rightly I expect, that this spirit is not allowed to cross the Equator; he has a good deal of latitude, but to let him trench on the domain of the Spirit of the North Pole would be absurd. The Gloss (l. 431) says: The lonesome spirit from the south-pole carries on the ship as far as the Line, in obedience to the angelic troop, but still requireth vengeance.

(Why not carrieth? The Glosses are slovenly.) The next Gloss (l. 447) says he “accorded” a “penance long and heavy” for the Mariner, so he is willing to go home, the next (l. 476) that “the angelic power causeth the vessel to drive northward faster than a human life could endure.” This does not hold together. The ship has been going at least 300 miles an hour on the previous halfday, while the Mariner was helping the spirits to pull the ropes, and it hardly can (on the evidence provided) go faster on the northern half of the run, while he is in a trance. Why did the spirits of the air use the Polar Spirit at all, if they can do better without him; and why are they never seen at work, after he is gone? According a long penance for the Mariner makes even more absurd the Gloss on the next page, saying that the curse on him is now finally expiated. Besides, there is nothing in the poem to support the idea of a belated negotiation. Indeed, a stern query by Humphry House begins to haunt the inquirer: are the avenging by the tutelary spirits of the South Seas and the reanimation of the dead bodies to work the ship here just out of politeness, because Wordsworth suggested them?14

Well, come now, Coleridge believed that the world is crowded with many varieties of spirits, so he could afford to admit some extra ones into his poem; he had only the usual duty of a host, to find something for them to do. A landsman often feels let down, at this stage, when told that the Polar Spirit had been pushing the boat all the time, so that there was no need for work by the corpses. But he has been told from the start that there was no wind. I am assured that shoving the keel of a large sailing-ship would make a frightful

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jam-up unless the sails and rudder were attended to (the sails sing a tune, of course, because the still air moves backwards in relation to their movement). And this is the one stretch of the voyage where the ship goes very fast without the Mariner being unconscious, so the spirits are being highly skillful. What may still excite curiosity is how the Polar Spirit alone got the ship round the Cape; we must be content to know that he found the work a nuisance, and appealed for the help of the Spirits of the Air, who were then dancing in the antarctic aurora. But who drove the ship north from the Equator, on the final stretch? Mr Warren of course accepts the Gloss, which at least appears to say that the angels did it; but he thinks they first had to tussle with the sun (246): . . . at noon . . . when the sun is in its highest power . . the sun resumes briefly its inimical role and prevents the happy forward motion of the ship . . . [T]he power of imagination seems to be turning away vengefully from the Mariner. But this crisis is passed, for after all the Mariner has been redeemed, and the ship plunges forward again with such suddenness that the Mariner is thrown into a “swound.”

I thought at first that perhaps the Mariner was being fanciful, because it is unlike him to agree with Mr Warren. That is, he had really feared another calm at the Equator, so he imagined for a moment (foolishly, as he now admits) that the vertical sun was nailing the ship down. But it is unwise procedure to rationalise what the Mariner tells us, so as to make the story rather less magical; his life must anyway have been saved by magic, unless practically the whole story is a product of his imagination; and even then what he had imagined would be all we had available to examine. Still, I may yet differ from Mr Warren about the intention of the tropical sun, a point on which the Mariner does not pronounce. It was at its usual mysterious work, coaxing or teasing till it produced a sudden explosive change, like a birth, but often given some other name, for example among insects or plants. The results have a quality of random violence—one cannot really suppose that the Mariner needed to be knocked out again. Still, this was convenient in that it allowed him to overhear the two Voices who were discussing his fate; and the incidental question “What makes it go?” was answered by a riddle: “The air is cut away before, And closes from behind” (ll. 478–79). Mr. Warren calls this a scientific explanation (247), but his views on science need not further delay us. “Nobody does it; it does it for itself ” would be a way to make sense of the riddle, and that is what the poetry describes:

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The sails at noon left off their tune,   And the ship stood still also. The Sun, right up above the mast,   Had fixed her to the ocean: But in a minute she ’gan stir,   With a short uneasy motion Backwards and forwards half her length   With a short uneasy motion. Then like a pawing horse let go   She made a sudden bound: It flung the blood into my head,   And I fell down in a swound. (ll. 435–46)

We should take this literally. As a result of its various supernatural experiences, the ship has come alive; it has become like the Ghost-Ship which “mov’d / Like a Being of the Sea!” (ll. 196–97). That skeleton was first seen jerking about at random, like a fly, or like the creatures which used to live on the surface of horse-ponds; “As if it dodged a water-sprite, It plunged and tacked and veered” (ll. 159–60). When called by the Mariner it came straight to him, perhaps ordered to do so by its passengers; till then, its behaviour looked free. The production of another ship like that gives a last glimpse of the tropical sun, always throwing up wild feverish forms of life, but without malignity—most of them were unpleasant ones, but they included the watersnakes. Coleridge was unlikely to regard even an equatorial sun as wholly evil. In the same year as he wrote The Ancient Mariner he wrote (Fears in Solitude): . . . the owlet Atheism, Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, Drops his blue-fringéd lids, and holds them close, And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, Cries out “Where is it?”

Surely this is what Mr Warren and his supporters have praised Coleridge himself for doing in the Mariner? Even in the Biographia Literaria, where Nature has become invisible, the Imagination is still called “the sunshine comparative power.” Still, though you needn’t quite blame the sun, to adopt an independent life is bad for a ship’s character, and no doubt that authorities on the subject

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in Bristol had told Coleridge so; the Pilot and the Hermit, as soon as they set eyes on it, know that it looks like a Ghost, or a Fiend. The two Voices are water-spirits, so they knew that it would bear watching, as soon as it was transformed; they are the ones who come racing up under water to destroy it at the end, when it has agreed to help kidnap the Mariner. The only rather unsatisfactory question is why the corpses needed to “work” again for the kidnapping: With silent pace, each to his place,   Came back the ghastly crew. (582–83)

But we never gathered, even from Life-in-Death, how one communicates with a Ghost-Ship, and at least we are not told that the corpses pulled on more ropes. A ship so very like a horse could attend to its sails by its own muscular power; that is why we did not find anyone pulling ropes on the last lap of the voyage. The air-spirits could go to sleep on the last lap of their assignment; they were too unsuspicious, but then, it is agreed that all spirits are rather feckless, if well-intentioned. The Mariner was lucky to get away; there is a certain over-crowding in the final picture, but it conveys this thought. I would agree, were it objected, that Coleridge had better have explained such things from the start by a system of Glosses; but he might well have felt, before people began bully-ragging him about the poem, that they were not needed because the explanations would fit so well into the existing superstitions and popular assumptions. How dreadful the shock must have been when he had brought the poem into the lions’ den of critics, and himself, despairing, took part in its destruction.

No t e s 1. William Empson and David Pirie, eds. Coleridge’s Verse: A Selection (London: Faber & Faber, 1972; reprinted as Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Poetry, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1989). 2. Robert Penn Warren, “A Poem of Pure Imagination: an Experiment in Reading,” Kenyon Review, VIII, 1946; reprinted in Selected Essays (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964) 213–14. “I shall label the primary theme in this poem as the theme of sacramental vision, or the theme of the ‘One Life’.” Further references are given in parentheses in the text. 3. See John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (1927), (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986) 204–06. 4. Coleridge opposed Lord Erskine’s Bill for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; as John Colmer has remarked, “It is odd to think of the author of the last stanzas of The Ancient Mariner being opposed to so humane a measure. He opposed it on the grounds that it was an example of the dangerous principle of ‘extending

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personality to things.’ ” Coleridge: Critic of Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959) 92–93. See also Coleridge’s Verse, 42.   5. See also Coleridge’s Verse, 55.   6. See also Coleridge’s Verse, 49–50.   7. See also Coleridge’s Verse, 86.   8. Letter to Danvers, New Letters of Robert Southey, vol. 1, 511, ed. Kenneth Curry (New York and London: Columbia U P); see also Barbara E. Rooke, ed., The Friend, vol. 4:11, 26, note 1 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969); and Coleridge’s Verse, 246–47.   9. James D. Boulger, ed. “ ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’—Introduction,” Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1969) 17. 10. Lewis Patton, ed. The Watchman, no. IV, 25 March 1796 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970) 138. 11. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, eds., S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983) 152. 12. Humphry House, Coleridge (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953) 94. 13. “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” in P. P. Howe, ed., The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, vol. 17 (London & Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1933) 113. 14. House, Coleridge, 104.

T homas M c F arland

Coleridge: Prescience, Tenacity and the Origin of Sociology

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n 1795, in some theological lectures, Coleridge, at that time only 23 years old, posed a question, modified from a verse in the Bible:1 ‘If we love not our friends and Parents whom we have seen—how can we love our universal Friend and Almighty Parent whom we have not seen?’2 More than a quarter of a century later, in his Opus Maximum, he asked the same question: ‘If ye love not your earthly parent, how can ye love your father in heaven?’3 All that time, from 1795 to 1820 or later, the question had been held in his mind. It was occupying his thoughts in his fledgling, though virtuoso, work of the mid-1790s; and it was occupying his mind as he set forth on what he considered ‘the great object of my life’4, that object being ‘my Opus Maximum on which I chiefly rely for the proof that I have not lived or laboured in vain’ (CL, VI, p. 541, January 1826). It is extraordinary that a mental formulation should remain vital in anyone’s mind for so long a period of time. It is even more extraordinary, however, that it not only remained in Coleridge’s mind for more than a quarter of a century, but that it did not rest there inertly. On the contrary, it permuted and combined under constant reflection to eventuate in the most distinctive and vivid insistence of the entire Opus Maximum. For the apex of that work, and perhaps the most original and powerful insistence in his entire edifice of thought, is Coleridge’s derivation of From Romanticism 4, no. 1 (1998): 40–59. © 1998 by Edinburgh University Press.

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the belief in God from the relationship of mother and child. Few before Coleridge had dwelt so insistently on the meaning of that relationship, but under his intense scrutiny the profoundest of meanings are uncovered to view. The ‘first dawnings’ of a baby’s humanity will break forth in the eye that connects the Mother’s face with the warmth of the mother’s bosom, the support of the mother’s Arms. A thousand tender kisses excite a finer life in its lips & there first language is imitated from the mother’s smiles. Ere yet a conscious self exists the love begins & the first love is love to another. The Babe acknowledges a self in the Mother’s form, years before it can recognize a self in its own. (Opus Maximum, Fragment Two ff. 65–6)

Sounding, except for the elevation of his language, much like Spitz, Kohut, Winnicott, or other modern investigators of the pre-Oedipal situation of the child, Coleridge points out that The infant follows its mother’s face as glowing with love and dreaming protection it is raised heavenward, and with the word God it combines in feeling whatever there is of reality in the warm touch, in the supporting grasp, in the glorious countenance. The whole problem of existence is present as a sum total in the mother; the mother exists as a One & indivisible something, before the outlines of her different limbs and features have been distinguished by the fixed and yet half vacant eye, & hence through each degree of dawning light the whole remains antecedent to the parts . . . (Fragment Two, f. 88)

If the ‘whole problem of existence is present as a sum total in the mother’, it follows inevitably that this primal experience leads to the idea of ‘God’. We are reminded that for the greatest of nineteenth-century theologians, Schleiermacher, religion grew simply out of Abhängigskeitsgefühl, the feeling of absolute dependence. Nowhere is dependence more absolute than in the relation of infant and mother. Yet the powerful elaborations of this line of thought in 1820 all issue from the question posed by Coleridge in 1795. As he says in the Opus Maximum: that which the mother is to her child, a someone unseen and yet ever present is to all. The first introduction to thought takes place in the transfer of person from the senses to the invisible. The reverence of the Invisible, substantiated by the feeling of love—

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this, which is the essence and proper definition of religion is the commencement of the intellectual life, of the humanity. If ye love not your earthly parent, how can ye love your father in heaven? (Fragment Two, f. 79)

A second instance of Coleridge’s extreme ideational tenacity reveals exactly what the example brought forth above reveals: first, that mental collocations persisted in his mind over a course of decades, and, secondly, that the extreme prolongation of his intellectual attention was matched by the depth of the philosophemes so retained. Thus, in the Opus Maximum he notes that Unlike a multitude of tygers, a million of men is far and more than one man repeated a million times. Each man in a numerous society is not simply co-existent, he is virtually co-organized with, and into, the multitude of which he is an integral part. And, for the same cause, this multitude is no mere abstraction, but is capable of becoming a true and living whole, a power susceptible of personal attributes, a nation. (Fragment Two, f. 15)

About fifteen years earlier, in a letter to Thomas Clarkson in October 1806 Coleridge had said that A male & female Tyger is neither more or less whether you suppose them only existing in their appropriate wildness, or whether you suppose a thousand Pairs. But Man is truly altered by the coexistence of other men; his faculties cannot be developed in himself alone, & only by himself. Therefore the human race not by a bold metaphor, but in a sublime reality, approach to, & might become, one body whose head is Christ (the Logos). (CL, II, p. 1197).

The two passages, each so beautifully articulated, and each modified to its own particular purpose fifteen years apart, dramatically illustrate the extraordinary persistence in Coleridge’s mind of thoughts once taken up. But the passages are more than a witness to Coleridge’s intellectual tenacity. They witness as well his cultural prescience and intellectual depth. For they each incorporate the fundamental understanding by which alone the science of sociology is possible. It was an understanding that could not be grasped at all by others in Coleridge’s time. For a single instance, the brilliant Harriet Martineau found it totally unintelligible. As she recalled of a meeting with Coleridge in 1832:

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He looked very old, with his rounded shoulders and drooping head, and excessively thin limbs. His eyes were as wonderful as they were ever represented to be;—light grey, extremely prominent, and actually glittering: an appearance I am told common among opium eaters. His onset amused me not a little. He told me that he (the last person whom I should have suspected) read my tales as they came out on the first of the month; and, after paying some compliments, he avowed that there were points on which we differed (I was full of wonder that there were any on which we agreed): ‘for instance,’ said he, ‘you appear to consider that society is an aggregate of individuals!’ I replied that I certainly did; whereupon he went off on one of the several metaphysical interpretations which may be put upon the many-sided fact of an organised human society, subject to natural laws in virtue of its aggregate character and organisation together. After a long flight in survey of society from his own balloon in his own current, he came down again to some considerations of individuals, and at length to some special biographical topics, ending with criticisms on old biographers, whose venerable works he brought down from the shelf. No one else spoke, of course, except when I once or twice put a question; and when his monologue came to what seemed a natural stop, I rose to go.5

Martineau’s amusement at Coleridge’s incomprehensible remark was recorded in her autobiography in the 1870s; so even as late as that Coleridge’s distinction was so radical as not to be understandable. It was not until the work of the French school of sociologists, beginning in the 1890s, that the distinction became available even to specialists. As the great social anthropologist Marcel Mauss said in 1938, after a third of the twentieth century had passed, ‘Thanks to forty years of effort, our sciences have become phenomenologies. We know that two special realms exist: the realm of consciousness on the one hand, and the realm of collective consciousness and the collectivity on the other. We know that these two realms are in the world and in life, are in nature.’6 Mauss was the nephew of the greatest of all sociologists, Emile Durkheim. In his Latin thesis for the Sorbonne in 1892, Durkheim had identified Montesquieu as the first sociological thinker; and he later wrote a revealing essay on the sociological perspective of Rousseau’s Social Contract. But neither Montesquieu nor Rousseau, immensely important figures though they were, even comes close to matching the point and profundity of Coleridge’s grasping of the bedrock fundamental of sociological awareness.

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Durkheim’s own thought was profoundly influenced by Rousseau’s conception of the volonté générale, which for Rousseau replaces the initiating conception of the individual in the state of nature (indeed, Talcott Parsons says flatly that ‘clearly the conscience collective is a derivative of Rousseau’s “general will” and [Auguste] Comte’s “consensus”’);7 and Durkheim begins his essay on Rousseau by pointing out that the state of nature does not refer to natural bliss but to the conception of the individual taken without reference to others. But even these epoch-making understandings do not contain the matchless sociological potentiality of Coleridge’s awareness. Indeed, Coleridge’s vivid metaphor of the different meanings of plurality in tigers and humans contains exactly the same understanding as does Durkheim’s own memorable formulation, in his great work on the division of labour, of conscience collective. The ‘collective consciousness’ is diffused throughout society, and the states which constitute it differ specifically from those which constitute particular consciousnesses. The specificity results from the fact that they are not formed from the same elements. The latter result from the nature of the organico-psychic being taken in isolation, the former from the combination of a plurality of beings of this kind.8

For Durkheim, as Steven Lukes notes, social facts (faits sociaux), as opposed to ‘organico-psychic’ facts restricted to the individual, exist ‘outside individual consciences’. Thus, for example, domestic or civic or contractual obligations are defined, externally to the individual, in law and custom; religious beliefs and practices ‘exist prior to the individual, because they exist outside him’; language and currency, as well as professional practices ‘function independently of my use of them’.9

Durkheim himself used the term conscience collective interchangeably with conscience commune, and in De la division du travail social he says that the ‘conscience collective or commune’ is ‘the set of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a single society and forms a determinate system that has its own life.’10 (We should note parenthetically that Lukes points out that the ‘French word “conscience” is ambiguous, embracing the meanings of the two English words “conscience” and “consciousness”. Thus the “beliefs and sentiments” comprising the conscience collective, are, on the one hand, moral and religious, and, on the other, cognitive.’ See Lukes, p. 4.) Later on,

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Durkheim tended to replace the term conscience collective with a more supple term, représentations collectives. Of this latter phrase Lukes says: Durkheim started using this concept in about 1897, when he wrote (in Suicide) that ‘essentially social life is made up of représentations’. Collective représentations are ‘states of the conscience collective’ which are ‘different in nature from the states of the individual conscience.’ They express ‘the way in which the group conceives itself in its relations with the objects which affect it.’ Much of Durkheim’s later work can be seen as the systematic study of collective représentations. Thus his sociology of knowledge examines the social origin and the social reference, and the social functions, of the forms of cognitive thought; his sociology of religion does the same for religious beliefs; and his projected sociology of morality would have done likewise for moral beliefs and ideals. (Lukes, p. 6)

The reference just made to Durkheim’s sociology of religion tends in its ramifications also to illuminate Coleridge’s prescience. In the second of the tyger passages quoted above, Coleridge directs his brilliant grasp of sociological reality toward religion: ‘the human race, not by a bold metaphor, but in a sublime reality, approach to, & might become, one body whose head is Christ (the Logos).’11 Coleridge certainly understood that the church was a conscience collective, not a gathering of discrete individuals; the Greek word ekklesia means a gathering of citizens, an assembly, not simply a crowd. As Coleridge said in On the Constitution of the Church and State, the Christian church is ‘not like reason or the court of conscience, existing only in and for the individual’. On the contrary, it is ‘an institution consisting of visible and public communities’. Nor for Coleridge was it simply a hodge-podge of individual needs; his elevated idea of a national church should not be reduced merely to ‘a religion’: ‘Religion, a noun of multitude, or nomen collectivum, expressing the aggregate of all the different groups of notions and ceremonies connected with the invisible and supernatural’ (CS, p. 61). That formula is of course denigrative, but even there the religious is definitively constituted by the social. Indeed, Coleridge’s two tyger passages, the one converging on ‘a true and living whole, a power susceptible of personal attributes, a nation’; and the other converging on ‘one body, whose head is Christ (the Logos)’, come together in their common service to his interlocked conception of church and state. Coleridge warns the reader not to ‘confound the state as a whole, and comprehending the church, with the State as one of the two constituent parts, and in contradistinction from the Church’ (CS, p. 107). This sameness

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in difference arises from the polar nature of Coleridge’s characteristic conceiving. Specifically, the church is the complementing opposite of the state: The Christian Church, I say, is no state, kingdom, or realm of the world; nor is it an Estate of any such realm, kingdom or state; but it is the appointed Opposite to them all collectively—the sustaining, correcting, befriending Opposite of the world! the compensating counterforce to the inherent and inevitable evils and defects of the state, as a state, and without reference to its better or worse construction as a particular state; while whatever is beneficent and humanizing in the aims, tendencies, and proper objects of the state, the Christian Church collects in itself as in a focus, to radiate them back in a higher quality: or to exchange the metaphor, it completes and strengthens the edifice of the state, without interference or commixture, in the mere act of laying and securing its own foundations. (CS, pp. 114–15)

Underlying all this thinking was Coleridge’s position that ‘Religion, true or false, is and ever has been the centre of gravity to a realm, to which all other things must and will accommodate themselves’ (CS, p. 70). Mutatis mutandis, the same conclusion pertains to the most mature thought of Durkheim. Of Durkheim’s four large works, the first three were published during his Bordeaux period in the 1890s, the Division of Labor in 1893, the Rules of Sociological Method in 1895, Suicide in 1897. But the fourth and last, the Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, was not published until much later, until 1912, when he was professor at the Sorbonne. It is not only his final and greatest work, but is one of the truly significant books in all of Western culture. For in Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse Durkheim demonstrates, once and for all, what religion is. He shows that religion does not depend primarily on a belief in God—for some religions, such as Buddhism, do not have such a belief—but on the division of sacred from profane; and that the substratum and regulating factor of religion is always social. Arguing that ‘Society is a reality sui generis’12, he says, conforming exactly to Coleridge’s conceptions as set forth in his tract on Church and State, that we arrive at the following definition: A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. The second element which thus finds a place in our definition is no less essential than the first; for by showing that the idea of religion in

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inseparable from that of the Church, it makes it clear that religion should be an eminently collective thing. (p. 49)

At the end of his masterwork Durkheim sums up: ‘nearly all the great social institutions have been born in religion. Now in order that these principal aspects of the collective life may have commenced by being only varied aspects of the religious life, it is obviously necessary that the religious life be the eminent form, and, as it were, the concentrated form of the whole collective life. If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion’ (p. 419). This was the conclusion toward which the thought of the great sociologist had been moving from its earliest origins. Indeed, his revered teacher at the École normale supérieure, the classicist Fustel de Coulanges, had in his eminent work La Cité antique challengingly taken up the fecundating and originating power of religion in the ancient city. Fustel was very important to Durkheim—as a matter of fact, Durkheim’s Latin thesis was dedicated to Fustel—and of the great influence exerted by the teacher on the student a commentator has said in part: The Ancient City is a study of the central role of religion, in particular the ancestor cult, in Greece and Rome (‘The religious idea was, among the ancients, the inspiring breath and organizer of society’), stressing the importance of sacredness in the explanation of their institutions and beliefs, and the pervasive predominance of ritual (religion ‘signified rites, ceremonies, acts of exterior worship. The doctrine was of small account: the practices were the important part; these were obligatory and bound men . . . ’). These were the very features which Durkheim’s sociology of religion was to emphasize. Its germs can be seen throughout Fustel’s great work: for example in its account of ancestor worship (establishing ‘a powerful bond . . . among all the generations of the same family, which made of it a body forever inseparable’); in its view of primitive religion as the source of ‘all the institutions, as well as all the private law, of the ancients’, the earliest forms being ‘the most important for us to know’; in its hypothesis that there might be a connection between the ideas of economic value and of religious value; and in its general focus on ‘the intimate relation which always exists between men’s ideas and their social state’. And, like Durkheim, Fustel spoke of the ‘truth’ underlying the ‘legendary forms’ of religious beliefs: ‘Social laws were the work of the gods; but those gods, so powerful

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and beneficent, were nothing else than the beliefs of men.’ (Lukes, pp. 62–3)

Despite the germinating seeds planted by Fustel, Durkheim did not, as he autobiographically says, start thinking seriously about religion until 1895: ‘It was not until 1895 that I achieved a clear view of the essential role played by religion in social life. It was in that year that, for the first time, I found the means of tackling the study of religion sociologically. This was a revelation to me. That course of 1895 marked a dividing line in the development of my thought, to such an extent that all my previous researches had to be taken up afresh in order to be made to harmonize with these new insights’ (Lukes, p. 237). Durkheim goes on to say that his reorientation was entirely due to ‘the studies of religious history which I had just undertaken, and notably to the reading of the works of Robertson Smith and his school’ (Lukes, p. 237). Robertson Smith, however, had himself been influenced, in his study of Semitic clans of Arabia, by Fustel’s La Cité antique. In any event Durkheim’s overt attention, beginning in 1895, combined with the subliminal awarenesses of earlier years to eventuate in the power and depth of the Elementary Forms of the Religious Life in 1912. But this paper is not intended to be a treatise on the magnificent contribution of Durkheim; and in truth Durkheim has loomed so large solely because of the necessity of illustrating how deep Coleridge’s tenacious conceptions run. Yet it is necessary to reiterate that Durkheim was not only the first true sociologist, but also the greatest of all sociologists. His life and career were approximately contemporary with those of Georg Simmel and Max Weber in Germany; and although Karl Jaspers expresses almost unbounded admiration for Weber, and although the Weber mystique has great currency in modern sociology—‘Weber is seen as a kind of Magus’, says Donald Macrae, in his study of Weber for the Modern Masters series13—nevertheless Durkheim is even more important. Noting that ‘In sociology Weber is canonized’, MacRae nevertheless judges that ‘Durkheim is by far the greater sociologist’ (pp. 5, 6). The fact, therefore, that Coleridge’s deep-running tenacity expressly prefigures the sociology of Durkheim guarantees not only a constancy but a prescience of thought. It is to that deep-running and prescient tenacity that the paper will now return to present another example. The elaborations of On the Constitution of the Church and State having been adduced in the course of the foregoing illustration, it might be instructive, as witness to the cornucopian richness of Coleridge’s mind, to summon that same treatise for the next illustration. In this work Coleridge sees the healthy society as determined by a continuing tension of polar opposites.

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One of these oppositions is that between permanence and progression: ‘the two antagonist powers or opposite interests of the state, under which all other state interests are composed, are those of Permanence and of Progression’ (CS, p. 24). Coleridge goes on to connect ‘the permanence of a state with the land and the landed property’ (CS, p. 24); whereas ‘the progression of a state, in the arts and comforts of life, in the diffusion of the information and knowledge, useful or necessary for all; in short, all advances in civilization, and the rights and privileges of citizens, are especially connected with, and derived from the four classes of the mercantile, the manufacturing, the distributive, and the professional’ (CS, p. 25). After further discussion, he says: That harmonious balance of the two great correspondent, at once supporting and counterpoising, interests of the state, its permanence, and its progression; that balance of the landed and the personal interests was to be secured by a legislature of two Houses; the first consisting wholly of barons or landholders, permanent and hereditary senators; the second of the knights or minor barons, elected by, and as the representative of, the remaining landed community, together with the burgesses, the representatives of the commercial, manufacturing, distributive, and professional classes,—the latter (the elected burgesses) constituting the major number. The king, meanwhile, in whom the executive power is vested, it will suffice at present to consider as the beam of the constitutional scales. A more comprehensive view of the kingly office must be deferred, till the remaining problem (the idea of a national church) has been solved. (CS, pp. 29–30)

With that last statement Coleridge moves toward the twin realities, Church and State, that provide the title of his discourse; and when he arrives at those twin realities, he subsumes them under the same polar schematism that he has inaugurated with the concepts of permanence and progression: In order to correct views respecting the constitution, in the more enlarged sense of the term, viz. the constitution of the Nation, we must, in addition to a grounded knowledge of the State, have the right idea of the National Church. These are two poles of the same magnet; the magnet itself, which is constituted by them, is the Constitution of the nation. (CS, p. 31)

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That the complex of ideas here being elaborated runs deep may perhaps be demonstrated by a single testimony. In 1859, in his classic treatise, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill writes: In politics, again, it is almost a commonplace, that a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy political life. . . . Each of these modes of thinking derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other; but it is in great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity. Unless opinion favourable to democracy and to aristocracy, to property and to equality, to co-operation and to competition, to luxury and to abstinence, to sociality and to individuality, to liberty and discipline, and all the other standing antagonisms of practical life, are expressed with equal freedom, and enforced and defended with equal talent and energy, there is no chance of both elements obtaining their due; one scale is sure to go up, and the other down. Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach to correctness, and it has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners.14

The entire passage is permeated by the precursorship of Coleridge’s Church and State. Mill, of course, admired Coleridge’s mind and habitually read Coleridge’s writings with respectful attention—after all, in a famous essay he divided all Englishmen of his time into only two classes, Benthamites and Coleridgeans—and one can have little doubt that he is here working directly with the memory of Coleridge’s treatise of 1830. That he can, by 1859, term the ideas ‘almost a commonplace’, is eloquent witness to how deeply they had rooted themselves in the cultural soil. But if the polarities of Church and State rooted deeply and branched out broadly, they had also been growing slowly in Coleridge’s mind over the years. For in 1811, almost two full decades before the treatise on church and state, Coleridge is mulling the very same ideas: Church and state [he says]—civil and religious rights—to hold these essential power of civilized society in due relationship to each other, so as to prevent them from becoming its burdens, instead of its supports; this is perhaps the most difficult problem in the whole science of politics. . . . From the first ages of Christianity to the

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present period, the two relations of a natural being, to his present and future state, have been abstracted and framed into moral personages, Church and State: and to each has been assigned its own domain and its special rights.15

This passage of 1811 shows conclusively that Coleridge had been tenaciously holding to the primary polarity of Church and State, and its implications for social thought, for twenty years before the treatise that still thirty years later influenced Mill. And it constitutes a third vital instance, to be set beside the two just elucidated, of his extraordinary intellectual tenacity. This paper has up till now brought forward three complex examples, not just one, in order to illustrate how characteristic of Coleridge was the tenacious retention of focal ideational clusters. In doing so, it has illuminated also two subsidiary features of Coleridge’s mentation. He not only tenaciously retained philosophical emphases, but these emphases were, first, characteristically explored at great depth, and, secondly, were elaborated in far reaching ramification. Each emphasis was, so to speak, like Coleridge’s favorite organic metaphor of a tree: it germinated long, grew slowly, put its roots down ever more deeply, and branched out into broad and complex foliage. All this seems unmistakably clear on the basis of the multiple examples just explored. Yet the intellectual public’s awareness of the palpable truth of Coleridge’s intellectual tenacity has been compromised by three large factors. Working in synergy they have constituted a kind of snarling Cerberus, it might be said, blocking in this instance the gateway to understanding. The first factor is the fragmentary nature of Coleridge’s work, which, until the inauguration and completion of the great Collected Coleridge, was made to seem even more fragmentary by the existence of scattered and piecemeal texts, with much of the witness to his mental effort remaining unprinted. The second is the special allusiveness of Coleridge’s prose style, and its reference to a vast range of reading in five languages, a reading by no means matched by his commentators. As a single instance, the present writer has had occasion to point out more than once that no commentator on Coleridge has ever so much as approached his magisterial command of the philosophy of Kant, and to compound that deficiency some have even projected their own ignorance into their assumptions about their subject. The third factor is the prevalence, in the last quarter century, of aggressive and ill-informed dismissals, taking their impetus from a heightened awareness of Coleridge’s psychological desperation. These dismissals have had a resonating effect. Fruman’s Damaged Archangel received over 100 reviews, most of them laudatory, almost none of them by scholars competent to judge. It was bemusing to see intellectuals of

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the calibre of Angus Fletcher, Hugh Kenner, and Christopher Ricks largely accept that manipulated stock; and it was also bemusing to note that reviewers never seemed to question their own credentials for judging in the matter. It was in this witch-hunting climate of opinion that E.P. Thompson could, in an orgy of fulmination and denunciation, roundly dismiss Coleridge as being ‘wrong on almost everything’ and of being ‘a chameleon’.16 Whatever Coleridge was, a chameleon he was not. Indeed, it might even be said that the whole point of this paper is to demonstrate how baseless is such a charge. No one has ever been more constant in his opinions or more tenacious in his intellectual attitudes and viewpoints than was Coleridge. But he has in recent years been enveloped in a miasma of misconception, and grossly, even ludicrously mistaken views have sometimes prevailed. To dispel, or begin to dispel, that miasma of misconception, therefore, an extended concluding example must be joined to the three already summoned. It will serve to illustrate still a fourth aspect of Coleridge’s all-pervading intellectual tenacity. To the characteristics of lengthy retention, depth, and ramified elaboration already identified must be added, and explored, another characteristic noted in passing above: the persistence of thoughts once taken up. For thoughts once taken up into the blast furnace of Coleridge’s mental activity were never discarded or wholly rejected; they might be modified or reshaped in their role in his systematic commitment, but they were never forced out of his concern. His often-quoted description of his philosophical aims is a paramount witness to this truth. For he says that his system is an attempt to reduce all knowledges into harmony. It opposes no other system, but shows what was true in each; and how that which was true in the particular, in each of them became error, because it was only half the truth. I have endeavoured to unite the insulated fragments of truth, and therewith to frame a perfect mirror. I show to each system that I fully understand and rightfully appreciate what that system means; but then I lift up that system to a higher point of view, from which I enable it to see its former position, where it was, indeed, but under another light and with different relations; so that the fragment of truth is not only acknowledged, but explained.17

A fine example of Coleridge’s uniting the insulated fragments of truth, of retaining an unpalatable fragment by viewing it in another light and with different relations, is provided by his disposition of the received concept of reason in which he had been brought up. That reason, the raison of the French Enlightenment, came to seem inadequate to him. Instead of rejecting it entirely, however, as other thinkers might have done, he retained it. But he

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cast it in another light and with different relations. He renamed it ‘understanding’; and he substituted a more satisfactory conception of reason under the now vacated term ‘reason’, the binary linkage of reason and understanding having been suggested to him by the dichotomized conceptions of Tetens, Kant, and Jacobi. Incidentally, Coleridge’s attention to the binary linkage of reason and understanding is a prime illustration of his intellectual tenacity, for as he says in On the Constitution of Church and State, to return to the work we have been mining, ‘It is now thirty years since the diversity of Reason and the Understanding, of an Idea and a Conception, and the practical importance of distinguishing the one from the other, were first made evident to me. And scarcely a month has passed during this long interval in which either books, or conversation, or the experience of life, have not supplied or suggested some fresh proof and instance of the mischiefs and mistakes, derived from that ignorance of this Truth, which I have elsewhere called the Queen-bee in the Hive of Error’ (CS, pp. 58–9). That passage alone, with its reference to a continuing mental engagement of thirty years, provides vivid witness to Coleridge’s intellectual tenacity. And it would be very possible, by further investigation, to illustrate the characteristics of depth and elaboration, as well as those characteristics of tenacity and persistence already evident in the passage on its face. But instead of embarking on the lengthy and rewarding possibilities attendant on such an investigation, we will choose as our fourth example a very similar situation, but one susceptible of somewhat briefer address, with regard to another Coleridgean collocation. That collocation is constituted by the Coleridgean concern with imagination. Here, as with reason, Coleridge’s tenacious involvement—his longterm preoccupation and elaboration—was elicited by dissatisfaction with the received view obtaining in his formative years. But instead of Enlightenment raison, the received view here was the conception of mind and its active power espoused by the tradition of Locke. Indeed, the situation in England in Coleridge’s intellectually germinating period was that Locke and Newton formed an alliance that reigned supreme. As Godwin said in 1793, ‘Locke and others have established certain maxims respecting man, as Newton has done respecting matter, that are generally admitted for unquestionable.’18 As corollary to his espousal of these beliefs, Godwin found the mind to be completely passive. ‘In volition’, he said, ‘if the doctrine of necessity be true, the mind is altogether passive’ (Godwin, I, p. 323). ‘Man’, he said again, ‘is in reality a passive, and not an active being’ (Godwin, I, p. 310). But Coleridge came to rebel against this view, and his rebellion, continuing over the decades, is itself a prime witness to his intellectual tenacity,

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both in its length and in its elaboration. In 1801 he rejected the tradition of Locke and Newton in this way: Newton was a mere Materialist—Mind in his system is always passive—a lazy Looker-on on an external world. If the mind be not passive, if it be indeed Made in God’s Image, & that too in the sublimest sense—the Image of the Creator—there is ground for suspicion, that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system. (CL, II, p. 709)

Fourteen years later the same urgency obtained, for one of Coleridge’s hopes for Wordsworth’s Recluse, as he wrote in 1815, was that it should refute ‘the sandy Sophisms of Locke, and the Mechanic Dogmatists’ by ‘demonstrating that the Senses were living growths and developements of the Mind & Spirit in a much juster as well as higher sense, than the mind can be said to be formed by the Senses’ (CL, IV, p. 574). The tenacity so clearly attested by the dates of 1801 and 1815 continued unabated. Another seventeen years passed, and the matter was still occupying Coleridge’s thoughts; for in 1832 he said, ‘The pith of my system is to make the senses out of the mind—not the mind out of the senses, as Locke did’ (TT, II, p. 179. 25 July 1832). Coleridge’s intellectual tenacity in rejecting the passiveness of mind extended to his engagement with the chief evidence for the activity of the mind, the imagination. And here he did exactly what he also did with reason. Instead of simply dismissing the tradition of mental imaging arising out of the conception of the mind’s passivity, he retained it under the name ‘fancy’; and he simultaneously urged his own view, under the name ‘imagination’, of the mind as made in ‘God’s Image’, the ‘Image of the Creator’: The imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the hind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create. . . . It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.19

To that extrication of the vital and creative activity of mind, conceived in analogy with the creative activity of God himself, Coleridge subjoins the

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rejected Lockean conception of a non-creative passivity, here presented in another light and with different relations: Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by the empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word choice. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. (B, I, p. 305)

The invocation of the ‘law of association’ places ‘fancy’ firmly in the tradition of Locke, and of Locke’s epigone, Hartley. Those famous passages were published in 1817. In only this one place does Coleridge overtly summon the theological analogue, under the rubric ‘primary imagination’. But as the passage of 1801 against Newton attests, it was always the substratum of his conception. The fundamental division between imagination and fancy too had had a long provenance in Coleridge’s ever-tenacious concern. Fifteen years before the formulation in the Biographia Literaria, in a letter of 1802, he expresses that division for the first time. The occasion, distinguishing Greek religious poetry from that of the Hebrews, refers to imagination and fancy in such casual terms as to suggest that they had long been current in his conceiving; at any rate, they are certainly current in this letter of 10 September 1802, where he refers to ‘Fancy, or the aggregating Faculty of the mind—not Imagination, or the modifying, and co–adunating Faculty’ (CL, II, pp. 865–6). But Coleridge’s tenacious concern had been current even before the fifteen-year span from 1802 to 1817. For his elaboration of the doctrine of imagination is actually a reshaping of his earlier preoccupation with necessitarian thought. Necessitarian thought was unequivocally espoused by three figures important in Coleridge’s early intellectual background, Hartley, Priestley, and Godwin. It is a large subject, but perhaps a single quotation from each figure will serve to triangulate it for our present elucidation. Hartley, in his Observations on Man, said in 1749 that one of ‘the consequences flowing from the Doctrine of Association’ was ‘that of the Mechanism or Necessity of Human Actions, in Opposition to what is generally termed Free-will’.20 Priestley, in 1777, in The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, argued from materialist hypotheses that ‘every thing belonging to the doctrine of materialism is, in fact, an argument for the doctrine of necessity, and, consequently, the doctrine of necessity is a direct inference from materialism’.21

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And Godwin, in 1793, in Political Justice, espoused necessitarianism and said that ‘He who affirms that all actions are necessary, means, that, if we form a just and complete view of all the circumstances in which a living, or intelligent being is placed, we shall find that he could not in any moment of his existence have acted otherwise than he has acted’ (Godwin, I, p. 285). Coleridge was profoundly immersed in this tradition. Indeed, in 1794 he wrote Southey that ‘I am a compleat Necessitarian—and understand the subject as well almost as Hartley himself—but I go farther than Hartley and believe the corporeality of thought—namely, that it is motion—’ (CL, I, p. 137). But as Coleridge continued to work out the implications of his own primary assumptions, he came increasingly into conflict with the necessitarianism of Hartley, Priestley, and Godwin. The line of thought and observation that led to their abjuration may be glimpsed in a letter of 1800 to Josiah Wedgwood: Both I & Mrs Coleridge have carefully watched our little one and noted down all the circumstances &c. under which he smiled & under which he laughed for the first six times—nor have we remitted our attention—but I have not been able to derive the least confirmation of Hartley’s or Darwin’s Theory. (CL, I, p. 647)

In a note of 1804, Coleridge rejects Hartley’s doctrine of association in unequivocal terms: ‘I am much pleased with this Suggestion, as with everything that overthrows & or illustrates the overthrow of that all-annihilating system of explaining every thing wholly by association.’22 Yet Coleridge did not simply abandon the concerns directed into his hopes for necessitarian theory. Rather, he modified the applicability of their doctrine, and rechanneled their energy into his theory of imagination, which rectified necessitarian defects. As he said in an anticipatory note of 1796, ‘Doctrine of necessity rendered not dangerous by the Imagination which contemplates immediate not remote effects’ (NB, I, no. 156). Both concerns, opposition to Hartleyan necessity, on the one hand, and the liberating theory of imagination, on the other, continued at the forefront of Coleridge’s thought, until, in 1817, twenty-one years later, in the Biographia Literaria, he set forth the fullest elaboration of the doctrine of imagination alongside an extended refutation of Hartley: It remains then for me, first to state wherein Hartley differs from Aristotle; then, to exhibit the ground of my conviction, that he differed only to err; and next as the result, to shew, by what influence of the choice and judgment the associative power becomes either

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memory or fancy; and, in conclusion, to appropriate the remaining office of the mind to the reason, and the imagination. (B, I, p. 105)

In Chapter Seven of his work, Coleridge delivers body blows to what he calls ‘Hartley’s scheme’. He speaks of the assumption, that the will, and with the will all acts of thought and attention, are parts and products of this blind mechanism, instead of being distinct powers, whose function is to controul, determine, and modify the phantasmal chaos of association. The soul becomes a mere ens logicum. (B, I, pp. 116–17)

The soul would by the same token, says Coleridge, become ‘worthless and ludicrous’; for in Hartley’s scheme the soul is present only to be pinched or stroked, while the very squeals or purring are produced by an agency wholly independent and alien. (B, I, p. 117)

Thus ‘Hartley’s scheme’ is absolutely rejected by Coleridge as antithetical to his commitment to what he calls ‘the free-will, our only absolute self ’ (B, I, p. 114). But Coleridge’s involvement in these matters did not simply run from that date in 1794 when he declared that he understood necessitarianism almost as well as Hartley himself, to the date in 1817, lengthy though that span of almost a quarter of a century is, when he elaborated a comprehensive scheme of imagination specifically designed to rescue his thought from Hartleyan implication. It ran still further. For sixteen years later, on May 18, 1833, a note in the Table Talk shows that Coleridge is still tenaciously ruminating on the convolutions of necessity and freedom. ‘in natural history’, he says, ‘God’s freedom is shown in the law of necessity. In moral history, God’s necessity or providence is shown in man’s freedom’ (TT, II, p. 231. 18 May 1833). These four examples of Coleridge’s tenacity, here rehearsed at length, should serve to identify that characteristic as a fundamental feature of his mental activity. As I have said elsewhere: Coleridge did not change by abrupt repudiations and summary voltes-face; change, for Coleridge, was always a matter of evolving emphases and additional considerations. He was as tenacious of his primary beliefs as any thinker has ever been; and no intellectual life

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can have been more continuous and integrated in its development than was his.23

Not constant change, but continuity, was the hallmark of Coleridge’s intellectual activity. Not constant rejection and beginning again, but continuing integration was his typical procedure. One may place against E.P. Thompson’s agitated denunciations Coleridge’s own beautifully articulated statement of this ideal: It is a maxim with me, to make life as continuous as possible, by linking on the Present to the Past: and I believe that a large portion of the ingratitude, inconstancy, frivolity, and restless self-weariness so many examples of which obtrude themselves on every man of observation and reflective habits, is attributable to the friable, incohesive sort of existence that characterizes the mere man of the World, a fractional Life made up of successive moments that neither blend nor modify each other—a life that is strictly symbolized in the thread of Sand thro’ the orifice of the Hourglass, in which the sequence of Grains only counterfeits a continuity, and appears a line only because the interspaces between the Points are too small to be sensible. Without Memory there can be no hope—the Present is a phantom known only by its pining, if it do not breathe the vital air of the Future: what is the Future, but the Image of the Past projected on the mist of the Unknown, and seen with a glory round it’s head. (CL, V, p. 266)

This, then, is enough. Coleridge’s distinctive hope of aligning past, present, and future into one cohesive witness to a meaningful life, which is so strikingly formulated in the preceding quotation, underlies the enormous constancy of his intellectual career. Informed by such constancy, that career, despite the fragmentations and neuroses of his psychic life, raised itself to a high place in the annals of culture. And the idiosyncratic constancy, which co-inhered so unexpectedly with the ruinous disintegration of his personal existence, manifested itself in a tremendous intellectual tenacity. It was a tenacity whereby thoughts once propounded evermore played a vital role in Coleridge’s concern; and he himself may be finally defined, in simple fact, as nothing less than a hero of intellectual abidingness.

No t e s 1. ‘For he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?’ (I John 4:20).

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  2. S.T. Coleridge, Lectures 1795 On Politics and Religion, ed. by Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). Volume I in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Kathleen Coburn, Bollingen Series 75.   3. Opus Maximum, Fragment Two folio 79.   4. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), VI, p. 861. Hereafter cited as CL.   5. Coleridge the Talker; A Series of Contemporary Descriptions and Comments, ed. by Richard W. Armour and Raymond F. Howes, new edition with addenda (1940: New York and London: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1969), p. 297.   6. Marcel Mauss, Sociology and Psychology; Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 3.   7. Talcott Parsons, ‘The Life and Work of Emile Durkheim’, in Emile Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy, trans. by D.F. Pocock, with an introduction by J.G. Peristiany (New York: The Free Press, 1974), p. li.   8. Emile Durkheim, Les Règles de la méthode sociologique, revue et augmentée d’une préface nouvelle (2nd. edn.: Paris: Alcan, 1901), pp. 127–8.   9. Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work; A Historical and Critical Study (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1973), p. 11, hereafter Lukes. 10. Emile Durkheim, De la division du travail social (2nd. edn.: Paris: Alcan, 1902), p. 46. 11. S.T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. by John Colmer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 116. Volume 10 in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Kathleen Coburn, Bollingen Series 75. Hereafter cited as CS. 12. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. by Joseph Ward Swain (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1915), p. 16, subsequent page references in the text. 13. Donald G. MacRae, Max Weber (New York: The Viking Press, 1974), p. 4, subsequent page references in the text. 14. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. by David Spitz, Norton Critical Editions (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), p. 46. 15. S.T. Coleridge, Essays on His Times, ed. by David V Erdman, 3 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), I, pp. 172–3. Volume 3 in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Kathleen Coburn, Bollingen Series 75. 16. E.P. Thompson, in The Wordsworth Circle, 10 (Summer 1979), pp. 262–3. 17. S.T. Coleridge, Table Talk; Recorded by Henry Nelson Coleridge (and John Taylor Coleridge), ed. by Carl Woodring, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), II, 147–8. 12 September 1831. Volume 14 in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Kathleen Coburn, Bollingen Series 75. Hereafter cited as TT. 18. William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (London: G.G.J. and J. Robinson, 1793) I, p. 20. Facsimile edn. published by Woodstock Books: Oxford and New York, 1992. Hereafter cited as Godwin. 19. S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton: Princeton University Press,

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1983), I, p. 304. Volume 7 in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Kathleen Coburn, Bollingen Series 75. Hereafter cited as B. 20. David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (London: S. Richardson for James Leake and Wm. Frederick, 1749), I, p. 500. Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints: Delmar, New York, 1976. 21. Joseph Priestley, The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, being an appendix to the Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit, vol. ii. The second edition enlarged (Birmingham: Printed by Pearson and Rollason, for J. Johnson. No. 72, St Paul’s Church-Yard, London, 1782), p. xviii. 22. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Kathleen Coburn et al. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), II, no. 209. Hereafter NB. 23. Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Heritage of Rousseau (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 94.

J . D o u glas K neale

“Between Poetry and Oratory”: Coleridge’s Romantic Effusions

I

n 1796 Samuel Taylor Coleridge published his first volume of poetry, entitled Poems on Various Subjects, which included three dozen poems designated as “Effusions.”1 At least one of what we now regard as Coleridge’s best poems, namely “The Eolian Harp,” originally belonged to this genre of the effusion, and was first published in Coleridge’s volume simply under the title of “Effusion xxxv.” What exactly is an “effusion”? Where does it fit into pre-Romantic and Romantic literary history? And what predecessors might the young Coleridge have been thinking of when he composed his effusions? Can we legitimately talk about the effusion as a distinct genre or subgenre? While a considerable amount of work has been done on eighteenthcentury and pre-Romantic lyric forms (M.H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp and Marshall Brown’s Preromanticism are two different examples), and their relation to the “emotion recollected in tranquillity” of high Romanticism, no study has looked at the genre of the effusion separately; when considered at all, the effusion is an emotional Romantic fragment, usually subsumed under the rubric of Coleridge’s conversation poems, despite the fact that a number of effusions pre-date by up to eight years the composition of “The Nightingale,” the one text Coleridge actually called “a conversation poem.”2 Yet Coleridge himself suggests that these thirty-six poems From Romantic Aversions: Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge, pp. 28–49, 161–66. © 1999 by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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of 1796 are to be considered separately: in the volume they are given a separate half-title page—simply “Effusions”—and an epigraph from William Lisle Bowles’s Monody, Written at Matlock, October 1791, a poem that Coleridge singles out for praise in chapter 1 of his Biographia Literaria (1: 24). The poems are numbered in series, with one exception, from “Effusion 1” to “Effusion 36” in the table of contents; thirty poems have additional titles, such as “To Schiller,” “To the Autumnal Moon,” and “Complaint of Ninathoma,” while six poems have no further title beyond “Effusion—.”3 All these details suggest that the poems are to be considered as a unit—or, as I will suggest, as a genre in which Coleridge was experimenting from 1788 to 1796. I It may seem like an invention of literary history to talk about the genre of the effusion; an effusion, as Abrams has written, merely connotes “a spontaneous expression of personal circumstances and feelings” (Correspondent Breeze 160). It is, as Paul Magnuson has said, “a separate expression of a moment, a lyric utterance of strong feeling, playful speculation, or political observation and not an ordered body of poetic thought” (5).4 Yet the terms in which Coleridge thought about his “Effusions” have as much to do with questions of genre as with emotional content and tone. In his preface to Poems on Various Subjects, he attempts to position the volume in contemporary literary tradition by referring the reader to related works. “Of the following Poems,” Coleridge writes, a considerable number are styled “Effusions,” in defiance of Churchill’s line “Effusion on Effusion pour away.” I could recollect no title more descriptive of the manner and matter of the Poems—I might indeed have called the majority of them Sonnets—but they do not possess that oneness of thought which I deem indispensible (sic) in a Sonnet—and (not a very honorable motive perhaps) I was fearful that the title “Sonnet” might have reminded my reader of the Poems of the Rev. W.L. Bowles—a comparison with whom would have sunk me below that mediocrity, on the surface of which I am at present enabled to float. (CPW 2:1136–7)

I read this statement as confirming that the twenty-three-year-old Coleridge knew what he was doing in publishing his “Effusions”: the

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topos of affected modesty at the end of this passage balances the earlier “defiance” of convention; the invocation of both Churchill and Bowles creates, as it were, the negative and positive poles framing Coleridge’s own work; even the formulaic phrase “manner and matter” shows familiarity with traditional rhetorical theory. Coleridge’s assumption that his readers immediately would have associated the title Sonnets with the recent work of Bowles instead of, say, Shakespeare may be at first curious, but it reinforces the view that Coleridge is not only responding to the contemporary eighteenth-century literary scene more than to a great tradition, but aggressively defining the terms of reference by which his work is to be measured. Such aggressiveness, surpassing the milder convention of affected modesty, can be seen in Coleridge’s contradictory publication of his sonnets along with Bowles’s later the same year. In spring 1796 Coleridge professes that any comparison with Bowles would sink Poems on various Subjects “below that mediocrity, on the surface of which I am at present enabled to float,” yet by autumn he forces precisely such a comparison by binding his sonnets with Bowles’s and several other contemporary poets’, and adding a preface on the theory of the sonnet.5 Coleridge’s term “effusions,” however, appears to have been unfamiliar to contemporary reviewers of Poems on Various Subjects. For example, the anonymous reviewer in the Analytical Review ( June 1796) writes: “To a collection of small pieces the author has chosen to give the name of Effusions: some of these are political, others descriptive, and others sentimental. A very small number of these effusions are devoted to love.” The reviewer in the Critical Review ( June 1796) praises Coleridge’s poems: “They consist of sonnets, which, however, Mr. Coleridge chooses to call Effusions.” John Aikin, in the Monthly Review ( June 1796), notes Coleridge’s originality, and especially “a principal division of the volume, styled ‘Effusions.’ These are short poems, many of them regular sonnets, others in a different form, but generally like them turning on a single thought, the topics of which are various; some breathing the high notes of freedom or fancy, some the softer strains of love and pity.”6 The fact that the reviewers say that Coleridge “chooses” to call certain poems “effusions” suggests their response to the apparent arbitrariness or novelty of such a term; in the first and last examples, the brief definitions of what the effusions consist of confirm the unfamiliarity of Coleridge’s choice of label. The reviewers nowhere identify any literary tradition in which an “effusion” might stand defined. Then what are we to make of the allusion to Churchill—”Effusion on Effusion pour away”? The line is taken from Charles Churchill’s political satire The Candidate, published in 1764, in which the poet John Langhorne (1735– 1779) comes under fire for his works The Effusions of Friendship and Fancy

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and The Enlargement of the Mind . . . Written at Belvidere, both published in 1763. The immediate context concerns a catalogue of “Scribblers” (25) who are mocked and dismissed by Churchill: Why may not langhorne, simple in his lay, Effusion on Effusion pour away, With Friendship, and with Fancy trifle here, Or sleep in Pastoral at belvidere? Sleep let them all, with dullness on her throne, Secure from any malice, but their own. (The Candidate 41–6)

Coleridge’s citation of the line “Effusion on Effusion pour away” does not engage the literary politics of Churchill’s attack on Langhorne so much as it seems to declare, “in defiance” of certain literary opinion, Coleridge’s intent to redeem the genre of the effusion from disrepute by clearing it of the charge of what he calls “querulous egotism” (CPW 2: 1135). While Coleridge may not have been concerned exactly to vindicate Langhorne, we know that he did have more than a passing acquaintance with his work: he owned a copy of Langhorne’s well-known edition of Collins, and in that edition in 1793 he wrote two poems which he called “Effusions.” 7 But before we can pursue what Coleridge meant by the term effusion, and how it is related to egotism, we need to consider briefly Langhorne’s Effusions. The first characteristic to notice is that Langhorne’s work, whose full title is The Effusions of Friendship and Fancy. In Several Letters to and from Select Friends, is not a book of poetry at all, but rather two volumes of (in the first edition) sixty-two prose letters, some containing poetic extracts, written mainly on topics of literary criticism, theology, philosophy, and society.8 Letter 10 from volume 2, for example, claims that “Milton’s Comus is, beyond all comparison, the finest poem in the English language”; letter 16 in the same volume disagrees with Quintilian over what a proper hyperbole should be. In volume 1, letter 23, Langhorne discusses pastoral poetry, and in the next letter he attacks the three unities of drama as “petty tyrants” that create only “a dull regularity, an insipid consistency.” One letter that deserves attention is number 37 of volume 1, addressed to an unnamed male correspondent: If I had not received so many interesting proofs of the sincerity of your friendship, I should now begin to doubt it. You will wonder how this should come into my head, and possibly you may laugh at me, when I tell you that my suspicion arises only from the different style of your letters. It is very true, my friend, your letters, which were once so easy and dégagée, the careless effusions of the heart,

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are now, to my great mortification, polished and smoothed off like the modulated periods of the Rambler. You know you have already so much of my affection that it is scarce possible for you to increase it, and perhaps, therefore, you send me these elegant compositions to add to my esteem—well then, you have gained your end. I now know and esteem your elegant talent very highly, and desire that I may have no more proofs of it. Relapse into that unstudied negligence, those natural, friendly, genuine overflowings of the heart, which I have heretofore so much admired in your letters, and which delighted me more than the most finished periods. What have you and I to do with accuracy and elegance, who never intend that our letters shall be printed? Let those write like Seneca or Balsac, who like them design to publish their letters, as memorials of their friendship. Be it enough that our friendship last as long as we live; for, believe me, those that come after us will not care whether we loved or hated each other. Come then, my friend, let us unbend a little, and talk in our old strain—What have you been doing this season . . . ? (1: 163–6)9

What is “effusive” about this letter? One feature is its “easy” style— chatty and witty on the surface, yet revealing a formal, self-conscious rhetoric in its deliberate structure. The letter thematizes letter-writing precisely on the question of style. Acknowledging the fact of friendship in the first sentence (“proofs of the sincerity of your friendship”), the letter-writer reciprocates that point in the fourth sentence (“so much of my affection”), and finally mockingly rejects it (“no more proofs of it” [i.e., “esteem” inspired by literary talent]). Alternating with these statements of friendship is the commentary on style, in which Langhorne openly asks his correspondent to return to the “easy and dégagée” style of writing and abandon his more recent “polished and smoothed off ” manner. The ideal is to write letters that are “the careless effusions of the heart” and not “the modulated periods of the Rambler.” Langhorne reiterates the point by asking his correspondent to “[r]elapse into that unstudied negligence, those natural, friendly, genuine overflowings of the heart” and leave behind “the most finished periods.” A genuine style argues a genuine friendship, while an artificial style raises doubts: Langhorne’s “suspicion” over the correspondent’s ingenuousness “arises only from the different style of [his] letters.” Where there is leisure for elegance there can be little sincerity. Yet what is the reason given for thinking that a polished style implies insincerity? The answer is audience: writing with “accuracy and elegance”

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instead of “unstudied negligence” suggests that one writes for an audience other than the immediate one—for a public audience rather than a private one. This rhetorical strategy is not an aversion of discourse, obviously not apostrophic, yet it does raise the question of who is the proper or intended reader. Such style, Langhorne implies, smacks of serving two masters at once: I am writing to you, but I am not really writing to you because ultimately I am writing for publication or for posterity. “What have you and I to do with accuracy and elegance, who never intend that our letters shall be printed?” he asks. 1: 60–1).”10 The argument presented in this letter implicitly defines an effusion as a spontaneous overflow—a literal definition, since effusion etymologically means a pouring out. Thus Churchill’s line “Effusion on Effusion pour away” manages to pun on Langhorne’s title while conveying a sense of the gushing quality and quantity of his writings. To effuse, or to effude, usually connotes the act of pouring forth a liquid, often blood or tears. In figurative usage, what effuses is the “overflowings of the heart,” as Langhorne puts it. But in the classical topos of effusis habenis, or the loosening of the reins, we find the trope of effusion applied to discourse, to what Cicero and Quintilian call the genus sermonis, the art of speaking and conversing. To let go the reins of language means to give in to passion, to “the careless effusions of the heart.” “Slackened reins” is a recurrent Virgilian figure.11 Coleridge taps into this tradition through a particular source, Petrarch’s Epistola Barbato Sulmonensi, which he quotes first in chapter 1 of the Biographia Literaria in the context of Bowles’s sonnets (1: 13–14), then in chapter 10 in Coleridge’s self-characterization as a frustrated poet (1: 221–2), and thirdly in chapter 14 in his definition of a poet. As well, in 1813 he copied a passage from Petrarch’s Epistola into a notebook (BL 2: 16n6). In chapter 14 of the Biographia, Coleridge outlines how the poet’s imagination, “first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, controul (laxis effertur habenis) reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities” (2: 16). The tag “laxis effertur habenis;” meaning “carried on with slackened reins” (2: 16n6), is from Petrarch’s Epistola.12 “Effertur” is cognate with effusion; imagination flows, but the will and the understanding rein it in. There is a deep intertextual thread running through this passage: Coleridge’s previous sentence states that the poet “diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination” (Coleridge’s emphasis). I am alerted by the figural disclaimer of “(as it were),” which calls attention to Coleridge’s rhetoric more than his logic, and specifically the figure of polyptoton: the poet “diffuses” as well as “fuses”; what goes without saying, except

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in the Petrarchan intertext, is that the poet also effuses. Petrarch’s Epistola is again invoked in chapter 10 when Coleridge quotes the line “Quas humilis tenero stylus olim effudit in aevo”—“that once, in tender youth, my humble pen poured forth” (1: 222, 222n2). The Petrarchan intertext is both a literary topos and a lived experience for the young Coleridge. We begin to see the disguised but recognizable presence of the genus sermonis in Coleridge’s early “Effusions.” His numerous texts entitled and addressed “To X” obviously adopt a style that we would now designate as “conversational,” albeit anachronistically. In the context of the rhetorical definitions laid down in chapter 1, we may offer a clearer definition. The effusion is defined by its rhetorical structure of address and aversion. It depends on the directing and the redirecting of discourse. If we trace the trajectory of one line of Coleridge’s poetic career through such poems as “The Eolian Harp,” “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “Frost at Midnight,” “The Nightingale,” “Dejection: An Ode,” and “To William Wordsworth,” we see that they all depend on an explicit, formal structure of address: a clearly delineated speaker, a message, and a specific, often specifically named, recipient. Against certain notions of the private nature of Romantic discourse, we have to say that this is not poetry to be “overheard”; this is poetry to be received loud and clear. Coleridge is always at pains to ensure that the reader gets the message; like Wordsworth, he assumes that the poet is “a man speaking to men” (Wordsworth, Prose 1: 138), although in a decidedly different rhetoric from Wordsworth’s. Contrary to John Stuart Mill’s distinction (12), Coleridge’s poetry partakes of the nature, not of soliloquy, but of oratory. Or it partakes, as Coleridge himself described it in a manuscript note, of “a sort of middle thing between Poetry and Oratory” (CPW 1: 257n). This notion of a sort of poetry that is not poetry, or is “between” poetry and something else, can be found throughout Coleridge’s work. The bestknown example is the note to “Kubla Khan,” in which Coleridge says that the fragmentary text is published “rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits” (CPW 1: 295). In a similar self-cancelling manner, the subtitle of his “Address to a Young Jack-Ass,” as published in the Morning Chronicle, 30 December 1794, indicates that the poem is written “in familiar verse” (CPW 1: 74). In a note to his sonnet “On Receiving a Letter Informing Me of the Birth of a Son,” Coleridge writes that “This sonnet puts in no claim to poetry . . . but it is a most faithful picture of my feelings on a very interesting event” (CPW 1: 153). Coleridge’s “Reflections On Having Left A Place of Retirement,” whose original subtitle was “A Poem which affects not to be Poetry,” makes a similar rhetorical gesture by opening the Romantic text to other discourses. Even more significant, though, is the Horatian motto that Coleridge added in 1797 to replace the subtitle of

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“Reflections”: “Sermoni propriora,” which may be translated as “more suitable to prose/conversation,” but which Coleridge himself facetiously translated as “Properer for a Sermon.”13 This epigraph is all the more interesting when we consider that it is taken from Horace’s first book, commonly called Satires, but actually entitled Sermones, or conversations.14 And when Coleridge described his 1798 poem “Fears in Solitude” he again echoed his Horatian intertext: “N.B. The above [“Fears in Solitude”] is perhaps not Poetry,—but rather a sort of middle thing between Poetry and Oratory—sermoni propriora.—Some parts are, I am conscious, too tame even for animated prose” (CPW 1: 257).15 What is this “middle thing between Poetry and Oratory”? To position Coleridge’s “Effusions” we need to know the relative status of their framing discourses, but can we even be sure which term, poetry or oratory, is the privileged one? And where does the last element, “animated prose,” fit in? Does a literary genre that is “properer for a sermon” belong to the same tradition as Milton’s poetry, which is “of power beside the office of a pulpit” (Milton, Complete 669), or does it settle for some “middle flight” (Paradise Lost 1.14)?16 Coleridge considers some of these questions at length in his Biographia Literaria, partly in the context of his analysis of Wordsworth, but here in the early poems of the 1790s the answers are not so easily reached. I suggest that for the younger Coleridge these terms are all interinvolved, overlapping; they define not discrete discourses, but rather tendencies within his different rhetorical voices.17 The genre in which Coleridge was experimenting in the 1790s, the genus sermonis that combines aspects of poetry, oratory, and animated prose, partakes of the rhetoric of “correspondence.” This is the intertextual after-effect of Langhorne’s Effusions: effusions, whether in prose or poetry, share the nature of epistolary writing, not least the genres of the eighteenth-century familiar letter and the literary epistle.18 As the precursor of the conversation poem, the effusion assumes as its rhetorical ground a literary structure of address and aversion. At once familiar, spontaneous, personal, immediate, and conversational, Coleridge’s effusions exploit the rhetorical possibilities of verse epistles, yet they also adapt the formalities of other poetic styles of address, such as the ode or the “Address to X.” Coleridge’s effusions are both public—that is, formal, political, and oratorical—and private—easy, intimate, self-referring. As such, they conform to the very paradoxes of correspondence itself, which, as Charles Lamb suggests in his essay on letter-writing, must be both formal and informal.19 Wordsworth, known for his “aversion from writing” (Early Years 407), is forever the “man speaking to men”; Coleridge, famous for his sublime table-talk, is a preeminent conversationalist, yet at the same time the poet of the letter, of the written word. His “Effusions,” with all their outpouring of feeling, inhabit that middle ground so deliberately staked out by the young Coleridge—a

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discourse somewhere “between”: between negligence and elegance, between naturalness and polish, between the most finished and, alas for Coleridge, the mostly unfinished periods. II The notion that Coleridge’s “Effusions” lie partway “between Poetry and Oratory” is corroborated by his 1796 preface to Poems on Various Subjects, in which he addresses the problems raised by a poetic discourse that is both public and private—that is, personal and familiar in its content, but public in its literally being published. Coleridge fears being “condemned for [the] querulous egotism” (CPW 2: 1135) of a genre that, in an uncanny way, brings forth into the open those things which properly should have remained hidden. He writes: The communicativeness of our nature leads us to describe our own sorrows; in the endeavor to describe them intellectual activity is exerted; and by a benevolent law of our nature from intellectual activity a pleasure results which is gradually associated and mingles as a corrective with the painful subject of the description. True! it may be answered, but how are the public interested in your sorrows or your description? We are for ever attributing a personal unity to imaginary aggregates. What is the public but a term for a number of scattered individuals of whom as many will be interested in these sorrows as have experienced the same or similar? (CPW 2: 1136)

By focusing on the “communicativeness”—that is, the expressiveness—of human nature and the poetic spirit, Coleridge affirms the possibility of a “correspondence” between poet and reader, between the person describing. the sorrow and the person reading about it. This one-on-one correspondence is undoubtedly what motivates Coleridge’s fracturing of an alleged monolithic “public” (unity in multeity) into “scattered individuals” (multeity in unity). Even Coleridge’s phrasing suggests a grammar of deconstruction in the opposition between, on the one hand, “imaginary aggregates” and, on the other, “scattered individuals” defined by difference rather than by “personal unity”: in a simple shift from plural to singular number, “How are the public” becomes “What is the public.” Coleridge makes a similar point in chapter 3 of the Biographia Literaria, where he traces the rise of the despotic reading audience from “ ‘learned readers’ ” to “ ‘the candid reader’ ” to “the town” and finally to “the multitudinous public, shaped into personal unity by the magic of abstraction” (1: 59). In this context, no poet can say “I refuse to effuse in public”; every effusion, no matter how private and

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personal its content, is by definition a public act, an outpouring or outering or uttering of feeling. Here, then, is where the “egotism” of the effusion may be found: in Coleridge’s polemic against contemporary convention we see him arguing for the speaking “I” as a privileged voice: With what anxiety every fashionable author avoids the word I ! —now he transforms himself into a third person,—“the present writer”—now multiplies himself and swells into “we”—and all this is the watchfulness of guilt. Conscious that this said I is perpetually intruding on his mind and that it monopolizes his heart, he is prudishly solicitous that it may not escape from his lips. (CPW 2: 1136)

“Men old and hackneyed in the ways of the world,” Coleridge continues, “are scrupulous avoiders of Egotism” (CPW 2: 1136). But obviously not young poets, publishing their first volume of poems. Again we hear the “defiance” of young Coleridge, taking on “every fashionable author” and staking his own claim against theirs. “Compositions resembling those of the present volume [Poems on Various Subjects],” he writes, somewhat defensively, are not unfrequently condemned for their querulous egotism. But egotism is to be condemned then only when it offends against time and place, as in an History or an Epic Poem. To censure it in a Monody or a Sonnet is almost as absurd as to dislike a circle for being round. Why then write Sonnets or Monodies? Because they give me pleasure when perhaps nothing else could. (CPW 2:1135–6)

Coleridge may be egotistical in his attack on the anti-egotists, but his polemical preface also offers the more traditional grounds of literary decorum and genre as support for his argument. By freeing up the “said I,” that is, the speaking I, Coleridge is able to stake out the rhetorical territory that properly belongs to the effusion. But at the same time he also stakes out the territory of the said ear, that group of “imaginary aggregates” called the public. Arguing for acceptance of a passionate, “egotistical” speaker, Coleridge implies a correspondent listener who is fit to share the “communicativeness” of the poet’s feelings. And because such a correspondence necessarily means a rhetoric of address, the fundamental structure of any speech act, Coleridge’s curious defence of egotism in poetry thus is a displaced strategy

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for securing his audience. What looks like a justification for “I” turns out to be a pretext for “You.” These questions of audience might well be called Horatian, for they are the same difficulties that Horace faced when he began writing his Epistulae. Having published his Sermones, or “talks” on literature and life at least a decade earlier,20 Horace turned to the verse letter, where he explored the convention of a rhetorical structure similar to that of a sermo in its formal use of apostrophe and address. In a similar cross-genre shift, Coleridge included five “Epistles” after his thirty-six “Effusions,” along with a separate epigraph: Good verse most good, and bad verse then seems better Receiv’d from absent friend by way of Letter. For what so sweet can labor’d lays impart As one rude rhyme warm from a friendly heart?

As this motto suggests, there is considerable similarity and generic overlap between an effusion and an epistle. Like Langhorne, Coleridge prefers “one rude rhyme warm from a friendly heart” over “labor’d lays.” The fact that this last line, Coleridge’s own enactment of a “rude rhyme,” is itself deliberately “labor’d” is a fully ironic and relevant issue. Langhorne’s influence presents itself here in Coleridge’s “Epistles,” as much as in his “Effusions,” to the extent that the “careless effusions of the heart” again surpass the “most finished periods.” But Coleridge makes the distinction between “labor’d lays” and “one rude rhyme” specifically in the context of a particular structure of address, or correspondence, “receiv’d from absent friend by way of Letter.” What makes possible the favouring of negligence over polish is the personal aspect of the correspondent speech act. Coleridge seems to say, after Langhorne, “What have you and I to do with accuracy and elegance, who never intend that our letters shall be printed”? In a predictably paradoxical way, however, he publishes verse letters in 1796 written in the “easy and dégagée” style; but no convention of affected modesty can cover up the palpable evidence of labour used to hide labour. Epistles, by definition, assume primarily a direct rhetoric of address, though secondary or oblique addressees may also be aimed at through variations or aversions in style and voice. Similarly, Coleridge’s Horatian effusions depend on rhetorical address. Of the thirty-six poems called “Effusions” in 1796, at least twenty-seven explicitly use either simple direct address or an aversion of address. The table of contents even claims that Effusion viii is addressed “To Kosciusco” when, in fact, the poem is about him, not written to him. Everywhere, even in places where it doesn’t belong, the structure of address is present.

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Consider, for example, “Effusion xxxiv;” entitled “To an Infant.” The opening line immediately establishes the rhetoric of address: “Ah! cease thy tears and sobs, my little Life!” (CPW 1: 91). As I showed in chapter 1, the introductory “Ah!” should not produce the reaction: “Here is an apostrophe to an infant.” The title already tells the reader that this text is directed to the babe; apostrophe plays no role. But curiously, in a manuscript version the poem begins in a different mode: How yon sweet Child my Bosom’s grief beguiles With soul-subduing Eloquence of smiles! Ah lovely Babe! in thee myself I scan— Thou weepest! sure those Tears proclaim thee Man! (ms. e; CPW 1: 91)

Here we do have an aversion, from “yon sweet Child” to “thou.” This text does not begin by speaking to the babe: the initial line obviously distances him as an object of contemplation; the apostrophic turn occurs with the same “Ah” as in the final version. Why should Coleridge remove these opening lines, thus turning an apostrophe into an address? I suggest that it is because of the conceit that he will develop in the poem as a whole, the simple reflexive analogy between the babe and the man: “in thee myself I scan.” In the finished version, Coleridge has the first verse paragraph deal primarily with the child; the analogy that the babe is a man and the man a babe does not come until line 15, and then is elaborated in the second verse paragraph. If the babe is “Man’s breathing Miniature” (15)—compare “my little Life” in line 1—then the converse is true: “A Babe art thou—and such a Thing am I!” (16). The man, however, is not a child vis-à-vis his babe, but vis-à-vis his “Faith.” Hence the motivation in the second paragraph for him to turn to apostrophize it: O thou that rearest with celestial aim The future Seraph in my mortal frame, Thrice holy Faith! whatever thorns I meet As on I totter with unpractis’d feet, Still let me stretch my arms and cling to thee, Meek nurse of souls through their long Infancy! (21–6)

The analogy between the physically immature baby and the spiritually infantile poet is complete in its rhetorical balance within the poem. Coleridge was surely right to cut the first two lines in the manuscript version because they spoil the symmetry between the address to the babe and the aversio invoking “Faith.” By directing the discourse first to his child and then, through that

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build-up of spiritual anguish so frequently found in Coleridge, redirecting it to a “thrice holy” auditor, Coleridge positions himself squarely between two polarized audiences, neither of whom necessarily understands what he is saying. The apostrophe to faith, with its obvious prayer-like qualities, does not end with a benediction for the child, in the way that “Frost at Midnight,” for example, does; rather, it completes the conceit by showing Coleridge in relation to a heavenly father in precisely the same way that the babe is in relation to Coleridge. The apostrophe to faith is effective in turning the poem from infantile subjects to the higher stakes implicit in such matter, and for introducing the note of pathos into Coleridge’s self-characterization, a recurrent trope in his oeuvre. As in forensic oratory, so here: Coleridge seeks confirmation—in this case, spiritual witness—in his passionate turn to faith. Not that his turning is successful, however: throughout his career Coleridge anxiously looks for a saving grace, some healing faith that would redeem him as a miserrimus, most miserable man, yet the reader can never be sure that the turn to a spiritual or supernatural auditor is efficacious. Did you get my message? The disquieting possibility that needs to be considered is that Coleridge’s salvation works precisely to the extent that his rhetorical aversions succeed. Even in Coleridge’s self-composed “Epitaph,” there is a doubleness in that the speaker of the poem is constructed as someone other than Coleridge, since he is referred to in the third person. The opening exclamations—”Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God” (1)—the request to the traveller-reader to “lift one thought in prayer for S.T.C.,” and the final injunction, “Do thou the same,” constitute a dialogue between speaker and audience that is complicated by the unavoidable knowledge that Coleridge has effected a ventriloquistic turn from his own voice to that of a persona. To write one’s own epitaph in the third person is a curious, though not unprecedented, act of removal. It is not exaggeration to say that in Coleridge faith depends on figure, or that an inward and spiritual grace depends on an adequate external and rhetorical expression of it. The paradigm reminds us of the pattern of repeated frustrations in “Lycidas,” in which apostrophe (“Where were ye Nymphs?”) does not always produce the anticipated effect (“Had ye been there—for what could that have done?”). The scheme of failed aversions haunts Coleridge’s poetry to the end. III The section of Poems on Various Subjects designated as “Effusions” has, on the reverse of its separate title page, an epigraph from William Lisle Bowles’s Monody, Written at Matlock, October 1791. The epigraph reads: Content, as random Fancies might inspire If his weak harp at times or lonely lyre

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He struck with desultory hand, and drew Some soften’d tones to Nature not untrue.

These lines are, especially in the context of “Effusion xxxv” (“The Eolian Harp”), an appropriate epigraph in imagery and sentiment. They are also a fitting introduction to “Effusion i” (an earlier version of which appeared in the Morning Chronicle of 26 December 1794), which begins, “My heart has thank’d thee, bowles! for those soft strains / Whose sadness soothes me.” The “soft strains” can be read as referring to Bowles’s poetry generally—which had a limited, but formative effect on the young poet Coleridge (see chapter 4 below)—and also as echoing specifically the “soften’d tones” of the motto. But oddly, the verses in the epigraph as given by Coleridge are not the actual words that Bowles wrote. By contrast, the original lines in Bowles’s Monody read: Content, as random fancies might inspire, If his weak reed, at times, or lonely lyre He touch’d with desultory hand, and drew Some soften’d tones, to nature not untrue.21

Coleridge’s changing of Bowles’s “reed” to “harp,” and his “touch’d” to “struck,” is curious, all the more for the fact that no commentator has noted Coleridge’s arbitrary revisions.22 It may be that Coleridge was simply quoting from memory, yet, as with any parapraxis, a deeper, unconscious motivation is likely responsible for this overdetermination of harp and lyre. The “weak reed” of Bowles becomes the “weak harp” of Coleridge, in an ironic misprision that proves Coleridge to be anything but a weak reader, rather a strong misreader of texts. The corresponding change from “touch’d” to “struck” follows a certain logic, musically speaking: one can imagine what touching a reed means—doing the fingering, or playing the oaten stops—but one is hard pressed to conceive what striking a reed would do. The revisions remind one of the difference between Milton’s “Crop your young” and his later “Shatter your leaves” at the beginning of “Lycidas”:23 it is again the difference between a strong and a weak “read.” The context of the passage in Bowles is part of a dramatic surmise—what “some lov’d companion” visiting the grave of a bard “might say.” Conventionally, the two classical metonymies of the bard are the reed and the lyre, as in “Lycidas,”24 yet here Coleridge replaces the wind instrument with a stringed instrument which is “struck” by either human hand or natural breeze. Following this epitaphic moment, Bowles’s Monody, like Milton’s “monody,” continues with an apostrophe, in Bowles’s case to the river Derwent.

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This is not the sole instance of Coleridge’s unauthorized and unacknowledged tampering with other people’s words. As Paul M. Zall has shown in detail, Coleridge arbitrarily edited, without acknowledgment, sonnets by other poets compiled in his 1796 Sonnets from Various Authors. What interests me here is not the ethics of such editorial revisions but rather their rhetorical and psychological motivation. What might Coleridge have been thinking when he altered Bowles? Was Milton’s “Lycidas” as present intertextually as I have been suggesting? Inasmuch as an effusion is an expression of passion, could Coleridge have been recalling Samuel Johnson’s judgment that “Lycidas” is “not to be considered as the effusion of real passion”? “Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief,” Johnson said, and proceeded to dismiss pastoral poetry as “easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting” (Patrides 60–1). The overdetermination of harp and lyre in Coleridge’s epigraph involves the intersection of both Milton and music, an overdetermined crossing in itself. A close-up of a few passages will demonstrate what is at stake in Coleridge’s intertextuality, and how it relates to a concern with rhetoric and genre. The epigraph anticipates the themes and images of effusiveness. Coleridge has harps on the brain. In the epigraph the harp and lyre are actively struck by human hands—albeit weakly and desultorily, as part of Coleridge’s signature of conventional modesty—but by the time we reach “Effusion xxxv,” almost the end of the “Effusions” as a group, the harp has become not just a literal instrument acted on by human fingers or by a natural wind but a figural harp played on by an “intellectual breeze” (“Eolian Harp” 47). Even at the beginning, in “Effusion i,” Coleridge introduces certain aeolian overtones that resonate throughout the texts as a whole. In the first poem, addressed to Bowles, Coleridge thanks him for the soothing power of his “soft strains” that have caused “a strange mysterious pleasure” to “brood / Over the wavy and tumultuous mind, / As the great spirit erst with plastic sweep / Mov’d on the darkness of the unform’d deep” (CPW 1: 85). Compare these lines to the well-known climax of “Effusion xxxv”: And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversly fram’d, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps, Plastic and vast, one intellectual Breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all?

The trope of a harp played by a divine, creative maestro unites the two passages, along with specific echoes of “sweeps,” “plastic,” and other verbal repetitions—for example, in “Effusion i,” Coleridge is a “thought-bewilder’d man”; in “Effusion xxxv,” he is “Wilder’d and dark.” Whether the spirit of

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creation sweeps across the waters, as in the sonnet to Bowles, or moves over “all of animated nature,” it is sufficiently clear that Coleridge has in mind an aeolian figure whose rhetorical provenance includes both Genesis and Paradise Lost. Thus the image of the harp recurs throughout the “Effusions” in both muted and explicit ways: in “Effusion xxiii” (“To the Nightingale”), Coleridge has to tell the bird that its voice, “Tho’ sweeter far than the delicious airs / That vibrate from a white-arm’d Lady’s harp,” is “not so sweet as is the voice of her, / My Sara.” More subtly, even a trope such as “thrills”—Sara “thrills me with the Husband’s promis’d name” (“Effusion xxiii”)—contains overtones of a vibrating string or heart-string. When Coleridge changed the title of “Effusion xxxv” to “The Eolian Harp” in 1797, he was only raising to the level of explicit theme what had been an underlying trope of the effusions as a whole. But he also introduced new resonances. Through its revised title, “The Eolian Harp” suggests that it might be read, on some level at least, as a poem about music, in the way that Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” in its original publication in Annals of the Fine Arts in 1819, implies that it too might be read as a poem about the art of music. But such has not been the case with Coleridge’s text. Commentary has generally focused on the figural aspects of the poem’s title, and not on its literal concerns, or on the intertextuality of its musical conceit.25 Yet there is justification for reading Coleridge’s “Eolian Harp” as a poem about music. The topos of the harp, of course, is both ancient and modern, whether it is hung up on the willows as a political gesture, a refusal to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land, or whether it is connected with some more familiar lay, as in Hector MacNeill’s The Harp (1789), in which the hero’s lament is based on the burden “I’ll never burn my harp for a woman!” (1: 7–25). Coleridge does not quite burn his harp for Sara, though more than one reader has noted how “The Eolian Harp” dissolves in a “failure of imaginative nerve” (Mileur 40) that can be read as a trope for the same thing.26 The Bowles motto sounds the keynote for the lyrical effusions to follow, and many of the themes running through the poems culminate in “The Eolian Harp,” the penultimate effusion of the group, and also Coleridge’s favourite.27 In tracing connections between rhetoric and genre, in this case between harps and effusions, I wish to consider a passage immediately following the poet’s well-known description of the music of the lute itself—how its sweet moans sound “like some coy maid half yielding to her Lover” (15): And that simplest Lute Plac’d length-ways in the clasping casement, hark! How by the desultory breeze caress’d, Like some coy Maid half-yielding to her Lover,

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It pours such sweet upbraiding, as must needs Tempt to repeat the wrong!

Here again we have a “desultory” sweeping of the strings, as in the Bowles epigraph, but with the difference that the touching has turned to sexual caressing. The “sweet upbraiding,” or protestation of the “coy Maid,” which seems to elicit the wrong response in the lover, is in effect a reprise of similar tempting and attempted wrongs in “Effusion xxviii” (“The Kiss”): In tender accents, faint and low, Well-pleas’d I hear the whisper’d “No!” The whisper’d “No”—how little meant! Sweet Falsehood that endears Consent! For on those lovely lips the while Dawns the soft relenting smile, And tempts with feign’d dissuasion coy The gentle violence of Joy.

In this effusion, apparently, no does not mean no. Here is a new way to characterize the conversation poem: it belongs to the genre of “he said, she said.” This text, one of Coleridge’s more sexually explicit, shares several details with the better-known “Eolian Harp,” including the coyness of the woman, the tempting of the male, and the impending wrong or “violence.” “The Kiss” is Coleridge’s equivalent of Donne’s “The Flea,” in that both operate on a simple metaphysical or Romantic conceit designed to convince a woman to consent sexually. Coleridge’s poem is rhetoric with a purpose. He uses erotesis, or the rhetorical question, for erotic ends: “Ah why refuse the blameless bliss? / Can danger lurk within a kiss?” From the poet’s point of view, of course, the answer is implied, even as the woman’s later answer is denied: “The whisper’d ‘No’—how little meant!” By comparison, the “sweet upbraiding” in “The Eolian Harp,” oxymoronic in its rhetorical form, tempts the interpreter to a double entendre, acknowledging “wrong” but disregarding it in search of more sweetness and “Joy.” This disregard, or wilful misprision—how little meant!—has clear associations with an allegory of reading within the text: Coleridge inserts scenes of interpretation or misinterpretation into his poetry, as if to underscore his own anxiety over a “dream of communication” and to foreground reading and its differences. 28 Coleridge is, to some extent, following certain pre-Romantic guides. Thomson’s Castle of Indolence, with its descriptions of the aeolian harp (1.40) of the wizard Indolence, and the “British harp” (2.46) of the Knight’s Bard, dramatizes the competition between different ethical powers of music—that

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which puts to sleep, and that which awakens. Coleridge’s allegedly “indolent and passive brain” in “The Eolian Harp” (41) is active at least in its echoes of Thomson. The symbolic power of music to draw or entrance its listeners has its provenance in the myth of Orpheus, a text which subtly informs Coleridge’s poem. But if we want a more immediate eighteenth-century intertext linking a harp and an erotic undersong, we need look no further than William Collins’s “The Passions: An Ode for Music,” in which the poet’s “flying Fingers kiss’d the Strings” (89). Now while the initial music of Coleridge’s harp is distinctly erotic, the speaker goes on to describe the changing sounds emitted by the wind-caressed lute: And now, its strings Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes Over delicious surges sink and rise . . . (17–19)

There is much here, and in the succeeding descriptive passage, that deserves notice, but I want to spotlight only two things: the verbal phrase “boldlier swept,” and the adjective “sequacious.” “Boldlier swept” calls attention to itself as a somewhat unusual grammatical construction: the use of the comparative adverb “boldlier” instead of the phrase “more boldly” was not common in Coleridge’s day.29 The comparative “boldlier” throws into relief the contrast between the soft or “coy” music of the harp produced by a “desultory breeze” and the bolder music produced by a wind that more loudly sweeps the strings. More loudly? More boldly, the poet says. Yet to sweep a stringed instrument more boldly, that is, more forcefully—a Pete Townsend windmill, not a pizzicato—is also to sweep it more loudly, thus transforming the musical coy excuse of the maid into something different—a “witchery of sound” (20). The first intertext of this passage I have already insinuated into my reading so far by my quoting words and phrases from a poem troped by Coleridge here in “The Eolian Harp.” That poem, I suggest, is “Lycidas,” and the relevant passage occurs, coincidentally, at the precisely corresponding point in Milton’s poem. The second verse paragraph of “Lycidas” opens:   Begin, then, Sisters of the sacred well, That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring, Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string. Hence with denial vain, and coy excuse . . . (15–18)

The similarities in diction and phrasing between these lines and those from “The Eolian Harp” are unmistakable. Milton’s command to the muses to

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“begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string” of the poetic harp becomes a fait accompli in Coleridge: “its strings / Boldlier swept,” Coleridge’s lute yields up its music. And in both poems this yielding up by a harp that is more loudly or more boldly played transforms a coyness already asserted in the texts: Milton’s “coy excuse,” or affected modesty, for sweeping the harp so timidly, and Coleridge’s “coy maid,” who is usually read as a trope for the timidly played lute itself. Both Milton and Coleridge ask a female to yield, to give it up. Whether “it” is chaste inspiration, as in Milton’s invocation of the muses (but recall his lingering desire “to sport with Amaryllis in the shade, / Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair”), or whether “it” means mischief in Coleridge’s projected honeymoon vision, the analogous relation between poems remains clear. At the same time, however, we hear the familiar conceit, no less Miltonic than it is Romantic, that the harp or lute is a trope for the poet himself. Camille Paglia is right to suggest that readers have been mistaken in identifying the harp solely with Sara. Sara, she argues, “is imaginatively peripheral. Coleridge addresses her only to remind himself who or what he should be” (319). What about the word “sequacious”? K.M. Wheeler writes that “the form as adjective is rarely met with and acts to distance the semantic content and to add a strangeness in the midst of familiarity” (74); Jill Rubenstein argues that “sequacious” is “a vaguely pejorative term suggesting servility and lack of individuality” (55). It is by no means a frequent word in Coleridge’s poetry, but it is a significant one—significant enough that Thomas De Quincey, writing in 1851, felt obliged to acknowledge Coleridge’s use of it. In one of his essays on Pope, De Quincey draws a comparison to Dryden. “Dryden had within him,” De Quincey writes, “a principle of continuity which was not satisfied without lingering upon his own thoughts, brooding over them and oftentimes pursuing them through their unlinkings with the sequaciousness (pardon a Coleridgian word) that belongs to some process of creative nature, such as the unfolding of a flower” (Collected Writings 11: 119). “Sequaciousness” reminded De Quincey of Coleridge, undoubtedly of this very passage from “The Eolian Harp,” in which “the long sequacious notes / Over delicious surges sink and rise,” their musical pitch climbing and falling like waves. The word “sequacious” in this context means simply that the notes follow one another in a regular or wavelike pattern; “sequel” and “sequence” are two cognate words. Though the adjective “sequacious,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was common in the seventeenth century, especially in scientific discourse (and therefore in a context that Coleridge possibly would have known), there is one instance of its use in a musical context that is significant for us. It is Dryden’s 1687 “Song for St Cecilia’s Day,” in which Dryden writes:

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Orpheus could lead the savage race; And trees unrooted left their place, Sequacious of the lyre . . . (Dryden 3: 48–50)

Here, the power of Orpheus’s music causes animals, not to mention rocks and stones and trees, to follow the poet. Nature becomes sequacious of art. With Coleridge, the musical notes themselves are sequacious, and what they follow is one another in continuous melody. Is it not highly significant that De Quincey, speaking of Dryden, should think of and acknowledge Coleridge on the word “sequaciousness”? “Sequacious,” it is fair to say, is Dryden’s word; yet Coleridge’s appropriation of it is so complete as to screen out in De Quincey’s memory (and what a memory!) the original intertext. Why should Milton and Dryden be compressed in one line of Coleridge’s like this? What is the connection between Milton’s strings being “boldlier swept” and Dryden’s music being sequacious of itself? How do we read this rhetorical, intertextual confluence? One association has already been suggested: Orpheus, the dead poet, whose life is associated with both Lycidas, the drowned poet, and St Cecilia, the martyred musician. Orpheus figures prominently in both Milton’s poem and Dryden’s, emblematizing the archetypal fate of aspiring poets, and he uncannily resurfaces here. As the Orphic music of Coleridge’s harp is drowned out by Sara, the poet becomes identified with Orpheus himself, and imports the fatal ironies of his myth into the text. We know that Coleridge would eventually make explicit the Orphic intertext that lurks here, for in his later poem “To William Wordsworth” he characterizes The Prelude as An Orphic song indeed, A song divine of high and passionate thoughts To their own music chaunted! (CPW 1: 406)

and he casts himself, as Reeve Parker has argued (221–40), in the role of the drowned poet. “The Eolian Harp” has been read as Coleridge’s first real poem as a Romantic poet, but a poem across whose imaginative centre a shadow falls. Harold Bloom has said that the poem “collapses in a self-surrender that augurs badly for the Imagination. . . . The Imagination wishes to be indulged, and Coleridge feared the moral consequences of such indulgence” (Visionary Company 202). The rhetoric of “The Eolian Harp” betrays Coleridge’s anxieties about his own death as a poet, and in his intertextual confirmation of such anxiety he repeats the thematic collapse by revealing the end already implicit in his beginning.

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IV Between poetry and oratory stands rhetoric. I have attempted to show that Coleridge’s effusions take up residence in a middle ground criss-crossed by other literary practices. While they arguably have an identifiable character, formed in part by a Horatian tradition, Coleridge defines his effusions less by their positive identity than by their self-conscious difference from the other genres and figures (sermo, epistle, address, aversion, conversation) that impinge on and cohabit their poetic space. Coleridge’s assertiveness in naming thirty-six of the poems in his first volume as “Effusions,” and his defence of his practice in the preface, speak not only to his concern with genre and audience, but also to his ambition to clear literary space for himself by setting up shop at a main intersection. As a distinct genre, however, the effusion was relatively short-lived, becoming more common as a “lady’s” genre, suitable for the expression of delicate feelings and sensibilities, though also occasionally lending itself to more “heroic” sentiments by military men. 30 Effusions of the heart, the poets discovered, can be both literal and figurative, erotic and patriotic, tender and polemical. The examples of Langhorne and Churchill gave Coleridge a sense of one trajectory within the tradition, and also his difference from it. Later, indeed, there would be a few noteworthy instances of the genre, such as Wordsworth’s 1835 “Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg,” in which Coleridge is remembered by name in a catalogue of dead poets. But no one approaches the theoretical or practical accomplishment of Coleridge in a genre so carefully positioned between poetry and nonpoetry. The very “betweenness” of Coleridge’s effusions discloses an intrinsic “variousness” which, in style, emotion, and range of public and private occasion, is implicit in Coleridge’s title of 1796. Poems on Various Subjects arises “in defiance” of set convention, with a rhetorical flourish “As wild and various as the random gales / That swell and flutter on this subject lute!” (“Eolian” 42–3).

No t e s 1. Poems on Various Subjects, by S.T. Coleridge, Late of Jesus College, Cambridge. London: Printed for G.G. and J. Robinsons, and J. Cottle, Bookseller, Bristol. 1796. Coleridge notes in his preface that “The Effusions signed C.L. [numbers 7, 11, 12, and 13] were written by Mr. Charles Lamb, of the India House. . . . For the rough sketch of Effusion xvi, I am indebted to Mr. Favell. And the first half of Effusion xv was written by the Author of ‘Joan of Arc,’ an Epic Poem” (CPW 2: 1137). As J.R. de J. Jackson’s entries in Annals of English Verse show, “Poems on Various Subjects” was a popular title used by numerous authors during the Romantic period, including Henry James Pye, John Thelwall (who also wrote “effusions”), Thomas Warton, and others.

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2. Coleridge’s sonnet “To the Autumnal Moon,” for example, was composed in 1788 but not published until 1796 (CPW 1: 5); see my discussion in chapter 4. The best existing discussion of the effusion is by Magnuson. See also Abrams, Correspondent Breeze 160–5 for some brief comments. The phrase “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is from Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Prose 1: 149). 3. In the table of contents the effusions are numbered using Arabic numerals, while the individual poems are numbered using Roman numerals. The additional titles given to individual poems often differ from the listing in the table of contents. For more bibliographic details, see CPW 2: 1135–8. 4. See also Carl H. Ketcham’s comment on Wordsworth’s “Effusion, in the Pleasure-ground on the Banks of the Bran, near Dunkeld”: “[T]he poem is called an ‘effusion,’ which implies (if it is not just a literary convention) an immediate, spontaneous overflow of composition” (526). Jack Stillinger also briefly considers the implication of the term “effusion,” seeing it as conveying “an air of relative frivolousness” (37). Albert S. Gérard discusses Coleridge’s term “effusion” in relation to “romantic egotism” (24), which I consider below. 5. See Paul M. Zall. David Erdman studies Coleridge’s sonnets and effusions, but dismisses the latter term: “Coleridge had frequently poured out his soul in Odes and Effusions (the latter only tardily called Sonnets, a term perhaps more critically deprecatory than we realize). . . . [In 1797] he now called them ‘Sonnets’ instead of ‘Effusions.’ But I suspect that to his ear the new term was more, not less, belittling; he was turning less against effusions of pathos than against ‘puny pathos’ ” (570). For a concise discussion of Coleridge’s early efforts in the sonnet, following Charlotte Smith and Bowles, see Curran 29–39. 6. These reviews are excerpted in J.R. de J. Jackson, ed., Coleridge: The Critical Heritage 32–8. 7. The two effusions were “The Rose” and “Kisses.” See CPW 1: 45–6. Langhorne’s edition of The Poetical Works of Mr William Collins. With Memoirs of the Author; and Observations on his Genius and Writings was published in 1765, and again in 1771, 1776, and 1781. 8. Volume 1 contains forty letters; volume 2 has twenty-two, plus an index. The second edition of 1766 contains sixty-five letters in total. 9. The second paragraph of the letter is worth quoting as a whole for the way it turns stylistic questions into other topics of conversation not unrelated to the themes of the first paragraph: Come then, my friend, let us unbend a little, and talk in our old strain—What have you been doing this season? are your espaliers pruned? are your tulips set? are your annuals classed? or have you neglected the occupation of Adam for that of Nimrod? If you have, what diversion has the field afforded you? have you signalized yourself once more at the bridge of H   ? or does wisdom come with age, according to the old Saxon song; and has the goddess of fear preserved you for Mrs.    and me? I assure you I have entertained a very poor opinion of the diversion of hunting in England, since I read the history of Poland. Had you and Tom    , once been at a public hunt in that kingdom, the pityful foxes and hares of your own country would be below your notice. It has always been said that hunting is the image of war. In Poland it is compleatly so. The Polish kings, like Eastern monarchs, hunt with an army. A circular space

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is marked out in a forest which they encompass with nets, except one opening that answers to the plain. At a considerable distance a line of dogs, held in leashes, form a crescent; behind which the king, the huntsmen, and the spectators are drawn up in another line. The signal being given, the dogs are let loose into the forest, and drive before them whatever they find. In a short time come out stags, elks, wild bulls, lynxes, boars and bears; and every dog attackes the beast that is its proper prey. This mixed multitude of men, horses, and wild beasts, the noise of horns and the variety of combats is something extremely magnificent. But perhaps I have said too much. This, I know, will furnish you with a topic of conversation for a week, and should it end in a journey to Warsaw, I must never more see the face of Mrs.    (1: 163–6) 10. Compare Lamb’s advice to Coleridge in a letter written 8 November 1796: “Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge, or rather, I should say, banish elaborateness; for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart, and carries into daylight its own modest buds and genuine, sweet, and clear flowers of expression” (Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb 1: 60–1). 11. See, e.g., The Aeneid, trans. Mandelbaum, 5.818, 6.1, 7.600, 11.623, and 11.827. 12. The relevant part of the passage that Coleridge copied reads: latè tam noscor, et audax Fama praeit Meritum, laxisque effertur habenis. Affectus animi varios, Bellumque sequacis Perlegis Invidiae: curasque revolvis inanes, Quas humilis tenero Stylus olim effudit in aevo. See Petrarch 396, and Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 3, item 4178. 13. Coleridge also uses the phrase “sermoni propriora” in Biographia Literaria 1: 26. Engell and Bate translate the phrase, which comes from Horace’s Sermones (or Satires) 1.4.42, as “more suitable to prose / conversation,” but they correctly note that Horace’s phrase is actually “sermoni propiora,” or “nearer to” conversation (BL 1: 26n2). See Horace, Satires 75. In a letter to William Sotheby, Coleridge himself refers to his tongue-in-cheek translation of the correct Horatian phrase: “ ‘Sermons propiora’ which I once translated—‘Properer for a Sermon’ ” (CL 2: 864). Engell and Bate note that Coleridge is reported to have said that Lamb translated Horace’s phrase in the same way (Table Talk 25 July 1832), but the reference in the letter to Sotheby (10 September 1802) indicates that Coleridge’s translation may be of an earlier date. 14. C.E. Bennett writes that “Horace’s first published work was Book 1 of the Satires. . . . Though conventionally called ‘Satires,’ and alluded to by Horace himself as satirae, these were entitled by him Sermones, as being talks, so to speak, couched in the familiar language of everyday life” (Horace, Odes and Epodes ix–x). The overdetermined characterization of poetry as “talks, so to speak, couched in the familiar language of everyday life” is particularly apt for Coleridge’s effusions. Richard Harter Fogle once characterized Coleridge’s conversation poems as “comparable to the more formal eighteenth-century poem of meditation . . . on the one hand, but modified on the other by the graceful informality of Horace’s Epistles and Satires” (106).

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15. It is possible to hear an echo of Horace not only in the Latin tag but also in the phrase “middle thing,” which, while describing a literary style, also recalls Horace’s discussion of epic form—the convention of plunging into middle things (in medias res). Coleridge returns to the Horatian motto in his discussion of his early poetry in BL 1: 26. Horace cautioned that “the word once uncaged never comes home.” Niall Rudd notes that Horace again uses the metaphor of words being irrev­ ocably uttered in Epistles 1.18.71 and 1.20.6; in each case, he suggests, Horace’s vehicle appears to be a bird being released. See Horace, Epistles 213–14. Discussing Horace’s Epistles, Edward P. Morris writes: “The custom of dedicating a poem to an individual by a direct address, as Horace inscribes his first satire to Maecenas, is an approach to the epistolary form; no distinct line can be seen between the manner in which Lucretius addresses Memmius at intervals in the de Rerum Natura and the occasional address to the Pisones in the Ars Poetica” (Horace, Satires 9). 16. The Miltonic context is not irrelevant, as evidenced by Coleridge’s letter to his brother George in 1798, in which he says that he wishes, “in poetry, to elevate the imagination and set the affections in right tune by the beauty of the inanimate impregnated as with a living soul by the presence of life” (CL 1: 397). The phrase “set the affections in right tune” comes verbatim from a passage in Milton’s Reason of Church Government, where Milton discusses his conception of the function of poetry and rhetoric (669). 17. Considering the question of Coleridge’s “voices” in a chronological perspective, Max F. Schulz has argued that “if the 1790’s is the decade when Coleridge is most active in claiming through tags that his poems are spontaneous effusions, the second half of the 1820’s is the period when he is most intent on trying to write poems which convince us of their extemporaneity by letting us watch them come into being” (158). 18. See Anderson et al., especially their conclusion to The Familiar Letter in the Eighteenth Century (269–82), in which, curiously, no mention is made of Langhorne’s Effusions. In this volume, Cecil Price, in his essay “ ‘The Art of Pleasing’: The Letters of Chesterfield,” cites John Tavernier’s The Newest and Most Compleat Polite Familiar Letter Writer, 4th ed. (Berwick, 1768): “Letter writing is but a sort of literary conversation, and that you are to write to the person absent, in the manner you would speak to him, if present” (288n2). 19. In “Distant Correspondents” Lamb humorously outlines his idea of the conventions of letter-writing: “Epistolary matter usually compriseth three topics: news, sentiment, and puns” (Selected Prose 137). H.J. Jackson, in her edition of Coleridge’s Selected Letters, suggests a different trinity of epistolary conventions: spontaneity, informality, and intimacy (viii–ix). What Jackson says of Coleridge’s letters applies almost equally to his early effusions. 20. Horace published the first book of Sermones in 35 bc, and his Epistulae (or the first book of what we call his Epistles) in 20 bc. See Horace, Complete Works 12, 258. 21. It is not a case of Coleridge’s using a different version; Bowles did not at any point revise the lines. The seventh edition of Bowles’s Sonnets and Other Poems, for example, which was printed in 1800 (after Coleridge’s Poems on Various Subjects had appeared), still contains these exact lines in the Monody. 22. Magnuson (5) refers only to Coleridge’s version of Bowles, and notes a thematic connection between Bowles’s lyre and Coleridge’s aeolian harp. Stillinger

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likewise mentions the Bowles epigraph, without noting Coleridge’s rewriting of the original (36). 23. “Crop your young” is an early version of the fifth line of “Lycidas,” which Balachandra Rajan has described as a crucial example of how Milton “yielded the poem to the power of its suddenness” (268). 24. Consider, e.g., the phrases “sweep the string” (17), “Oaten Flute” (33), “vocal reeds” (86), “my Oat” (88), “scrannel Pipes” (124), and “the tender stops of various Quills” (188). 25 One exception is K.M. Wheeler, who considers the musical aspects of the poem (73–8) and notes some related discussions (182n22). 26. See Richard Harter Fogle 109, and Harold Bloom, Visionary Company 202. Richard E. Matlak says that the poem “verges on humiliation of the poet as seer” (106). 27. See Coleridge’s letter to John Thelwall in December 1796 (CL 1: 295), in which he calls “The Eolian Harp” “my favorite of my poems.” 28. I take the phrase “dream of communication” from Geoffrey Hartman’s essay on I.A. Richards (Fate 20–40). 29. Logan’s concordance notes only one other instance of “boldlier,” in Coleridge’s “Destiny of Nations”: “Others boldlier think . . .” (39). 30. I have come across approximately one hundred late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works entitled “effusions.” See, e.g., [Anon.], The Effusions of Love (London: Lister, [1783?]); [English lady of rank], Effusions of the heart, or, Miscellaneous Poems (Dublin: M. Graisberry, [1785?]); [Anon.], Flights of Fancy, or Poetical Effusions (London: J. Long, 1791); William Gilbert, The hurricane . . . To which is subjoined, A solitary effusion in a summer’s evening (Bristol: R. Edwards, 1796); Mary R. Stockdale, The Effusions of the Heart: Poems (London: J. Stockdale, 1798); [Anon.], Effusions of Fancy (London: Richardson, 1798); John Thelwall, Poems chiefly written in retirement . . . Effusions of relative and social feeling (Hereford: W.H. Parker, 1801); Isabella Lickbarrow, Poetical Effusions (Kendal: M. Branthwaite, 1814); Margaret Burton, Poetical Effusions (London: Butterworth, 1816); Almira Selden, Effusions of the Heart, contained in a number of original poetical pieces, on various subjects (Bennington, Vermont: Printed by Darius Clark, 1820); and Ethelind M. Sawtell, The Mourner’s Tribute, or, Effusions of Melancholy Hours (Montreal: Armour and Ramsey, 1840). See J.R. de J. Jackson, Annals of English Verse 1770–1835 and Romantic Poetry by Women: A Bibliography, 1770–1835 for relevant entries. See also the following entries in The British Library General Catalogue of Printed Books to 1975, vol. 92 (London: K.G. Saur, 1981): Poetical Effusions. By a Young Lady, author of “The Willow Branch” (Bath, 1824); Ephemeral Effusions. By D.R.M. [i.e., Dorothy Rose Miles?] (1861); [S.W.H. Ireland], Effusions of Love from Chatelar to Mary, Queen of Scotland (London: C. Chapple, 1805); [Bernard Burton], Metrical Effusions, or verses on various occasions (Woodbridge, 1812); Loyal Effusions. A selection of odes, songs . . . by an old naval officer; as incitements to perseverance in heroism (London, 1819); and Poetical Effusions from Fairy Camp. [By Major Snell.] (Tewkesbury, 1802). Gender, as I have suggested in the case of “The Kiss” and “The Eolian Harp,” is not irrelevant to the question of how to read Coleridge’s effusions, though we might well expect that a discursive field so interpenetrated by different traditions would be open to appropriation by various personae and voices.

S eam u s P err y

Coda: The Incomprehensible Mariner

As a young man I snatched at any chance to hear wisdom drop from Mr T. S. Eliot, and he once remarked that the test of a true poet is that he writes about experiences before they have happened to him. —William Empson1

I have left ‘The Ancient Mariner’ for a last word, not because I think it in any way peripheral, but because so many Coleridgean elements meet in the poem that it seemed misleading to reserve it for any one chapter. Haven rightly calls it ‘the central document in Coleridge’ (Haven, 18): Coleridge returned to it compulsively, more so than to any other work, which implies a deep and nagging relevance; and any interpretation of his thought must try and decide what its implications are for the poem. Leslie Stephen once said, lightly but profoundly, that ‘The germ of all Coleridge’s utterances may be found—by a little ingenuity—in the “Ancient Mariner”’:2 on the voyage to Malta, Coleridge himself came to think of the poem as a prophetic selfportrait; and since I have been urging upon the reader the doubled theme of unity-and-division as fundamental, I should now try and persuade him that that predicament lurks at the heart of the great poem too. Of course, the idiom is utterly different from the inspired waywardness of the notebooks and the abstraction of the later metaphysical prose, but I think the kinds of

From Coleridge and the Uses of Division, pp. 281–91. © 1999 by Seamus Perry.

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philosophical drama I have been describing, a mind torn between the end of unity and the experience of differentness, can be traced backwards to this early and surprising masterpiece—and so too can the informing indecision of Coleridgean division, hesitating between the relative virtues (and demerits) of oneness and multiplicity. It is a work poised between a blessed vision of unity and the catastrophe of chaos—but also, to experience the same division but the other way up, between a cribbed nightmare of centripetal monomania and a redemptive resort to the free existence of other things. I suppose the standard reading to be some kind of One Life allegory, which very obviously puts foremost the virtue of unity—indeed its divinity. The Mariner, in killing the albatross, commits ‘a crime against the one Life . . . possible only to a man who had not seen the unity of all life in the world’ (Beer, 209); and he is punished for it: a ‘sordid solitary thing’, ignorant of ‘[t] he moral world’s cohesion’, he experiences a nightmarish ‘Anarchy of Spirits’, vividly realising the theological hypotheses that Coleridge had speculated about in ‘Religious Musings’ (149, 145, 146; PW, I:114). It is the most scarifying picture Coleridge ever drew of the unhappy spirit craving atonement. In the depths of his darkness, the Mariner is appalled by the horrific plenitude of his rotting universe: ‘And a million, million slimy things / Lived on; and so did I’ (238–9, app. crit.). But this suffering proves salutary, a via negativa leading the Mariner to bless those same snakes, creatures even more off-putting than Charles’s creeking rook, so a particularly testing case; but the Mariner passes the test, finally recognising the interdependent fraternity of all creation. The poem, that is, is about the redemption of other things—their transformation, indeed, from ‘slimy things’ to ‘happy living things’. Many distinguished critics interpret the poem along these lines: Abrams, say, who sees the Mariner learning a ‘lesson of community’ (Abrams, NS, 274); or Peter Kitson, who sees the Mariner led ‘to reintegrate himself with the One Life’.3 (Another version of this reading sees the poem as an eco-parable.) Such readings make a strongly intuitive sense, which I hardly dispute; certainly, something very like that was the gist of the poem which Wordsworth suggested in the first place: ‘some crime was to be committed which would bring upon the Old Navigator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, as a consequence of that crime and his own wanderings’ (Fenwick, 2). But the poem Coleridge wrote obscures so consequentially clear a logic of retribution: when you come to puzzle things through, it is surprisingly hard to make several of the more outstanding details fit. Some of the problems are carried over from the theology, and concern the mysteries of individuality and optimism: how is it possible for the Mariner to commit an evil act, one worthy of avenging, if this is a universe of benevolent determinism? The theological context of the One Life confuses

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any ambitions to treat sin, requital, and repentance: ‘Guilt is out of the Question’, as we have heard him tell Thelwall (Letters, I:213). Instead, individual acts participate without exception in ‘the Divine Providence that regulates into one vast harmony all the events of time, however calamitous some of them may appear to mortals’ (‘Argument’ to ‘Ode to the Departing Year’; PW, I:160): the poem can be felt warily revolving about the puzzle of evil. The theology dissolves the autonomous agency of the individual into a greater whole, and, as though in keeping with that principle, Coleridge contrives to make the Mariner seem somehow non-volitional while killing the albatross, as he is at the second of the poem’s two apparent turning-points, the blessing of the snakes.4 Wordsworth’s extraordinary note to the poem in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads complained that the Mariner did not act but was ‘continually acted upon’, which is hardly fair (see Empson, 38); but it does pin-point the strange inactivity marking the cruces of the allegory: the bird is shot before we know it, with any description of intent or motive or decision quite elided; and the snakes are blessed ‘unaware’, the action recognised for what it was only in retrospect (81–2, 285). (You wonder if the note isn’t drawn from Coleridge’s own self-deploring talk.) Even if the possibility of personal guilt were somehow granted, as some sort of poetic fiction, other problems remain: pre-eminently, the wrong people are punished. Stephen’s dry summary remains unanswerable: ‘the moral, which would apparently be that people who sympathise with a man who shoots an albatross will die in prolonged torture of thirst, is open to obvious objections’.5 In several other crucial regards, the attempt to find in the poem a redemptive allegory finds itself oddly frustrated. After the ‘crime’, for instance, the weather sends very conflicting signals about God’s feelings; it soon improves, leading the crew (who are evidently disposed to scrutinise nature for such signs) to congratulate the Mariner on killing ‘the bird / That brought the fog and mist’ (99–100), and hardly unreasonably. Then again, after the obscurely redemptive moment with the snakes, when his ‘kind saint took pity’ (286), the Mariner is still forced to endure the horror of the ‘ghastly crew’ (340), which doesn’t seem a massive improvement. Indeed, the whole notion of the water-snakes episode as the pivotal event in the Mariner’s spiritual journey, which seems so certain when you think about the idea of the poem, feels much less self-evident when you return to the real thing: it happens far too early in the work for it to be the expected climax. A student of mine remarked that the poem consistently surprises on rereading by being, throughout, fuller of horrors than you remembered; and while the summarising moral (610–17) expresses a sentiment evidently close to the optimistic emotions of Coleridge’s religion, most readers must feel its inadequacy, and even its bathos. Burney’s remark that the poem is a cock-and-bull story, like

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Shandy, makes a good point in an unkind way (CH, 56)—as perhaps does Coleridge’s famous (alleged) remark to Barbauld about it having ‘too much moral’ (TTalk, I:272–3), if the sense is of a moral unearned. It is as though the poem is made to contain the sort of event that puts an optimistic religious philosophy under the most severe strain: after such traumatic terror, it seems somewhat lacking to end with advice not to ‘pull poor pussy’s tail’ (Empson, 78). Anyway, it is a very moot point how much atonement the Mariner actually receives: the note in the margin soothingly announces that the curse is finally expiated, but it doesn’t feel that way, least of all to the Mariner himself, who experiences periodic torture ever after; and his redemption is evidently incomplete enough for the pilot’s boy to think he’s the devil (568–9) and for the Wedding Guest seriously to entertain the idea that he’s walking-dead (224–31). The misfitting nature of this supposedly One Life cosmos is most emphatically implied by the dice-throwing episode, a decisive moment of apparently sheer randomness: God doesn’t play dice, as Einstein is supposed to have said. Given such intractables, a rival reading has arisen, stressing not the deep, benevolent unity proposed by the poem, but, on the contrary, its stark, inconsolable chaos. Unity and diversity would then feature in the poem not in the form of a unifying vision that redeems an experience of disorder, but as a futile, superstitious dream of salvation perpetually thwarted by an unyielding meaninglessness. The Mariner is awakened into a consciousness of his isolated condition, his shooting of the bird an act of tragic individuation: ‘With my cross-bow / I shot the albatross’ (81–2). Not an exemplification of Unitarian theology, but its absurdist counter-vision, the poem in this reading is a ghastly parody of the sunlit world of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’: more like a modernist text; indeed the expression of those fears that the unifying theology came to salve.6 But this engaging account has its complications too. For a start, the Mariner himself doesn’t subscribe to such a view; nor is such a reading supported by the running gloss in the margin (added in the 1817 edition). The notes seem secure in describing a meaningful and unified spiritual narrative, from shooting the pious bird of good omen, to the albatross’s vengeance, to the spell beginning to break, to the curse finally expiated; and this might reasonably seem the spelling-out of a moral always intended, ‘added to assist the bewildered readers of the first published version’ (Abrams, NS, 272). For example, the Mariner tells us that the ship hails the bird ‘As if it had been a Christian soul’, and the marginal note takes over the suggestion eagerly, soon referring confidently to ‘the pious bird of good omen’ (65; note to 79); and when the Mariner attributes the blessing of sleep to the intervention of the Virgin, the editorial commentary obediently confirms that his relief is thanks to ‘the grace of the holy Mother’ (294; note to 297).

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But then how much authority are we to give the editorial commentary? The style is self-consciously literary and antiquated: not Coleridge’s usual prose, anyway; and McGann usefully suggests that the marginal notes are the words not of Coleridge exactly, but of an imaginary antiquarian of the seventeenth or eighteenth century, editor of the medieval ballad.7 And how shrewd an editor is he? He looks wildly off the mark at points, in his desire to be upbeat about the end of the terrors he’s annotating (‘The curse is finally expiated’); he is frequently gratuitously expansive, spilling out of the margins and across the page between the stanzas, sometimes beautifully (note to 263), but sometimes comically (the note to 422 is winningly bluff ): all of which might seem designed to insinuate his possible unreliability. The editorial voice, that is to say, is ‘placed’, to use a Leavisite expression. Once the ideas of interpretation and fallibility are abroad, the poem changes its colours dramatically, because we realise that our only source of evidence for any conclusion about the nature of the poem’s universe is the Mariner himself. The predominant world of the poem is that uncertain intermundium between objective and subjective which Coleridge found so compellingly occupied by ghosts and spectres; and if a dramatised fallibility characterises the editorial commentary, then might it not be an attribute of the Mariner too, who also speaks in a way obviously distant from the poet’s own voice. What I am worrying at here is the odd fact that the Mariner’s language is the language of a firm (if bewildered) medieval Catholic: he believes in spirits and angels, offers thanks to Mary Queen and his kind saint, and takes for granted ‘the ordinary Catholic practices of confession, absolution and church-going’ (House, 89). One of the few theological positions that we can confidently declare Coleridge to have consistently shunned was Catholicism: his anti-Catholicism is often vehement (as Notebooks, II: §2324; and see Aids, 212–13n.); and that makes it very remarkable that both his great narrative poems should have been written in a deliberately crafted Catholic voice. (‘Jesu, Maria, shield her well!’, the almost parodically fallible narrator of ‘Christabel’ exclaims.) The Catholic Mariner, perhaps, has had the experience but missed the meaning, trapped within his education’s spiritual paradigms of sin, guilt, repentance, and atonement (‘O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!’), and sure of the purgatorial virtues of suffering—none of which can be made properly to fit the unforgiving details of what happened. His narrative strays abundantly around the inclusive interpretation that he attempts to impose on it, too full of inexplicable, continuing sufferings. That persistent attempt to make sense of his story reintroduces an idea of unity to the poem, but in a tragically subjective way: pathologically, as an aspect of the needy spirit, badgering the disparities of experience for the consolation of a coherent, resolving meaning. Wordsworth’s note complained that

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the poem was insufficiently dramatised, the Mariner never saying very much about being a mariner; but it is hard to see how passing remarks about knots or trade winds would have improved the poem, and anyway the point is precisely that the Mariner is regarding his experiences not as an episode in his nautical career but as the turning point of his spiritual life. In this light, the poem looks very thoroughly dramatised indeed, in an almost Jamesian way, something like Turn of the Screw. Or, you might say, in a Wordsworthian way: it begins to look much more of a dramatic monologue or monodrama, like Wordsworth’s contemporaneous ‘The Thorn’, which was narrated by a superstitious seafarer with a disturbingly over-creative brain (as Wordsworth’s note helpfully explained). Coleridge is rather less convinced in his seafarer’s poem than Wordsworth is in his that there is a psychological explanation to account for things adequately; but both poems could still be engaged in the same sort of work—not expressing a theological vision, but fulfilling the task prominently announced in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, exploring ‘the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement’ (WProse, I:123–5). Excitement in this case is less the heat of the moment, than a protracted obsession, for he has told the story ten thousand times already, Coleridge said (TTalk, I:274): if the plan of the poem was indeed as much Wordsworth’s contribution as he told Isabella Fenwick, then Coleridge’s greatest move was to put the whole story back a step from the reader. For, like Heart of Darkness, the poem is not about a disastrous voyage, but about an old tar, years later, retelling the story of a disastrous voyage; the background presence throughout of voices coming from a world elsewhere is an understated but important part of the total effect (the Wedding Guest interrupts at 79–80, 224–9, 345). And like Marlow’s, the Mariner’s working-up of his story proves more than polishing an anecdote: it is an attempt repeatedly to make sense, to convince himself of his shaky grasp of the telling events. That sounds impossibly pat for so tormented a poem (although a kind of habitual mundanity is not wrong: as Empson says, ‘telling the whole story has become his routine’: Empson, 36); but the genius of the piece lies precisely in its showing how passionate and driven may be the desire to gather one’s experience into an intelligible thesis. The Mariner demonstrates that ‘the meanest of men has his Theory: and to think at all is to theorize’ (Friend, I: 189); but the instinct in his case takes a monomaniacal form, unifying as a form of dementia—‘that state of madness which is not frenzy or delirium, but which models all things to the one reigning idea’ (Lectures, I: 380), like mad Lear. This is one important way in which we ‘associate ideas in a state of excitement’: it is the sort of ruinous psychological phenomenon about which a Wedding Guest might well become wiser and sadder. We are returned, then, to the Coleridgean ground which I first scouted in Chapter 1: ‘Facts—stubborn facts!—none of your Theory’ (Notebooks III:

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§3737). It is a widely known ‘fact’ that the poem is about what happens to the Mariner because he shot the albatross: certainly, that is the Mariner’s theory. But the crucial role of the bird, which is so obvious, seems, on a second look, to have only the most precarious claim to metaphysical significance: strong evidence turns out, on closer viewing, to be less strong. Disembodied voices firmly identify the Mariner as a man who must serve penance for having ‘laid full low / The harmless Albatross’; but the Mariner himself allows that these voices come to him ‘ere my living life returned’ and are ‘in my soul discerned’ (400–1, 395–6), which allows very pointedly for their purely subjective existence, as in a guilt-stricken hallucination. It is the superstitious and erratic crew who initially decide that killing the bird caused all the trouble, an attribution which understandably lodges deep in the Mariner’s fevered mind, as a Cain-like crime would (‘wash away / The Albatross’s blood’: 512–13)—and lodges deeply too in the editor (much more so than, say, the sacrifice of the biscuit worms: 67, app. crit.; and see Empson, 40). The centrality of the albatross has consolidated itself into certain truth with every attempt the Mariner makes to locate the singular catastrophe of his story, some crucial event which will unify the whole bewildering sequence of events into a meaningful narrative. The Mariner returns to it compulsively, at the end of most of the sections, as to an idée fixe, his narrative ‘expressive of that deranged state, in which . . . the sufferer’s attention is abruptly drawn off by every trifle, and in the same instant plucked back again by the one despotic thought’ (Biographia, II:150). (Reaching for a simile to describe the souls flying to heaven and hell, for example, one suggests itself irresistibly—‘every soul, it passed me by, / Like the whizz of my cross-bow!’: 222–3.) Analogously, when he dwells wonderingly upon the supposedly restoring moment with the water-snakes, it is as though seeking to convince himself that it must be there that significance lies (because that is what the interpretation requires), although the evidence can’t really be said to look very promising: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware: Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware. (284–7)

‘Sure’ is needy enough to imply anything but sureness; and what does it mean to bless something unaware: the feeling is of a kind of enduring desperation, as though of someone forced to burden the moment with a necessary significance (for this is when the bird fell off) which was quite hidden at the time, and hardly confirmed in the aftermath.

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But if it is too simple to see the poem as a parable, green or otherwise, a work cogently exemplifying a thesis, then it is quite as wrong to think of it as an absurdist masterpiece, which treats only with dismissive irony the attempts of the Mariner to bring things to a kind of order, the desperate workings of a false consciousness deforming the world in its neurotic ‘Cocaption, or Together-taking’ (Notebooks, III: §4268). The poem is altogether a fuller embodiment of Coleridgean division; and while challenging the coherence of the Mariner’s emotive and obsessional thesis with counterevidence of the most disturbing kind, yet Coleridge still evidently regards with the keenest sympathy his character’s repeated attempts to intuit within his experience a ‘unity (Beginning, Middle, and End)’ (Letters, IV:574). In its exhibition of the powerful need for unified significance, and yet the exhibition too of that need’s frustration, we meet our old Coleridgean impasse, raised to Gothic heights. Coleridge himself described the poem as ‘incomprehensible’ (Biographia, I:28n.), which is not just customary self-deprecation. Comprehension is more than getting the right end of the stick: it is a seizing or catching together (as in comprehendo), and is charged in its Coleridgean life with the unitary passion lying behind the Reason’s impulse for ‘the comprehension of all as one’ (LS, 60). If the poem’s incomprehensibility is so especially striking, it is because it includes within itself so remarkably powerful a sense of the ‘at-one-ment’ (LS, 55) that comprehension might bring—but also so strong a warning of how imprisoning the wrong kind of unifying would be. The Mariner’s continuing, futile attempts to rationalise his experience into meaning might indeed be a type of parable, then, not of theological order, but of the human need to discern order at all, and of the pathos of that need. The Mariner’s ostentatious religious difference from his author might imply less his intrinsic wrongness, and more that such an impulse is a deep human instinct, independent of its theological environment, at work even in minds (as Coleridge would see it) dominated by the grossest superstition. The Mariner’s totalising interpretation, eagerly expanded upon by the well-meant obtuseness of the fictive editor, repeatedly discovers itself to be inadequate as it re-encounters again and again in memory the events it is meant to comprehend: the Mariner is, you might say, a reluctant diversitarian. He seeks desperately to gather all under ‘the one despotic thought’; but his story exceeds his narration: his ‘illustrations swallow up [his] thesis’ (Notebooks, II: §2372). And it is not only the Mariner and his obedient editor who cling so tenaciously to their comprehensive master-narrative in the teeth of the ill-fitting particulars: so do many of the critics. This means that criticism of the poem often rehearses its own version of the predicament which the poem describes, a wavering confrontation between visions of completed unity (‘a circular journey’:

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Abrams, NS, 272) and uncontrollable diversity (‘the unwelcome recognition of our interpretive helplessness’8). When, in an exemplary encounter, House reproves Warren for ‘forcing’ elements of the poem into congruence with his theory, and ‘minimising differences’ (House, 110), he replays a Coleridgean discrimination (‘the arbitrary bringing together of things that lie remote & forming them into a Unity’9). Meanwhile, the poem abides the muddle of its critics by encompassing it, in its fully Coleridgean, divisive life: even in this poem full of the fear of incoherence, diversity also makes its positive claim heard. Most of the thesisdefying details in ‘The Ancient Mariner’ are scarily at odds, which implies the darkening horror that accompanies the obstruction of oneness; but we know from the logic of Coleridgean division that the absence of encompassing unity is only inconsistently deplored, and that sometimes diversity is the occasional source of realist delight; and here too, though I agree in a muted way, the poem anticipates the great career, instinctively exploring the disputed claims of realist diversitarianism and egocentric unity that are articulated (as we know) throughout Coleridge’s life. Southey’s insult, that the poem makes ‘a Dutch attempt at German sublimity’ (CH, 53), may be taken as a mean-spirited expression of the tension at stake, one between diversitarian attention to minute particulars and the unifying ambitions of the gathering consciousness. (Again, I wonder if he didn’t gather the idea from Coleridge’s conversation, so ringing an example of opposites meeting does it seem.) Southey means to be unkind, but his crack anticipates the division between realism and idealism that Coleridge’s philosophy of mind would worry over so intently and that his literary mythology would later apotheosise into Shakespeare and Milton: a universe of little things, such as ‘Dutch’ realism describes, is not always contemptible; and even in the darkness of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ some of the incomprehensible details are not fearsomely bewildering so much as happily free. They are loose ends—in the sense that they are ends in themselves; odd particulars, they resist the duty of expressing the Mariner’s ‘interior meaning’ (Letters, II:866), residing instead in the uncompromised, digressive plenitude of themselves, ‘some thing out of him’ (Notebooks, II: §2672).10 Momentarily released from the Mariner’s monomania, the poem is refreshed by a world elsewhere, living ‘by feeding abroad’ (Notebooks, III: §3420)—a world that sometimes sidles into the poetry, as we have seen happen elsewhere in Coleridge, through the passing opportunity of a simile: . . . yet still the sails made on A pleasant noise till noon, A noise like of a hidden brook

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In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune. (367–72)

Or, in its sudden brilliant mundanity, the prosaic surprise of ‘The silly buckets on the deck’ (297), a phrase conjuring up, in John Beer’s astute phrase, ‘a whole world of relief ’ (Beer, 212). That world, plain and simple (‘silly’), innocent of any especially symbolical duties, is at once a world which brings relief, and one which places in relief the persecutory claustrophobia of the poem’s mental space. It is the common plural world where we and the Wedding Guest live, an ordinary world of other things, which offers its own tentative kinds of consolation, and for which Coleridge’s resilient sensibility retained an instinctive and complicating diversitarian love.

No t e s   1. William Empson, Essays on Renaissance Literature, Volume One: Donne and the New Philosophy (Cambridge, 1993; repr. 1995), 127.   2. Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library, rev. edn. (3 vols.; 1909), 335.   3. Peter Kitson, ‘Coleridge, the French Revolution, and the Ancient Mariner: A Reassessment’, Coleridge Bulletin, NS 7 (Spring 1997), 30–48, at 46.   4. ‘Why the Mariner blesses the snakes is of course as much a mystery as why he shot the Albatross’: Empson, 43.   5. Stephen, Hours in a Library, 335.   6. Most influentially argued by Edward E. Bostetter, ‘The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner’; in Kathleen Coburn (ed.), Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1967), 65–77.   7. Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford, 1985), 141–2. McGann refers to Huntington Brown, ‘The Gloss of the Ancient Mariner’, Modern Language Quarterly, 6 (1945), 319–24.   8. Susan Eilenberg, Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession (New York, 1992), 32.   9. Crabb Robinson, Blake, Coleridge, 31–2. 10. An instinctive sense that the poem’s elements have a kind of barely restrained life within the would-be inclusive authority of the allegory animates the ingenious cartoon version of the poem by Hunt Emerson: Hunt Emerson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1989).

J ack S tillinger

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oleridge wrote only a few poems of the first rank—perhaps no more than a dozen, all told—and he seems to have taken a very casual attitude toward them. He originally published The Eolian Harp under the title “Effusion”; he gave Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement the subtitle “A Poem Which Affects Not to Be Poetry”; he described Fears in Solitude as “a sort of middle thing between Poetry and Oratory”; and he kept Kubla Khan in manuscript for nearly twenty years before offering it to the public “rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits” (Coleridge 1912, 1:100 n., 106 n., 257 n., 295). Christabel and This LimeTree Bower My Prison are two other items that he delayed publishing in book form, and The Nightingale and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which came out anonymously or seemingly as Wordsworth’s in Lyrical Ballads beginning in 1798, did not appear under Coleridge’s own name until the Sibylline Leaves volume of 1817. My thesis in this chapter is that, despite his own lack of interest and confidence in them, Coleridge’s handful of first-rate pieces exerted a powerful influence on the language of subsequent English poetry, right up to our own time. I want to develop this thesis by way of a Keatsian view of Coleridge’s poems. One of my special interests over the years has been the realistic elements of Romantic poetry. When I was in graduate school several decades

From Romantic Complexity: Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, pp. 152–65, 237. © 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

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ago, Romanticism was still under attack by the New Humanists as a literature of escape, and so there was, for me, an attractive alternative in seeing Porphyro (in Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes) as a pilgrim intent on getting not into heaven but into Madeline’s bed and in arguing that Wordsworth’s principal sphere of interest was, as Wordsworth himself said it was, Not in Utopia,—subterranean Fields,— Or some secreted Island, Heaven knows where! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us,—the place where in the end We find our happiness, or not at all! (Fourteen-book Prelude, 11.140–44)

I turned Aristotle’s description of plot, with its parabola of rising and falling action, into a graphic representation of the structure of many of Keats’s poems, both narrative and lyric, using a simple horizontal line to mark a division between an actual world of mortal experience (below the line) and an ideal world of nonmortal perfection (above the line).1 Keats’s speakers in the best of the odes, and his heroes and heroines in at least some of the narratives, take off from the real world in quest of an imagined ideal but then are afflicted by what Endymion at one point calls “homeward fever” (Endymion 2.319). Their excursions into the ideal are inevitably failures, and they long to return to the reality that, at the beginning of the action, had seemed so faulty. Ode to a Nightingale is a handy epitomizing example: its structure takes the form of an imaginative excursion to join an unseen bird in a forest followed by return to reality and the speaker’s “sole self.” But the scheme has widespread application, describing Endymion’s quest for Cynthia, Madeline’s quest for union with her lover in a dream, the initial situation of the “Bright star . . . in lone splendor hung aloft the night,” the wretched knight’s temporary happiness in La Belle Dame’s grot, and the hypothetical remedies of Psyche’s temple, the permanently frozen pastoral of the Grecian Urn, the lovers’ magical palace in Lamia, and the “songs of spring” in To Autumn. I want to apply this scheme to Coleridge. Coleridge is not, of course, generally regarded as one of the realists among the English poets. In the common opposition between the mysterious, high-flying, metaphysical tendencies of one kind of Romanticism and the plain, down-to-earth, commonsensical tendencies of another, Coleridge is decidedly with the mysterious, high-flying, and metaphysical. Xanadu is a type of Shangri-la, the Ancient Mariner’s voyage is full of miraculous events, and Christabel is a tale of vampirism; the Conversation poems celebrate blurry abstractions about “the one Life within us and abroad,” “the Almighty Spirit,” “God . . . [teaching] Himself in all.”

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Yet Coleridge’s poems also have structural elements of Keatsian and Words­ worthian “homeward fever.” In some of the best of them, there is a conflict between the upward tendency of the ostensible subject matter and the downward tendency of the “plots.” The themes seem to go in one direction, the stories in another. Take The Eolian Harp as an early example. The theme of The Eolian Harp is sometimes said to be Coleridge’s vision of “all of animated nature” as “organic Harps” played upon by “one intellectual breeze, / At once the Soul of each, and God of all” (44–48). But the story of the poem is something quite different—a dramatic confession of a man who allows himself to indulge in “idle flitting phantasies,” “shapings of the unregenerate mind” (40, 55) amounting to heresy, and who is glad to return from these flights of fancy to the reality of his wife and cottage. Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement affirms “the bloodless fight / Of Science, Freedom . . . the Truth in Christ” (61–62) and the coming of God’s kingdom, but the story is about a reluctant departure and the solace of imaginative return. This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison likewise has a thematic “message”: “Henceforth I shall know / That Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure” (59–60). Read for its story, however, This Lime-Tree Bower is about a man who, because of a trivial domestic accident, cannot go on a walk with his friends, imaginatively accompanies them to view a wide prospect from the top of a hill, and then returns to the comfortable reality of his actual surroundings—lime trees, a walnut tree, ivy, elms, a bat, a solitary humble-bee. Frost at Midnight is thematically about “The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible / Of [God’s] eternal language” (59–60). Structurally the poem involves excursions into the past (to the speaker’s schooldays in the city) and into the future (to a time when the speaker’s infant son will grow up to “wander like a breeze / By lakes and sandy shores,” 54–55), and again there is a solacing return to a present reality, this time to “the secret ministry of frost,” the shining icicles, and the quiet moon (72–74). The story in Frost at Midnight is not perfectly clear, but the speaker is unhappy with his situation at the beginning, and in some way he solves his problem through the imagined excursions. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is loaded—almost (as Coleridge himself felt) overloaded—with religious, social, moral, and psychological themes: the sacredness of God’s creatures, the hapless plight of the inheritors of Original Sin, the difference between the working and the nonworking of imagination, and so on. As a story, the poem is, once again, an excursion into some kind of fantasy world and a glad return to the Mariner’s native land: “Oh! dream of joy! . . . Is this mine own countree?” (464–67). I think there is a connection between the “homeward” tendencies of these poems and some important qualities of Coleridge’s poetic style. Before the 1790s, the most notable characteristic of the language of English poetry

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was its artificiality. Wordsworth sets this forth in detail in his preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) when he makes a distinction between words and things and condemns various types of language that do not represent things—personifications, poetic diction, clichés, and the rest. He uses one of Thomas Gray’s sonnets to illustrate the emptiness and insubstantiality of the eighteenth-century style he is attacking. Here is another example from the same poet, the opening of Gray’s Ode on the Spring: Lo! where the rosy-bosom’d Hours, Fair Venus’ train appear, Disclose the long-expecting flowers, And wake the purple year! The Attic warbler pours her throat, Responsive to the cuckow’s note, The untaught harmony of spring: While whisp’ring pleasure as they fly, Cool Zephyrs thro’ the clear blue sky Their gather’d fragrance fling.

On this side of the 1790s, we no longer have “rosy-bosom’d Hours,” “Venus’ train,” “purple year,” “Attic warbler,” “Cool Zephyrs,” and the like. The language of poetry becomes plainer, more concrete, more straightforward, more natural (seeming, at least, to represent what Wordsworth called “the real language” of ordinary speakers). A serious and moving poem about mid-nineteenth-century religious crisis and the disappearance of God begins with some chat about the weather: “The sea is calm tonight. / The tide is full, the moon lies fair / Upon the straits. . . .” A famous poem of the 1920s pondering the nature of human life begins with a very homely description of a schoolroom: I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; A kind old nun in a white hood replies; The children learn to cipher and to sing, To study reading-books and history, To cut and sew, be neat in everything In the best modern way—the children’s eyes In momentary wonder stare upon A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

A not-so-famous poem of the 1960s about the unreliability of perception begins with a person on a train addressing a stranger sitting next to him:

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How it should happen this way I am not sure, but you Are sitting next to me, Minding your own business When all of a sudden I see A fire out the window.2

I don’t, of course, mean to suggest that all poetry before the 1790s was as artificial and prettified as the lines about “rosy-bosom’d Hours” quoted from Gray or that all poetry after the 1790s was as plain and straightforward as Matthew Arnold’s weather report or Yeats’s schoolroom or Mark Strand’s questioning of the reality of a fire outside the window. But as a general tendency, with a preponderance of the one kind of poetry before the 1790s and a preponderance of the other kind after the 1790s, the change is quite remarkable and, I would argue, quantitatively demonstrable. The 1790s may be seen as the crucial decade, a kind of watershed in the history of English poetry. I suggest that Coleridge played a central role in the change. Let me focus this change with a passage of nature description from the opening paragraph of This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, where Coleridge pictures a “roaring dell” that he had told his friends about: [That] roaring dell, o’erwooded, narrow, deep, And only speckled by the mid-day sun; Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock Flings arching like a bridge;—that branchless ash, Unsunn’d and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves Ne’er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still, Fann’d by the water-fall! and there my friends Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds, That all at once (a most fantastic sight!) Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge Of the blue clay-stone. (10–20)

In contrast with Gray’s stanza from Ode on the Spring, these lines from Lime-Tree Bower are quite sharp and specific. Gray gives us numerous embellishments in the form of classical allusion but no help whatsoever toward visualizing (“Lo!”—behold, see!) the rosy-bosom’d Hours, Venus’s train, the purple year, and the rest. One could, however, easily draw (or mentally recreate) a picture of Coleridge’s dell, giving a proper angle to the sides, adding

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the branchless ash tree in front of the waterfall, and sketching in the trembling leaves, the long lank weeds, and the blue clay-stone. Coleridge’s syntax is a little awkward, but the images are concrete, highly detailed, and presented in clear relationships to one another. This Lime-Tree Bower has, or can be read as having, a lofty theme about the ubiquity of beauty and God’s presence in nature. Its descriptive passages, especially at the beginning and end, are quite literally down-to-earth, full of particularities, and eminently visualizable. They are matter-of-fact in the manner of good passages of Wordsworth and pictorial in the manner of good passages of Keats. Coleridge did not always write such pictorial and matter-of-fact descriptions. Much of his verse is in the style that Byron characterized as “turgid ode and tumid stanza” (English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 256)—a lucky choice of interchangeable terms meaning swollen or bloated and, at the same time, empty of significant content. It is easy, in the early pages of Coleridge’s chronologically arranged Complete Poetical Works, to find expressions such as “soft Compassion,” “Furies fell,” “Vengeance drunk with human blood,” “dragon-wing’d Despair,” “sorrow-clouded breast of Care,” “Fancy’s high career,” “Life’s gilded scenes,” Hope’s “cheering beam,” “Fancy’s vivid colourings;” “Glory’s blood-stain’d palm,” “Morning’s wing,” “Memory’s Dream,” “Love’s pale cheek,” and the like. There are fervent exhortations to see what no one can possibly see (just as in Gray’s Ode on the Spring), and for sentiments we have to slog through such extravagances as this from an early version of Monody on the Death of Chatterton:   Thy corpse of many a livid hue   On the bare ground I view, Whilst various passions all my mind engage;   Now is my breast distended with a sigh,   And now a flash of Rage Darts through the tear, that glistens in my eye. (Coleridge 1912, 1:13)

A selected edition of Coleridge from the 1950s that I regularly used as a course textbook in the 1960s and 1970s has a telling juxtaposition between the worst of Coleridge in the turgid/tumid vein and some of the best of Coleridge in the conversational matter-of-fact. 3 In this edition, Ode to the Departing Year ends in the middle of a verso page with these lines:   I unpartaking of the evil thing,   With daily prayer and daily toil   Soliciting for food my scanty soil,

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  Have wail’d my country with a loud Lament. Now I recentre my immortal mind   In the deep Sabbath of meek self-content; Cleans’d from the vaporous passions that bedim God’s Image, sister of the Seraphim.

And then just below, on the same page of this selected edition, comes the opening of This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison: “Well, they are gone, and here must I remain, / This lime-tree bower my prison! . . .” Passages in the homely, conversational style of “Well, they are gone, and here must I remain” are relatively rare in Coleridge’s poetry, and so are passages of pictorial, matter-of-fact description of the sort that I quoted about the roaring dell, the waterfall, the ash tree, and the leaves and weeds. There are plenty of matter-of-fact details to cite—for example, the precise measurement of Kubla Khan’s enclosure (“twice five miles,” 6) and the Second Voice’s straight-faced explanation of the mechanism that drives the Ancient Mariner’s ship (“The air is cut away before, / And closes from behind,” 424– 25)—and some of the most memorable pictures in English poetry. Think of the transfixed Wedding-Guest, the “ice, mast-high,” the “bloody Sun, at noon,” the skeleton ship, the “silly buckets on the deck,” and the Pilot’s boy going crazy in The Ancient Mariner (53, 112, 297); or the poet’s “flashing eyes” and “floating hair” at the end of Kubla Khan; or the “red-breast sit[ting] and sing[ing] / Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch / Of mossy appletree” and the rest of the dozen or so extremely sharp visual details at the close of Frost at Midnight; or this description of Christabel praying in the forest: It was a lovely sight to see The lady Christabel, when she Was praying at the old oak tree.   Amid the jagged shadows   Of mossy leafless boughs,   Kneeling in the moonlight,   To make her gentle vows; Her slender palms together prest, Heaving sometimes on her breast. . . . (279–87)

But such passages occur in fewer than a dozen poems in the Coleridge canon—notably, among pieces written (or at least begun) before Coleridge and the Wordsworths departed for Germany in the autumn of 1798, The Eolian Harp, Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement, This Lime-Tree

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Bower, Kubla Khan, The Ancient Mariner, Frost at Midnight, Christabel, Fears in Solitude, and The Nightingale, and among pieces written after 1798, only Dejection: An Ode (1802) and To William Wordsworth (1807). The works that put Coleridge “among the English poets” are so few that if one wants to know what happened to Coleridge as a poet, it makes more sense to inquire what happened when he was successful rather than, as with a writer such as Wordsworth, what happened when he wasn’t. What is it that caused Coleridge to write his few good poems?—or, since I am connecting Coleridge’s good poems with certain qualities of style (plainness, substantiality, concreteness, particularity: the pictorialism and matter-of-factness of my title), what is it that caused Coleridge to produce those memorable passages of visualizable detail? One ready answer that might pop into the minds of readers of the first chapter of Biographia Literaria is the influence of Coleridge’s schoolmaster at Christ’s Hospital, the Reverend James Boyer. Coleridge writes that “in our own English compositions . . . [Boyer] showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words. Lute, harp, and lyre, muse, muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene, were all an abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming ‘Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? your Nurse’s daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose!’ ” (BL, 1:9–10). This certainly points toward the plainness and concrete detail that I have been emphasizing. But Coleridge had the advantage of this lesson at the very start of his poetry writing and didn’t heed the lesson until six or eight years later. His surviving early poems, from 1787 through the middle of 1795, are, in effect, full of harps, lyres, and muses and are conspicuously short on pens, ink, and the nurse’s daughter. How about early literary influences? We know from both Biographia Literaria and the letters that Coleridge was greatly moved by the poetry, especially the sonnets, of William Lisle Bowles, who combined, as Coleridge wrote in a note to his sonnet to Bowles published in the Morning Chronicle, “exquisite delicacy of painting . . . tender simplicity . . . [and] manly pathos” (Coleridge 1912, 1:84 n.). We also know that William Cowper was one of his favorite poets and that he composed the opening paragraph of Frost at Midnight with pointed reference to a well-known passage of Cowper’s The Task. Then there were the poems of close friends and associates—Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and, after a while, Wordsworth. But Bowles, Cowper, Lamb, and Southey do not create specific visual images in their poetry, any more than Gray did in the stanza quoted earlier. Bowles’s sonnet To the River Itchin, for example, begins with reference to the river’s “crumbling margin,” its

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“silver breast, / On which the self-same tints still seem to rest.” One imagines the Reverend James Boyer saying to Bowles: “Crumbling margin, boy? Silver breast? Self-same tints?—You mean sides, surface, colors!” Bowles, Cowper, Lamb, and Southey were all writing in the then standard eighteenth-century modes, using words to represent not things but abstractions—mental concepts, definitions, logical entities. And Wordsworth’s earliest influence is confined to the first version of Salisbury Plain, which is nearly all that Coleridge knew of Wordsworth’s poetry before he wrote his own first good poems toward the end of 1795. Perhaps we can explain what happened to Coleridge in terms of his finding a proper audience. Much of Coleridge’s early poetry in the turgid/tumid manner is addressed not to any actual auditors but to a vaguely conceived mass audience comprising all of England, or perhaps the entire population of the world. There are exceptions to this dramatic stance—for example, blank-verse lines addressed to his friend Charles Lamb and to his brother George—but in general, in his early poetry, Coleridge either writes to individuals whom he does not know personally (as in his “Sonnets on Eminent Characters”) or else imitates Milton in addressing the nation from pulpit or public platform. The results are full of artifice and emptiness, just as one would expect in a writing situation where the audience does not exist and communication is a purely academic endeavor. Coleridge’s turning to audiences whom he actually knew and loved—his wife in The Eolian Harp, Charles Lamb in This Lime-Tree Bower, his infant son in Frost at Midnight, William and Dorothy Wordsworth in The Nightingale—produced some amazingly good poetry. But the question of how Coleridge attained this more realistic and immediate poet/audience relationship is merely a variant of the question I started with: Why Sara and Charles Lamb and the Wordsworths at this particular time in his life? Coleridge’s marriage to Sara Fricker in October 1795 is a possible explanation. Marriage does entail an access of reality. Romance is the rising action of life, marriage the descent—or so it is frequently portrayed in fiction—and what was previously veiled, mysterious, and fervently desired becomes known and freely enjoyed. Because Coleridge’s first poems in his pictorial, matter-offact style either mention Sara or are addressed to her, it is tempting to connect the change—what happened to Coleridge—to his change in marital status. Unfortunately for this explanation, Coleridge from time to time reverted to his former windy style, producing works in the turgid/tumid vein even while he was still happily married. My own explanation of what happened to Coleridge has to do with rural Somerset, the ground on which we are meeting this morning and which we’ll be trudging over tomorrow afternoon.4 As a matter of chronological fact, Coleridge went to London after he left Cambridge University at the end

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of 1794, and shortly afterward he moved to Bristol, which was then, just as it is now, a metropolis, one of the major cities of Great Britain. He lived in Bristol from January through September 1795 and then went from the city to what he calls his “place of retirement,” the cottage at Clevedon, a town some twenty-five or thirty miles to the northeast of here, where he resided for three months, from his wedding day, 4 October, until the end of the year. At the beginning of 1796 he left Clevedon to raise subscriptions for his new periodical, The Watchman. He was on the road for this purpose during January and February 1796 and then returned to Bristol in order to be closer to the printers who would produce The Watchman. He lived in Bristol for the rest of 1796 and then moved to Stowey on the last day of the year. The “Coleridge Cottage” (across the road) was his residence until he departed with William and Dorothy Wordsworth for Germany in September 1798. There are, then, in Coleridge’s adult life before the turn of the century two distinct periods when he was away from the cities that, as he says in Frost at Midnight, were an impediment to his union with nature. The first period consists of the final three months of 1795, when he and Sara lived at the cottage in Clevedon, and the second consists of all of 1797 and January– August 1798, when he, Sara, and their first child, Hartley, lived in Stowey. And it happens that Coleridge wrote (or, in the case of Christabel, began) practically all of the good poems he ever produced—The Eolian Harp and Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement in Clevedon in 1795, and This Lime-Tree Bower, Kubla Khan, Frost at Midnight, The Ancient Mariner, the beginning of Christabel, Fears in Solitude, and The Nightingale in and around Stowey in 1797–98—in these relatively homely situations. It may look like a gross simplification to connect Coleridge’s intermittent periods of good poetry with these two periods of retirement amidst rural surroundings. But further support for just such a simplified view exists in the fact that in the year separating the two periods, when he traveled for two months and then returned to live in Bristol again for the remainder of 1796, Coleridge mainly wrote long bad poems in the old turgid/tumid vein—Religious Musings, The Destiny of Nations, and Ode to the Departing Year, his principal accomplishments of 1796. I suggested at the beginning of this chapter that Coleridge’s handful of good poems exerted a major influence on the style of subsequent English poetry. Now at the conclusion I’d like to say a little about Coleridge’s influence on the poetry of two important contemporaries, Wordsworth and Keats. It is sometimes forgotten, when Coleridge and Wordsworth are studied together, that in the early years of their relationship Coleridge had much more of a reputation than his older associate. A two-volume reference work published in 1798, David Rivers’s Literary Memoirs of Living Authors of

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Great Britain, notices Coleridge among the 1,112 living authors but does not include Wordsworth.5 Before 1798, Wordsworth had published just the two slender volumes containing An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches (they came out together in January 1793). Neither was a critical success, and there was no call for a second edition of either. Coleridge, in contrast, was the author of a play, The Fall of Robespierre, published in 1794; ten numbers of a periodical, The Watchman, issued between March and May 1796; a substantial collection of Poems on Various Subjects, published first in 1796 and then in a second, enlarged edition a year later; a slim quarto containing Fears in Solitude, France: An Ode, and Frost at Midnight, which came out in 1798; and some single poems published here and there separately. He was a well-established writer, mostly in poetry, at a time when Wordsworth was still just getting started. Coleridge, however, had no sense of this superiority. In the presence of Wordsworth, he felt himself, as he told a friend in June 1797, “a little man by his side”; and he wrote to another friend a month later that “Wordsworth is a very great man—the only man, to whom at all times & in all modes of excellence I feel myself inferior” (CL, 1:325, 334). Coleridge’s self-abasement visà-vis Wordsworth has caused some scholars to overlook the fact that while Coleridge’s best achievements in poetry go hand-in-hand with Wordsworth’s, seemingly joined in an interinvolved process that has been likened to biological symbiosis and lyrical dialogue,6 they in fact precede Wordsworth’s own productions at almost every point where documentary chronological evidence exists. Coleridge’s conversational blank verse anticipates Wordsworth’s first efforts in the same manner by at least a year and a half; Frost at Midnight precedes Tintern Abbey, a poem that resembles it in many aspects of theme and structure, by four or five months; the Mariner’s tale in Coleridge’s Rime precedes Wordsworth’s mariner’s tale in The Thorn by a few days or, more probably, a few weeks; The Prelude can be (and has been) read as a long Coleridgean Conversation poem. A perceptive writer on the literary relationship of the two poets says flatly that “Coleridge’s poetry was the prime influence on Wordsworth’s from the first days of their association until the winter of 1799–1800” (Magnuson 1988, 10). And Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads, at least according to Coleridge, grew out of mutual conversations between the two and was begun on the basis of notes by Coleridge. The influence of the Lyrical Ballads experiment—first as a jointly authored anonymous volume published in Bristol and London in the autumn of 1798; then as a second edition, in two volumes, with the famous preface at the beginning of volume 1, in 1800; then in two more editions, in 1802 and 1805; and in printing after printing of Wordsworth’s collected poems beginning in 1815 and continuing to the present day—has been incalculable. And

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Coleridge’s role, as a theorist about the language of poetry but much more significantly as the poet who wrote the earliest of the Coleridge-Wordsworth lyrical ballads, was considerable. We can take Wordsworth’s familiarity with Coleridge’s poems for granted, and I think we should take Coleridge’s influence on Wordsworth for granted as well. In the case of Keats, there is no question about who influenced whom, but again it is possible to sharpen the account of the relation of the earlier poet’s works to the latter. We of course place Coleridge with the earlier generation of Romantics—I have just suggested that he played a leading role in the Lyrical Ballads experiment—but, apart from The Ancient Mariner, his most significant poems were first made widely available in the midst of the activities of the second generation of Romantics, in particular in 1816 and 1817, when Keats was at a most impressionable stage of development as poet and thinker. Christabel (written mainly between 1798 and 1800) and Kubla Khan (written during 1797–98) were first published in May 1816 in a pamphlet that was much anticipated, widely noticed by the critics, and reissued in two subsequent editions before the year was out. (Reviewers of the pamphlet included Keats’s friends John Hamilton Reynolds, William Hazlitt, and George Felton Mathew.) Sibylline Leaves, Coleridge’s most important collection of poems before the later 1820s, came out in July 1817 containing, among other works, The Ancient Mariner, The Eolian Harp, This Lime-Tree Bower, To William Wordsworth, The Nightingale, Frost at Midnight, and Dejection: An Ode. Most of these poems were composed between 1795 and 1802; for several of them, Sibylline Leaves represents the first publication in book form, if not the first publication ever. Coleridge was also getting considerable public notice from another work that he issued at this time, the two-volume Biographia Literaria, published in the same month as Sibylline Leaves. Keats mentions Coleridge several times in his letters and actually met him once, on Hampstead Heath on a Sunday morning in April 1819 two weeks before he drafted his own best-known literary ballad, La Belle Dame sans Merci, and about a month before he wrote his own “greater Romantic lyric” to a nightingale, the most admired of his odes. It is also a matter of biographical record that Keats owned a copy of the 1797 second edition of Coleridge’s Poems, and he certainly was familiar with Sibylline Leaves. There are frequent echoes of Coleridge in Keats’s poems and some important general likenesses as well.7 Perhaps most prominent is Coleridge’s influence on Keats’s Gothicism. Both The Eve of St. Agnes and Lamia show numerous similarities with Christabel in plot, character, theme, motif, image, and atmosphere, some of them so close in detail as to constitute pointed allusions, as if Keats were retelling (or completing) Coleridge’s fragment. The

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well-known Keatsian pictorialism owes much to Coleridge—as, for example, in these lines from The Eve of St. Agnes when Madeline kneels to pray in her moonlit bedchamber. (Compare the passage quoted earlier in this paper in which Coleridge describes Christabel “praying at the old oak tree . . . Kneeling in the moonlight . . . Her slender palms together prest, / Heaving sometimes on her breast,” and so on.) Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest, And on her silver cross soft amethyst, And on her hair a glory, like a saint: She seem’d a splendid angel, newly drest, Save wings, for heaven. . . . (220–24)

Then there is the generic influence of Coleridge’s Conversation poems on the younger poet’s odes. Keats’s best odes figure prominently in the genre that M. H. Abrams (1965) has named “the greater Romantic lyric.” But Coleridge’s The Eolian Harp, Frost at Midnight, and Fears in Solitude are the earliest of Abrams’s defining examples, all three of them written before Tintern Abbey, which is the first of the Wordsworth items in Abrams’s list. It is not too much to say that Coleridge single-handedly invented the type. The Sibylline Leaves volume, containing these and other Conversation poems, was published just two years before Keats wrote his odes. The earlier works were unquestionably an influence on them. My conclusions from this cursory survey should be self-evident. Words­ worth, through his example in the lyrical ballads and other narrative, conversational, and autobiographical poems, as well as through his theorizing about the proper language of poetry in the landmark preface, exerted a tremendous influence on the course of subsequent English poetry, especially in the direction of plainness, simplicity, and matter-of-factness. Keats too, as his reputation expanded in the latter half of the nineteenth century, had a powerful impact on the Victorians (Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites in particular) and later upon modern poets such as Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, who themselves became important influences on more recent writers right up to the present. Coleridge, best known in his day primarily as a theologian, social critic, literary theorist, and talker, after a while became one of the standard Romantic poets in his own right and began to exert as much influence directly as he did through those whom he influenced. All this adds up to a considerable result from a handful of poems that Coleridge in effect tossed off, paid very little attention to, and for the most part didn’t even bother to publish until long after they were written.

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No t e s Originally published in The Wordsworth Circle 20 (1989): 62–68. This was the opening paper at the first Coleridge Summer Conference, in Nether Stowey, Somerset, July 1988. 1. See, for example, Stillinger (1971, 101) and my introduction to Keats’s Complete Poems (Keats 1982), chapter 1 in the present collection. 2. Mark Strand, The Whole Story, in Reasons for Moving (Strand 1969, 17). 3. See Coleridge (1951, 46). 4. This and the reference to the “Coleridge Cottage” at the end of the paragraph are details relating to the original delivery of this paper, at the town hall in Nether Stowey. 5. See John E. Jordan (1976, 118). 6. See McFarland (1981, chap. 1, “The Symbiosis of Coleridge and Words­ worth”) and Magnuson (1988). 7. See “Keats and Coleridge,” chapter 3 in the present collection.

W illiam A . Ulmer

Christabel and the Origin of Evil

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n a 1796 notebook entry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge envisioned writing “The Origin of Evil, an Epic Poem” and at some point enthusiastically discussed the project with Charles Lamb, who reminded him in 1797 “that when in town you were talking of the Origin of Evil as a most prolific subject for a Long Poem.”1 George Whalley famously speculated that Coleridge never wrote this poem “because as time went on he came to realize that he had already embodied his epic theme in The Ancient Mariner,” and Peter Kitson has suggested similarly that “perhaps this project became ‘Religious Musings.’”2 My alternate suggestion is that Christabel embodies Coleridge’s long-considered poem on the origin of evil. My related suggestion is that the text’s ruminations on evil presuppose the Unitarian Christianity that Coleridge still professed in 1798–1800. In fact, Christabel dramatizes Coleridge’s Unitarian understanding of Original Sin as a state of guiltless corruption, an innate and mysterious ambivalence of the moral will. The poem makes its way to associating Original Sin with the divided will by considering the dependence of identity on a mediating other—the dependence of Christabel on Geraldine, of course, and on Geraldine in her roles as a figure of libido, the mother, and the delusory image. What Geraldine retains throughout these metamorphoses is her power to block and frustrate the impulse to love. At times Christabel has been regarded as an From Studies in Philology 104, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 376–407. © 2007 by the University of North Carolina Press.

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erotic affirmation in which the protagonist readies herself for mature passion by confronting and embracing her sexuality.3 My interpretation concurs with J. Robert Barth’s, conversely, that the poem sketches “a whole world of unfulfilled love—love either failed, or frustrated, or at best ambiguous.”4 The miscarrying of love in this world produces Christabel’s undeserved brutalization, an image of suffering with which Coleridge seems never to have known exactly what to do, certainly not in 1800 when he left the poem unfinished. By then he had become humbly responsive to the weight and complexity of human pain but less confident about Unitarian rationalizations of mundane evils. We can consequently read Christabel for its prophetic explanation of Coleridge’s abandonment of Unitarianism, one of the pivotal events of his intellectual career. But we can also invoke Coleridge’s mounting sense of the theological problems of Unitarianism in 1800–1802 to explain his inability to complete Christabel. Christabel and Original Sin Most readings of Christabel assume that Christabel herself personifies moral innocence. It is an understandable assumption—the girl appears wellintentioned, virginal, and naive—that can seem quite innocent in its own right. References to Christabel’s innocence typically arise in passing amid interpretations not really concerned with innocence or in moral analyses that would differ little if they avoided the term entirely. Indeed, the innocence ascribed to Coleridge’s heroine almost never acquires theological specification, remaining one of the least interrogated but also, consequently, most obstructive assumptions in Christabel criticism. An easily summoned idea of innocence has clearly encouraged moral idealizations of Coleridge’s heroine. Reviewing the secondary literature, one encounters not merely repeated characterizations of Christabel as a sinless child or Romantic Eve but statements, for instance, that “Christabel suffers innocently, like Christ,” or that her “beauty has a particular innocence about it, being associated with the beauty of Christ,” and so on.5 In its power of orienting critical discourse, this ideal of innocence has impressively survived attempts to temper it. Even when criticism acknowledges Christabel’s complicity in her own corruption, allowing only that the girl “is relatively innocent,”6 qualification ultimately reconfirms the heroine’s innocence by lending it just enough realism to shore up its credibility. The notion of innocence ends up similarly recuperated when psychoanalytic critics stipulate that Christabel dramatizes “a conflict not between helpless innocence and supernatural evil but between two of Christabel’s attitudes toward her own sexual being.” 7 From their revised, psycho-sexual perspective, such formulations concede the centrality of some idea of innocence as a premise for reading Coleridge’s text and end usually

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by stressing the heroine’s purity all over again. For some readers, the fate of innocence has always signified the moral problem of Coleridge’s fable. No less a Coleridgean than John Beer surmises that Christabel remained unfinished precisely because in it “Coleridge had set himself [that] insoluble problem . . . which is involved as soon as we ask how innocence can ever redeem experience.”8 The critic who calls the representation of moral innocence in Christabel into question most effectively is Andrew M. Cooper in his discussion of “Gothic Parody and Original Sin” in Coleridge’s poem. By insisting on the heroine’s “ordinary human fallibility” as a legacy of Original Sin, Cooper establishes Original Sin as the motivating assumption of Coleridge’s story and argues that Christabel in truth exposes the moral dangers of believing in innocence. The difficulties that eventually arise with this reading for me, my obligations to it notwithstanding, involve Cooper’s privileging of intention. His argument begins with Coleridge’s objections to gothic stories about human beings victimized by ostensibly irresistible supernatural powers; extrapolating from this objection to Christabel itself, Cooper contends that “physical evil, no matter how supernatural its source, cannot touch Christabel’s soul unless she consents to it.” Sensible enough in its way, this assertion unfortunately shifts attention from the fundamental nature of the human will to a particular act of will—an act whereby assent is given or withheld—in seeking the origins of evil. When the question of evil defers to the issue of consent, Christabel’s sinfulness can fall into separate stages, with her opening reception of Geraldine dramatically distinguished in guilt from her later efforts at denial. “What makes Geraldine’s spell insidious,” for Cooper, is that, in part at least, it is not supernatural but merely a lie or threat which Christabel embraces in order to keep believing in her own infallibility. . . . Geraldine, who is not evil incarnate, only provides the opportunity for sinning; Christabel is free to stand or fall. But Christabel’s fugitive and cloistered virtue is oblivious of the fine Miltonic distinction between feeling tempted and actually succumbing. She ignores her actual deception by Geraldine, thereby conniving at it. . . . Unwilling to incur the heavy guilt which she deludedly believes she has incurred through a moment’s inattention, the girl thus rejects all responsibility whatsoever for Geraldine’s presence in the castle.

In effect, this reading makes Christabel crucially guilty from the start—a figure of Original Sin—but then restricts her “heavy guilt” to the latter phases of her behavior. Coleridge’s vision of evil emerges in the cover-up Christabel

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supposedly stages, an intentionally hurtful exercise in deception which makes part 2, in Cooper’s opinion, by far the more horrific section of the poem. I cannot see the Christabel of part 2 as so villainous a schemer any more than I can see evidence in part 1 that the girl herself has constructed a myth of her own infallibility. Above all, I cannot agree that “Christabel’s lugging the suddenly limp Geraldine across the castle threshold, a patent allegory of sin gaining entrance to the soul, dramatizes Coleridge’s hardheaded point here that the evils of fallen life, although unpleasant and saddening, are not irresistible.”9 For me, Christabel traces the origins of evil to problems of the will that precede and condition the possibilities of choice, and it underscores the unavoidable ramifications of sin throughout a fallen life. Cooper deserves enormous credit, however, for challenging the consensus that has crystallized around the idea of Christabel’s innocence—and certainly Coleridge’s poem works assiduously to identify its protagonist with Original Sin. At several points Coleridge likens the girl to fallen figures from Paradise Lost. When she twice hisses in part 2 (447 and 579), she reenacts the “dismal universal hiss” with which the fallen angels greet the returned Satan10 and through which Milton explicitly declares their complicity: “for now were all transform’d / Alike, to Serpents all as accessories / To his bold Riot” (PL, 10.509 and 519–21). We can similarly compare Geraldine’s request—”Stretch forth thy hand (thus ended she), / And help a wretched maid to flee”—and Christabel’s immediate response—”Then Christabel stretch’d forth her hand” (100–102)—to the actual moment of Eve’s fall in Milton’s epic: “her rash hand in evil hour / Forth reaching to the Fruit, she pluck’d, she eat” (PL, 9.780–81). Christabel’s encounter with Geraldine thus reenacts the Fall, with the complicities of that encounter signifying the girl’s subjection to Original Sin. Yet Coleridge’s most powerful summoning of Miltonic precedent for Christabel may lie in the way his heroine’s very birth recalls the famous first lines of Paradise Lost. In her responsibility for both her mother’s death and father’s perpetual mourning, Christabel duplicates Adam’s sin merely by living, for she literally “Brought Death into the World, and all our woe” (PL, 1.3). In the character and behavior of his heroine, then, Coleridge continually invokes the state of Original Sin—Original Sin as conceived by Joseph Priestley, the chief theologian of the Unitarianism to which Coleridge had converted during his Cambridge years. Most eighteenth-century Unitarians scorned the notion of Original Sin. Priestley himself questioned not only the occurrence of the Fall but the justification of the orthodox doctrine of Original Sin as well. In Priestley’s view, when St. Paul said that “all have sinned” through the sin of Adam, he meant only that all are involved in that death which was the consequence of his sin. If, indeed, [his statement] be interpreted literally, it will imply

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that all are involved in his guilt as well as in his sufferings. But this is so unnatural an interpretation, and so evidently contrary to sense and reason, (sin being in its own nature a personal thing, and not transferable,) that the text was never understood in this sense till the system, the history of which I am writing, was so far advanced as to require it, and to have prepared the minds of men for it?11

Priestley’s rationalist denial of vicarious sin and guilt colors some of the more blithely optimistic statements of Coleridge’s early days: “Guilt is out of the Question,” John Thelwall was informed in 1796; “I am a Necessarian, and of course deny the possibility of it” (CL, 1.213). But Priestley also lies behind the rhetorical jockeying of Coleridge’s well-known March 1798 letter to his brother George, a letter virtually contemporaneous with his first work on Christabel: Of GUILT I say nothing; but I believe most stedfastly in original Sin; that from our mothers’ wombs our understandings are darkened; and even where our understandings are in the Light, that our organization is depraved, & our volitions imperfect; and we sometimes see the good without wishing to attain it, and oftener wish it without the energy that wills & performs—And for this inherent depravity, I believe, that the Spirit of the Gospel is the sole cure. (CL, 1.396)

These comments reveal a chastened sense of moral dependency that looks ahead to Coleridge’s Anglican conversion in some ways, and they certainly differ in emphasis from Priestleyan rational theology.12 Still, by distinguishing an “inherent depravity” from an inadmissible “GUILT,” Coleridge endorses Priestley’s Unitarian refusal of Anglican moral vicariousness: that is the point of his conceding “depravity” while declining “GUILT.” Through this position he attempts to wed a conventional Unitarian moral optimism about the continual availability of conversion and salvation with his own moral realism about the self-victimizing propensities of the human will. What results is a notion of Original Sin in which we incur no guilt by being human; we inherit no postlapsarian moral debt we are obligated to discharge. Blamelessness does not forestall our power of doing harm, however, or keep us from suffering. We remain grievously flawed, grievously unfitted for fulfillment, simply because of our basic human nature. Coleridge’s early letters and essays recurrently show him characterizing Man as “a vicious and discontented Animal,” in the language of The Watchman (Watchman, 132). We may ultimately be perfectible, as Coleridge tacitly concedes in the name he awards his heroine: Christabel,

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as James McCartney Ewing notes, “is Christ-able, i.e. necessarily fallen, but ultimately perfectible, perfect ‘even as our Father in heaven is perfect.’ ”13 Yet that virtual saintliness is a goal, not a donné, and its accomplishment demands a renunciation of “Innocence.” Ordinarily Coleridge’s Unitarian references to “Innocence” are at least faintly derogatory: “Innocence implies the Absence of Vice from the absence of Temptation,” he remarked in the Lectures on Revealed Religion; “Virtue the Absence of Vice from the knowledge of its Consequences” (LPR, 108). What Coleridge terms “Innocence” is naiveté, a sheltered virtue untested and unreliable. Christabel’s progress to heroic “Virtue” demands that she undergo sufferings which arise not merely from existential circumstance but also from her own flawed human nature. In no way do Coleridge’s religious attitudes shape Christabel more decisively, I think, than in his acknowledgment of Original Sin. His heterodox notion of Original Sin expressly accounts for the guiltless fallibility at the heart of Christabel’s character and actions in the poem. But further, by denying that virtue is inherent or innate, by acknowledging it as produced, Coleridge can focus his narrative on the process of its production—on the system of psychic relocations through which a virtuous personality, in this case Christabel’s conflicted saintliness, gets itself constructed. Coleridge announces his interest in the construction of virtue and in the related issue of the creation and emergence of Geraldine in the comparatively little-discussed but brilliant passage which begins part 2 of the text. There, ringing bells associated with prayer, order, patriarchy, custom, and law set off a succession of antithetical echoes: In Langdale Pike and Witch’s Lair, And Dungeon-ghyll so foully rent, With ropes of rock and bells of air Three sinful sextons’ ghosts are pent, Who all give back, one after t’other, The death-note to their living brother; (338–43)

By subsequently mentioning the devil’s merry mockery, Bracy frames these lines comically, making their litany of death-notes a lighthearted joke. But Bracy remains an ineffectual figure in the poem, a poet able to experience revelatory dreams but unable to seize on their significance even when Geraldine stands before him in the morning light. Coleridge’s more considerable powers of insight lie behind this passage, a passage that serves as a paradigm of the relationship of Christabel and Geraldine. Leoline’s ringing bells— church bells dedicated to prayer and the memory of his wife—are punning images of the other “bell” in his life, his daughter Christabel. In their religious

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and disciplinary associations, the bells testify to the moral regimen which has fashioned Christabel’s identity on the beauty of Christ. Yet these bells produce echoes that antithetically transform what they imitate, disfiguring prayerful music as sounds reminiscent of constraint, violence, and witchcraft. The echoes are at once aural doublings and transposed denials, as well as complements, of the ordering gestures that produced them: so is Geraldine, critics agree, the sinister alter ego of Christabel. As these lines intimate, Coleridge’s insights into moral psychology extended apparently into an appreciation of sublimation, displacement, projection, and especially repression. Coleridge has occasionally been denied credit for psychoanalytic understanding—as in Norman Fruman’s account of his misinterpretations of his own dreams14—but the linkages between identity formation and sexual denial in Christabel certainly seem like Coleridgean anticipations of the return of the repressed. Coleridge’s grasp of repression provides one explanation for his interest in Saint Theresa as a model for Christabel. Coleridge compared the two figures, remarking once that Crashaw’s verses on St. Theresa “were ever present to my mind whilst writing the second part of Christabel; if, indeed, by some subtle process of the mind they did not suggest the first thought of the whole poem.”15 The lines Coleridge emphasizes, from the “Hymn to Saint Theresa,” recount Theresa’s willingness to “travell to a martyrdome.” What appears most striking about the Saint Theresa poems, however, is less the motif of spiritual pilgrim—age than Crashaw’s heightening of the traditional use of sexual imagery to describe union with God—as in the piercing arrow of “The Flaming Heart” and such erotically suggestive lines such as these: Shee never undertooke to know, What death with love should have to doe Nor hath shee ere yet understood Why to show love shee should shed blood. (19–22)

Christabel’s predicament may have reminded Coleridge of Saint Theresa, in short, because his early conception of Theresa anticipated his later analysis of her in the Philosophical Lectures—as Paul Magnuson has brilliantly speculated.16 There Coleridge casts Theresa’s spiritual raptures as the sublimated reflexes of bodily denials. Theresa’s father, Coleridge reports, opposed her retreat to a nunnery, for he could perceive how utterly unfit such a nursery of inward fancies and outward privations were to a brain, heart, and bodily constitution like those of innocent, loving, and high-impassioned Theresa.

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What could come of it but a despairing anguish-stricken sinner or a mad saint? This frame of such exquisite sensibility by nature and by education shaken and ruined by the violence done to her nature; but her obstinate resolve to become a nun against her own wishes, and against her fears, arose out of a resolve of duty, finishing in a burning fever which ended in madness for many months. . . . Combine these causes only and you will see how almost impossible it was that a maiden so innocent and so susceptible, of an imagination so lively by nature, and so fever-kindled by disease and its occasions . . . should not mistake, and often, the less painful and in such a frame the sometimes pleasurable approaches to bodily deliquium, and her imperfect fainting-fits for divine transports, and momentary union with God—especially if with a thoughtful yet pure psychology you join the force of suppressed instincts stirring in the heart and bodily frame, of a mind unconscious of their nature and these in the keenly-sensitive body, in the innocent and loving soul of Theresa, with “all her thirsts, and lives, and deaths of love,” and what remains unsolved, for which the credulity of the many and the knavery of a few will not furnish ample explanation?17

It is easy enough to associate this commentary with Coleridge’s account of a loving girl moved to prayer, in the language of the 1816 text, by dreams of her lover “that made her moan and leap, / As on her bed she lay in sleep” (29–30). Here the body’s restless tossing—Christabel is almost twitchingobliquely discloses banished desires the conscience will not own. When we trace Coleridge’s explorations of the origins of evil to the issue of the embattled construction of virtue and from there to the dynamics of repression and projection, it is not Theresa, however, but Geraldine to whom we are finally led. In a recent article, Christian La Cassagnère has provided an account of Geraldine as the uncanny “double of Christabel” especially pertinent for its reminder, pace Freud and Rank, that the double embodies “drives or desires that have been repressed because they are at odds with the subject’s ethical or social standards.”18 In her role as specular other, Geraldine by her very presence testifies to the tensions and denials underlying Christabel’s virtuous self-image—and to her unavoidable contact with evil. For me, the most curious aspect of scholarly belief in Christabel’s innocence, finally, is its coexistence with an almost equally widespread belief in Geraldine as Christabel’s dark double—to the end that critics identify Geraldine as the emissary of sin and leave Christabel morally vindicated, while simultaneously interpreting Geraldine as Christabel’s displaced persona. In any event, nothing contests the fiction of Christabel’s freedom from sin more effectively

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than the psychomachic allegory underlying Coleridge’s text. The doubling of Christabel and Geraldine in effect deconstructs the possibility of innocence by demonstrating how “the differences between entities”—in this case good and evil—“are shown to be based on a repression of differences within entities, ways in which an entity differs from itself.”19 When Christabel’s act of stretching forth her hand to Geraldine glances at Milton’s Eve, Coleridge stages a Fall conceived as self-violation, a closed transference of corruption to one aspect of the human personality from another in which that corruption was already present all along. So in Christabel Coleridge associates Original Sin with an inner division, an estrangement of the moral will from itself: that much seems paradigmatic for the narrative, its real reason for featuring Christabel and Geraldine. Next I simply want to consider what else Geraldine conveys about Coleridge’s sense of evil. Geraldine and the Problem of Mediation Any inquiry into the moral vision of Christabel must come to terms with Geraldine in her three principle roles: as a personification of sexuality, as a surrogate mother, and as an untrustworthy image—a simulacrum or mirage. About the first of these roles there can be little doubt. From the time of Roy P. Basler and Gerald Enscoe, if not from the time of the poem’s first reviews, Coleridge criticism has discerned the power of eros in Geraldine20 —and indeed, a seductress before all else, she moves through the poem virtually as an allegorical figure of sexual desire. What cannot be emphasized enough is that she is also a predator. As I noted earlier, accomplished critics applaud her as an agent of erotic liberation and psychic wholeness, but such defenses slight both the darkness of Coleridge’s poem and his own profoundly troubled attitude towards sex. Celebrations of Geraldine as an avatar of the Great Mother and champion of erotic jouissance would have struck Coleridge himself, I believe, as moral liberalism at its most sentimental and self-deceived. With her appearance signifying a return of the repressed, Geraldine represents not merely libido but the motives of repression, the harrowing guilt and fear that accompany desire for Christabel and for the poet as well. By integrating the motifs of sexual initiation, dream, and especially touch—“In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell” (255)—the white-robed Geraldine seems like a revenant from some of Coleridge’s own sexually charged nightmares. Coleridge scholars will be familiar with these examples, culled from the poet’s notebooks: a most frightful Dream of a Woman whose features were blended with darkness catching hold of my right eye & attempting to pull it out—I caught hold of her arm fast—a horrid feel. . . . (CN, 1.848)

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I was followed up & down by a frightful pale woman who, I thought, wanted to kiss me, & had the property of giving a shameful Disease by breathing in the face. . . . (CN, 1.1250) out rushes a university Harlot, who insists on my going with her / offer her a shilling—seem to get away a moment / when she overtakes me again / I am not to go to another while she is “biting”—these were her words /—this will not satisfy her / . . . a little weak contemptible wretch offering his Services, & I (as before afraid to refuse them) literally & distinctly remembered a former Dream, in which I had suffered most severely, this wretch leaping on me, & grasping my Scrotum. (CN, 1.1726)

Here are the matrices of Geraldine: she is, as Kathleen Coburn suggested years ago, “a malignity out of Coleridge’s own dreams.”21 Now, there is a careful evenhandedness to Coleridge’s presentation of her. Geraldine’s defenders emphasize that she hesitates in the seduction scene and refers to her apparent disfiguration as “This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow” (258), so she has not fully acquiesced to her own depravity— and rightly so, for she signifies not absolute evil but evil bearing a human face, evil divested of any comforting otherness. She must be divided within, moreover, to qualify as Christabel’s double. Coleridge cannot confine the psychic divisions of his text to Christabel’s projection of Geraldine as an independent character: that would display goodness triumphantly exorcising evil, separating itself from evil, when what we have of the text insists on the complex entanglement of good and evil. So Christabel’s moral state of predominant virtue tainted by sin should produce its symmetrical obverse in Geraldine’s state of predominant evil qualified by a residual good. Yet, emphatically it is a merely residual good. Sexuality become Iago-like, Geraldine signifies a calculating malevolence with the shape-changing ability to exploit the vulnerabilities at hand. She is the deceiver, the thing in the darkness, lurking on “the other side” (43) whose name is an anagram of “Dire Angel,” a Satanic epithet.22 She is the nightmare-bringer, a conveyer of guilt, abjection, and violation. Like the vampire, or the mistletoe of Coleridge’s opening sequence, she parasitically lives off others. The supernatural occurrences marking her entry into the castle—the need to be carried, the suddenly flaring torches, the dog troubled in its sleep—associate her with witchcraft because witches traditionally figured in the night fears of Coleridge’s culture. “However lenient we are to Geraldine,” Robert H. Siegel insists, “it is obvious that she still ‘represents’ the power of evil.”23 So she does: the poet’s Christian faith and personal psychological history left him deeply convinced of the existence of

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evil as evil, and Geraldine embodies that conviction. The leniency occasionally shown her by readers merely testifies to Coleridge’s Miltonic success in rendering sin charismatic. Geraldine’s role as a figure of libido by no means establishes her ultimate benevolence. Rather, it illustrates one of the most palpable aspects of Christabel’s moral purview, its association of evil with sexuality. That association was traditional enough—the poet would certainly have met with it in Boehme, Beer reminds us24—and Christabel links it to an equally traditional association of sexual desire and death. The connection of Eros to Thanatos emerged in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner when Coleridge paired his whorish Lifein-Death with Death himself. It emerges in Christabel through the death of the heroine’s mother in childbirth, a death which Charles J. Rzepka regards as the principle motive for Christabel’s fears of sex.25 Yet, while the mortality of the body invariably conditions the problem of bodily desire, Christabel’s thwarted efforts to love seem to originate from the particular ways in which her sexual awakening activates the latent tensions of certain family relationships. The family problems which Christabel emphasizes culminate in Geraldine’s appropriation of the maternal, but they do not originate with her appearance. They originate for Christabel with Sir Leoline, the only parent she has known. Coleridge’s criticism tends to handle Leoline roughly, accusing him of crimes ranging from a stultifying asceticism to outright incest.26 He plainly seems emotionally authoritarian and life-denying. As his matin-bells custom reveals, Leoline is a religious man who has sought consolation from heaven for the loss of his wife and who has idealized his surviving daughter in similar terms. If the name he assigns her conjures Christ and Abel as archetypal victims, it also connotes the beauty of Christ. Christabel’s belief in her mother as a guardian angel is a story presumably first told to her by Leoline. By making Leoline’s daughter the object and rationale of the mother’s ghostly presence, the story conveys his efforts to retain some connection to his wife through his daughter. But those efforts, if natural enough, create a ripple effect of emotional ambivalence. They place Christabel in a compensatory role. The poem suggests that she has tried to minister emotionally to her father to make up for the absence of his wife—all the more so since her birth occasioned her mother’s death, as Christabel knows well. So her father’s emotional needs on the one hand encourage her identification with the mother as does the process of her sexual maturation. On the other hand, Leoline’s idealization of Christabel and need to keep her has conversely tended to infantilize his daughter, encouraging her to remain, as Rzepka comments, “the little girl [he] wants her to be.”27 The conflicting demands made on Christabel by her relationship with her father result in an analogous ambivalence in her attitudes toward her mother. It would

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be plausible for Christabel to feel guilt about her mother’s death. Given a child’s emotional needs and incomprehension of death, however, her most probable early reaction was to feel abandoned. If the fiction of the mother as “guardian spirit” (206) serves to vicariously reconnect Leoline to his dead wife, it more powerfully ensures Christabel’s connection to the maternal. It allows the girl to believe in herself as loved. At the same time, predictably, the mother’s ghostly presence keeps the fact of her death constantly in mind. The cost of this comforting fiction is continual reconfirmation of the mother’s mortality, of Christabel’s implication in her death, and of her daughterly obligation to make amends for the mother’s absence by taking on her role—a role she cannot perform, of course, without on some level replacing and thus betraying the mother. From this complex of identification, substitution, and resistance springs Geraldine, precipitated by Christabel’s growing sense of identity crisis and, as Spatz argued, her fears of sexual experience in light of her planned marriage.28 Figuring Christabel’s unconscious as the site where her banished desires have gathered and intensified, Geraldine becomes the dutiful daughter’s ominous double. Yet in what can appear the single most brilliant move of Coleridge’s poem, Geraldine also becomes the mother’s double.29 For Geraldine can acquire power only by vanquishing the mother and assuming her prerogatives. It is Geraldine, tellingly, who can actually see the hovering spirit of the mother in Christabel’s bedroom, and Geraldine who dismisses the spirit: “Off, wandering mother! Peak and pine! “I have power to bid thee flee.” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Off woman, off! this hour is mine— “Though thou her guardian spirit be, “Off woman, off! ’tis given to me.” (199–201 and 205–7)

Geraldine seizes her hour by then drinking “the wild-flower wine,” described previously by Christabel as “a wine of virtuous powers; / My mother made it of wild flowers” (214, 186–87). When this wine restores her, we witness Geraldine retrieving her powers of action only as she appropriates the role of the mother. That reappropriation will leave her on the arm of Sir Leoline in a scene where he often strikes readers as sexually infatuated: it will leave her in the place of the mother, in short. Before that comes her violation of Christabel and its pieta-like aftermath: And lo! the worker of these harms, That holds the maiden in her arms,

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Seems to slumber still and mild, As a mother with her child. (286–89)

Here the serenity of Geraldine’s own sleep reflects her success in securing the role of the mother for herself. As a consequence of that triumph—it is an important measure of her insidiousness and power to corrupt—Geraldine acts as the double of Christabel herself and the double of the mother. The ultimate import of these paired doublings seems plain enough: in Coleridge’s poem the heroine can access her own sexuality (Geraldine as Christabel’s unconscious, the site of libidinal energy) only through her mother (Geraldine as maternal icon). As to why that sexual logic should impose itself in Christabel, psychoanalytic readings of the text differ almost luxuriantly. The poem conjures the mother amid its sexually charged bedroom scene because, the scholarship speculates, Christabel’s yearning for the mother motivates the two women’s lesbian encounter; or because Geraldine enacts Christabel’s oedipal desire to commandeer her mother’s relationship with Leoline; or because desire, in its effort to circumvent patriarchal regulation, seeks “to obey the law of ‘the mother’ ”; or, again, because Christabel’s wariness of sexual initiation arises from the reflection that pregnancy killed her mother.30 Underlying these dissimilar formulations, however, lies a common insistence on emotional and psychological ambivalence. As Christabel and Geraldine both appear in the poem because the conflicted Christabel feels two ways at once about her daughterly sexuality, so are there two mothers, the angelic guardian and her sinister double. The familial circumstances in which Christabel has formed her identity have left her oscillating between love and hate, abjection and aggression, in her self-image and her attitudes towards the lost mother in whom that self-image remains so poignantly invested. Christabel scholarship has often explained the ambivalence of the poem’s character relationships by looking to the author. This scholarship takes Christabel as a feminine persona for the poet, noting that Coleridge sometimes identified himself with birds, even as the text depicts Christabel as a dove, and invoking his references to himself as an orphan.31 Christabel’s situation is displaced autobiography, then, with the girl’s ambivalence toward her mother acting as an occluded reference to Coleridge’s own troubled relations with his mother, Ann, following his father’s death. Ann Coleridge was by all accounts an emotionally cold woman who inspired a sense of duty more than love in her sons. She was also socially ambitious for her family, valuing worldly success and pressuring her sons to achieve it. The financial reversals occasioned by her husband John’s unexpected death in 1781 devastated her. And her humiliation ended up exacerbated, ironically, by her decision to

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send Samuel to Christ’s Hospital in London. The school had been founded specifically for the sons of impoverished clergymen—the standard petition for admission requested the applicant “there to be Educated and brought up among other poor Children”—and Coleridge’s older brothers, Rosemary Ashton remarks, “were ashamed to have him visit them in his school uniform.”32 Ann Coleridge apparently never once visited her youngest son during his Christ’s Hospital years. Having established him there, she seems to have washed her hands of him emotionally: by conceding “ ‘the right of the Governors of Christ’s Hospital to apprentice her son,’ if Sam did not prove academically promising.” Richard Holmes writes, Ann “effectively put Sam’s destiny in the hands of the Christ’s Hospital authorities, and did indeed make him the child of an institution.” These events explain why Coleridge could tell Tom Poole that Tom’s mother “was the only Being whom I ever felt in the relation of Mother” (CL, 2.758). Clearly Coleridge construed his own mother’s behavior to him as abandonment. If that construction may be partly Coleridge’s retrospective projection, as Holmes allows, the fact remains that “he felt this rejection as deeply as anything in his life.”33 He internalized it as a sense of inadequacy accompanied, David Beres first surmised, by an unconscious hostility toward his mother. Just so, the death of Christabel’s mother at once replays the experience of abandonment and represents the child’s unconscious aggressions toward the mother. This ambivalence recurs in Geraldine, in whom, Beres contends, we witness “the mother, . . . killed by the child in the act of birth, returning to seek vengeance.”34 Yet Christabel seems to restage the psychological conflicts of Coleridge’s life, especially his sense of the traumatizing power of parental rejection, in even more specific ways. This restaging can be seen in the relationship between the final events of part 2 of the poem and the “little child” “Conclusion to Part the Second” (644–65). Part 2 ends with Leoline’s dismissal of Christabel. Feeling “Dishonour’d by his only child” for her ostensible inhospitality to Geraldine, Sir Leoline “[turns] from his own sweet maid” (631, 641). At that point, Christabel’s situation mirrors Coleridge’s own unhappy childhood: both have one dead parent and a disapproving second parent who withholds love and casts the child away. The gender identities are symmetrically transposed: for the female Christabel the mother dies and the father disowns, whereas for the male Coleridge matters arrange themselves the other way around. But those defensive reversals, arguably, were what freed Coleridge imaginatively to project a version of “his own experience . . . screened through a female figure.”35 So in his heroine’s plight Coleridge obliquely—and no doubt unconsciously—figures himself as an abandoned child. In the lines which immediately follow, interestingly, he figures himself as an irrationally scolding father. For, since the unjustly reprimanded child in the “Conclusion

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to Part the Second” of Christabel is a portrait of Coleridge’s son Hartley, as the poet’s letters show (CL, 2:728–29), then the father who upbraids him should analogously be a portrait of Coleridge himself. The “Conclusion” consequently depicts a second-generation tragedy. Turning from Christabel’s abandonment to Hartley’s chastisement, we move from an image of Coleridge as abused child to a mirroring image of Coleridge as an abusive father who abuses his son just as he was abused as a child: traumatizing rejection acquires a family pedigree. Here Coleridge provides a genealogy for the pain and frustration born of the will’s inherent ambivalence. The poet’s initial account of a father reacting to a young boy’s spontaneous happiness with seemingly unmotivated rage and his subsequent speculation that such “rage and pain” are reflexes of “love’s excess” (664 and 652) invokes a world where “the energies of wrath and the energies of love,” John Beer remarks, “are in necessary connection” to the point of “springing from the same source.”36 When the text identifies this ambivalence as the defining signature of “a world of sin” (661), it tacitly defines the ambivalence of the will as Original Sin. That implication also follows directly from Geraldine’s usurpation of the role of the mother. When Geraldine acts as both the double of Christabel and the double of the mother, Coleridge creates a situation in which Christabel can reclaim her own unconscious and become present-to-herself as a person only through the mediation of a (m)other—and only though the introjection of otherness. As in Lacan’s mirror-stage theory of identity formation, what constitutes the self also alienates it, inscribing it with a fundamental sense of lack.37 Versions of these ideas were of course wholly traditional in the Romantic period. Percy Bysshe Shelley too ascribed the origins of love to finding “within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void,” to the end that we “seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves.”38 Coleridge derived the impulse to love from an “instinctive Sense of Self-insufficingness” and acknowledged similarly that the “first lesson, that innocent Childhood affords me, is—that it is an instinct of my nature to pass out of myself, and to exist in the form of others” (CN, 4:4730 and 5:6487). Unfortunately, while it honors humanity’s impulse to love, this last 1830 notebook entry also reads like a retrospective gloss on the defining activities of Geraldine. Geraldine means many things, but she always figures Christabel’s desires in the alienating form of the other. As she passes from symbolic role to symbolic role in the course of the story, Geraldine shows us the inner emptiness that determines what Christabel wants: she wants her mother, she wants her own womanhood, she wants her father’s acceptance. She wants them because they have been experienced as withheld, and their absence, real or fantasized, has produced the tangled sense of inadequacy, guilt, compensation, and aggression discussed above. What

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Coleridge’s coda suggests is that Christabel’s familial experience of love as partly given and partly withdrawn has reflexively divided her own ability to love, bequeathing the moral will a fundamental and unavoidable ambivalence. Geraldine’s disfigurement leaves her divided above all—”Behold! her bosom and half her side—” (246, my emphasis)—and it is that dividedness that her touch transmits. Coleridge described the same inner division mentioned earlier in telling his brother George, again, that “our organization is depraved, & our volitions imperfect; and we sometimes see the good without wishing to attain it, and oftener wish it without the energy that wills & performs—” (CL, 1.396). Christabel advances beyond these claims by dramatizing how the human capacity to love is implicated in the corruption of the will, how the intention to love can be diverted, contrary to the subject’s intentions and dignity, in ways that breed misunderstanding and loneliness. So in Christabel, in sum, the association of Original Sin with the ambivalence of the will to love follows from Geraldine’s role as the estranging double of both Christabel’s libido and her mother. In developing its theology of desire, however, Coleridge’s poem traces the moral problem of love to origins which extend beyond the sexual and family matrices that Geraldine (in part) represents. Geraldine’s promiscuity suffuses her very doubling, which does not restrict itself to playing Christabel’s erotic alter ego or to impersonating the mother. Geraldine also lurks in Bracy’s unconscious, appearing in his dream as a green snake embracing/strangling the white dove. When she appears the next morning, her presence induces him to remark, “This dream it would not pass away—/ It seems to live upon my eye” (546–47)—and rightly so, for the woman before him epitomizes and replicates the dream. When Leoline meets Geraldine, he not only “kenn’d / In the beautiful lady the child of his friend” (433–34) but recognizes the beautiful child’s resemblance to her supposed father: Sir Leoline, a moment’s space, Stood gazing on the damsel’s face; And the youthful Lord of Tryermaine Came back upon his heart again. (415–18)

In Dr. James Gillman’s version of the poem’s projected conclusion, of course, Geraldine “changes her appearance to that of the accepted though absent lover of Christabel.”39 Of what character, one might then fairly ask, is Geraldine not in some way the double? Criticism of Coleridge’s poem appropriately reads her first as a libidinal projection and maternal figure. But Geraldine is Coleridge’s Romantic Duessa. Beyond her roles

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as a personification of sexuality and a surrogate mother, she discloses the dependence of all human desire on a mediating image and, for Coleridge as Christian moralist, an always shifting, treacherous image.40 The emphasis on Geraldine as a simulacrum in Christabel provides her powers of corruption and seduction with a conventional Christian genealogy. Even before his Anglican conversion, Coleridge understood human love in conventionally Christian terms, associating its essence, Barth shows, with the operation of the Divine Will as the ultimate principle of causality.41 Later Coleridge professed to “adore the living and personal God, whose Power indeed is the Ground of all Being, even as his Will is the efficient, his Wisdom the instrumental, and his Love the final, Cause of all Existence” (CL, 4.894). Love constitutes the energy by which God as Origin draws the human soul back to his fulfilling plenitude: for Coleridge there existed “a capaciousness in every living Heart, which retains an aching Vacuum . . . God only can fill it” (CL, 4.607). But this traditionally Christian theology of desire runs into the equally traditional problem of the Creator’s mysterious relation to his Creation. For Coleridge, people are “driven, by a desire of Self-completion with a restless & inextinguishable Love”—love for God—yet inhabit a world in which “God is not all things, for in this case he would be indigent of all; but all things are God, & eternally indigent of God” (CN, 1:1680)—a world, in other words, in which things refer to God without being fully coincident with him. Worldly objects of desire, considered theologically, are metaphors. They mix resemblance with difference in their flawed evocation of a God whose unmediated presence can alone fill the heart’s “Vacuum.” From the theological perspective embedded in Christabel, Geraldine is a liar and deceiver simply because she is a projected image, a false semblance. She confronts the other characters of the poem like a mirror designed to show them their deepest longings, but in the process she reveals their deepest existential wounds and then binds them to that pain by diverting them from the one adequate object of their “restless & inextinguishable Love.” As a perpetually self-recuperating principle of accommodation, she will pass from guise to guise—from Christabel to her mother to her absent knight—before confessing herself the lie she is. As a visitant from Coleridge’s dreams and an entrancing image, Geraldine above all discloses the power of the dreaming mind to create a succession of rationally uncontrolled images. Pondering the moral implications of his dreams, the poet at one point decides, I will at least make the attempt to explain to myself the Origin of moral Evil from the streamy Nature of Association, which Thinking = Reason, curbs & rudders / how this comes to be so difficult / Do not

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the bad Passions in Dreams throw light & shew of proof upon this Hypothesis? . . . But take in the blessedness of Innocent Children, the blessedness of sweet Sleep, &c &c &c: are these or are they not contradictions to the evil from streamy association?—I hope not. (CN, 1.1770)

It is precisely “the blessedness of sweet Sleep” that has been ruined in Christabel, as the heroine’s dreams make her “moan and leap” (29) and lead her toward a temptress who materializes as if conjured from dream. Disallowing the power of childhood innocence to contain “bad Passions,” the poem endorses the notebook entry’s attribution of “the Origin of moral Evil” to the flood of images in a mind unruddered by reason. Christabel locates evil at a nexus where sexuality, family romance, and the theological problem of mediation become densely entangled. Despite the text’s sexual and familial genealogies, it is the problem of mediating images which Coleridge’s religious faith moves him to emphasize. In presupposing a Christian antithesis of body and soul, reason and desire, Christabel becomes, as Barth has written, “a Coleridgean analogue of the Pauline ‘war of the members.’ ” 42 The moral and emotional ambivalence characterizing Coleridge’s notion of Original Sin derives from this ontological warfare. The apparitional aspect of Geraldine suggests, then, how easily the human need to desire through images becomes a spiritually corrupt desire for images. The figure of Geraldine also suggests how worldly objects of desire—as images that both are and are not what they represent—implicate the moral will in ambivalence and prevent the heart hungering for wholeness from wholly desiring what it desires. For this dilemma there exists just one solution for Coleridge, and he glances at it in the final role his poem bestows on Geraldine. Several critics have detected in Geraldine a faint, twisted palimpsest of Christ. Rhonda Johnson Ray reads Geraldine as a “Usurper of Christ,” for instance, while Jane Chambers sees Geraldine’s actions as a “perversion of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ.”43 Denials prefaced by a crowing cock, the apparently sacramental wine of the bedroom scene (reminiscent of the Last Supper, with a traitor present who will later kiss to betray), the motif of the soul as the bride of Christ, Geraldine’s comment “ ‘Off, woman, off! this hour is mine—’ ” (205), an allusion to Christ’s comment to those who arrest him, “this is your hour, and the power of darkness” (Luke 22:53): all these motifs inform the text like so many lost fragments of the life of Christ. The poem marshals none of them into coherent allegory, but, like Dante’s three-faced, cruciform Satan, they reassure readers that evil can only parody good, remaining parasitically dependent on it. For Coleridge, redemption lies in Christ,

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and Geraldine cannot at last conceal that truth. Disfigured into parody amid her false enticements survives an image of the sole object of desire and imitation through whom, Coleridge the Unitarian told a shattered Charles Lamb (CL, 1.239), human love can transcend its pain and find completion. Here, though, the image is distressingly faint, motivated but also undermined by the heroine’s anguish. Throughout the Mariner’s ordeals he retains powers of endurance that leave The Rime, in my experience, far less disturbing than the story of Christabel. In Christabel, Coleridge depicts a human being emptied out, divested of her personality and reduced to dehumanized instrumentality, at the pleasure of another. Christabel’s situation qualifies as archetypal victimization—and no comfort arises when Coleridge traces the girl’s baffled abjection to her earliest childhood memories, her “childhood of terror” as Anya Taylor calls it,44 or when he associates her plight with an existentially irreducible state of guilt, or when the text’s psychological allegory refigures events as instances of the self preying upon the self. The poem is Coleridge’s darkest account of a human soul’s powerlessness to resist the forces arrayed against it. Beyond Unitarianism The situations and concerns of Christabel recur in other poems Coleridge wrote, or tried to write, in 1797–1800. In “Love,” apparently conceived as an introduction to “The Ballad of the Dark Ladie,” the knight suffers when his devotion is cruelly scorned, as Christabel does when her father rejects her, but that devotion also saves “from outrage worse than death / The lady of the Land” (PW, 1.604.55–56), much as Christabel saved Geraldine. When his singing of this tale wins the speaker his Genevieve, “Love” makes the knight’s rejection the vicarious means of the speaker’s acceptance, as if Coleridge were fantasizing a happy ending for Christabel’s predicament. “The Three Graves” is even more closely engaged with issues central to Christabel (PW, 1.336). In “The Three Graves,” Coleridge domesticates the powers of guilt and suggestion that he had been reading about, he tells us in his prefatory comments on the poem, in an “account of the effect of the Oby witchcraft on the Negroes in the West-Indies.” 45 Christabel not only uses witchcraft as a metaphor for psychological fixation and control but recalls the malevolent, sexually aggressive mother of “The Three Graves” when Geraldine appropriates that role in winning the affections of Sir Leoline. “The Wanderings of Cain” shares with Christabel its interest in Original Sin and the double (PW, 1.358). The shape that appears to Cain in the wilderness in the likeness of Abel, tempting him both to blind himself and to sacrifice his son, is a false semblance of Abel assumed by the evil spirit in order to ruin Cain. Yet the shape is surely also, as Beer surmises, “an apparition

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conjured up by Cain’s own faulty consciousness,” 46 and, as such, a projection in which his guilt over the death of Abel returns in the punitive form of the other. As they ramify through variant formulations in related texts, the problems of Christabel come to seem like signs of a developmental impasse. By 1800 Coleridge appears increasingly unable to sustain, and certainly to resolve, the moral dialectic on which his more ambitious work depended. And that inability reflects in part the waning hold of Unitarian Optimism on his moral imagination. The imaginative crisis occasioned by Coleridge’s changing religious views centered on “the Origin of Evil” and the providential purpose of human misery. In Christabel the question of why evil exists, posed through the representation of the heroine’s sufferings, acquires particular urgency because her sufferings seem so unmerited and devastating. Readings of Christabel that offer a moral rationale for the heroine’s tribulations usually argue that she suffers so as to redeem others—such as Sir Leoline or her missing knight.47 Christabel’s knight remains the preferred candidate for redemption, generally, because critics take their cue from Coleridge’s own recollections about the poem. Gillman famously reported Coleridge telling him that The story of Christabel is partly founded on the notion, that the virtuous of this world save the wicked. The pious and good Christabel suffers and prays for “the weal of her lover that is far away,” exposed to various temptations in a foreign land; and she thus defeats the power of evil represented in the person of Geraldine. This is one main object of the tale. (The Life, 283)

This reminiscence has often seemed impressive due to its consistency with other statements Coleridge made, as when he informed his son Derwent that the “sufferings of Christabel were to have been represented as vicarious, endured for ‘her lover far away.’ ” 48 Here the connection of Christabel with St. Theresa has seemed similarly to provide important secondary corroboration. Humphry House, for instance, argued that “since the central theme of the Crashaw poem is the desire for martyrdom, and since the traditional view of martyrdom, and of the virtue in the blood of martyrs, includes the idea of the value to others of vicarious suffering, this one remark of Coleridge’s tends strongly to reinforce the evidence of Derwent Coleridge and the shorter account given by Gillman.” 49 By undergoing “martyrdom at her father’s castle,” House added, “Christabel would make atonement for the wrongs committed by her absent lover.”50 As House’s phrasing implies, the notion of Christabel expiating the sins of her knight in his absence invokes

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the doctrine of the Atonement, and other critics lend the implication even greater emphasis. Siegel remarks that, while “nearly all of Coleridge’s narrative poems and fragments of narratives reflect his interest in the theme of vicarious suffering, . . . it is in ‘Christabel’ that the theme of vicarious atonement . . . finds the most complete expression.” David Perkins concurs, flatly stating that Coleridge conceived Christabel to “be based ultimately on the Christian doctrine of the Atonement.”51 Finally, I cannot accept the pivotal importance granted Christabel’s missing knight in readings depending on Gillman and Derwent Coleridge,52 or agree that the logic of the Atonement organizes the representation of suffering in Christabel. Justifications of Christabel’s suffering even tacitly linked to the Atonement lose their aura of authorial sanction the moment we look beyond the Gillman and Derwent Coleridge reports of the poet’s conversation to his own accounts of his religious beliefs. During the years which spanned the composition of Christabel, Coleridge continued to regard the Atonement as “perhaps the most irrational and gloomy Superstition that ever degraded the human mind” (LLR 204). In dismissing the orthodox Atonement, Coleridge once more accepted Priestley’s critique of moral vicariousness. If, he asked, Sin be of so heinous a nature that God cannot pardon it without adequate satisfaction—if each man must have expiated his individual Sins by eternal Torture, how is it consistent with this dreadful Equity, this Tartarean justice, that the sufferings of one Being for a few hours should prove an adequate Satisfaction for the Sins of the whole World—Did this Being miraculously suffer in that brief Day as much as all mankind would have suffered through all Eternity? . . . But however mysteriously yet a full and adequate Satisfaction has, it seems, been thus made to the divine justice. . . . How then does it happen, that Repentance and good works are necessary? (LPR, 205–6)

Repentance and good works are necessary because people must save their own souls. The Crucifixion was not an act of sacrificial appeasement that vicariously redeemed others or that created the possibility of salvation where it did not exist previously. As a Unitarian, Coleridge believed in a human, exemplary Jesus whose Crucifixion and consequent Resurrection illustrated saving truths and pointed the way that others must take on their own, with Christ “voluntarily submitting to a cruel death,” Coleridge wrote, only “in order that he might confirm the Faith or awaken the Gratitude of Men” (LPR 203–4). Coleridge of course realized that virtuous actions could

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inspire a change of heart and behavior in other persons. Yet such changes are a matter of individual moral influence rather than vicarious atonement. Coleridge’s Highgate description of his heroine’s sufferings “as vicarious, endured for ‘her lover far away’ ” seems like an exaggeration designed to provide the conventionally orthodox Gillman with a denouement he could find understandable and satisfying on his own terms.53 If Coleridge saw a way of resolving the problem of evil in Christabel in 1798–1800, that resolution would have invoked not the Anglican Atonement but the doctrine of philosophical necessity. Necessity was an integral element of the Priestleyan Unitarianism to which Coleridge converted at Cambridge: he happily announced himself a “Necessarian” as early as 1796 (CL, 1.213) and insisted on the necessitarian aspect of Unitarian theology throughout his intellectual career. For Coleridge, necessity had both metaphysical and psychological aspects, designating a causal principle of the universe internalized in human consciousness. For the form of its internalization, he was, like Priestley before him, indebted to David Hartley’s explanations of cognitive association. Yet Hartley’s psychological exposition had also demonstrated that “the Doctrine of Necessity,” as Hartley admitted in his Preface, “followed from that of Association.”54 So necessity emerged as the direct metaphysical corollary of Hartley’s theory of the mind. The second part of Observations on Man reconciled that metaphysics with traditional Christianity; Priestley’s discussions of necessity, especially Illustrations of Philosophical Necessity, then reconciled Hartley’s Christian necessitarianism with Unitarian theology—to the end that necessity was conceived as an encompassing principle of orderly causation. For defenders of necessity, the will was irresistibly obligated to laws of motivation that, originating ultimately in God, assimilate all events to a providential benevolence. Experiences of human suffering follow from humanity’s self-centered inability to understand the cosmic scheme and are indispensable if people are to attain the moral wisdom which will alone secure their happiness. Coleridge echoed Priestley in declaring it “necessary that Man should run through the Course of Vice & Mischief since by Experience alone his Virtue and Happiness can acquire Permanence & Security” (LPR, 108). The sufferings imparted by evil are morally educative, allowing for inner growth from a false “Innocence” based on inexperience to a genuine “Virtue” based on an understanding of vice and its consequences (ibid.)—the very development that Coleridge may have initially intended for Christabel. For Coleridge the Unitarian, Christabel’s sufferings become morally purposive only insofar as they contribute crucially to her own progress to virtue. Any narrative continuation that presented her anguish as the requisite

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means of another’s salvation, in effect instrumentally sacrificing her, would invariably reconfirm the theology of Atonement. Geraldine remains the one character whose redemption by Christabel would be morally conceivable in the world of the poem, but only because Geraldine-as-double is finally not a character independent of Christabel at all. Christabel’s salvation of Geraldine would allegorize Christabel healing herself. Healing of that sort is the telos proposed by rite-of-passage readings such as Spatz’s essay on sexual initiation in Christabel. For Spatz, the heroine’s tribulations allow her growth into psychologically integral adulthood, an achievement which redeems the pain they occasioned, even as Christabel redeems Geraldine by incorporating libidinal energy in her own conscious personality: had Coleridge finished the poem, Spatz believes, he would have revealed Geraldine symbolically “merging with the adolescent Christabel to form a loving and virtuous wife.”55 This too may be a developmental model Coleridge initially intended for his heroine. But when the hissing Christabel of part 2 begins to imitate the lamia-like aspects of Geraldine—when Geraldine begins to incorporate Christabel, in short, rather than the other way around—any redemptive plan envisioned by Coleridge threatens to turn itself inside out. Unfortunately, Christabel lacks any sense of a spiritually ordained moral progress. What lingers in memory as the poem ends is Christabel as a virtually helpless victim, with Geraldine as her suave despoiler: that imbalance determines the affective power of the poem, undermining its occasional gestures at developmental or providential order. Derwent Coleridge’s assurances that Geraldine is “no witch or goblin, or malignant being of any kind, but a spirit, executing her appointed task with the best good will” seem simply unaccountable.56 The mother as sentimentalized guardian angel, Geraldine’s hesitation in the bedroom scene, her statement that “All they, who live in the upper sky, / Do love you, holy Christabel,” and Christabel’s own reflection “That saints will aid if men will call: / For the blue sky bends over all!” (221–22 and 318–19)—all of these flickerings of psychological and supernatural benevolence obtrude in the narrative-like remnants of a once-structural optimism fallen into ruin. So if what Christabel needs, amid the philosophical resources available to Coleridge at this point in his development, is a credible representation of necessity, that is nonetheless exactly what the text lacks, and there is a logic to its absence. For Coleridge’s renunciation of Unitarianism followed directly from his growing dissatisfaction with the doctrine of philosophical necessity. That dissatisfaction appears to have begun as early as 1799–1800. Mann concluded that “by 1799 [Coleridge’s] disenchantment with the doctrine of necessity was virtually complete”57 and adduced in support of that claim the 1799 letter in which Coleridge reflected on the death of his infant son Berkeley:

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I will not believe that it [human life] ceases—in this moving stirring and harmonious Universe I cannot believe it!—Can cold and darkness come from the Sun? where the Sun is not—there is cold and darkness!—But the living God is every where, & works every where—and where is there room for Death? . . . That God works by general laws are to me words without meaning or worse than meaningless—Ignorance and Imbecillity, and Limitation must wish in generals—What and who are these horrible shadows necessity and general law, to which God himself must offer sacrifices—hecatombs of Sacrifices? . . . God works in each for all—most true—but more comprehensively true is it, that he works in all for each.—I confess that the more I think, the more I am discontented with the doctrines of Priestley. (CL, 1.481–82)

If necessitarians in the Unitarian community reject a sacrificial atonement, they nonetheless endorse an implicit sacrificial logic, Coleridge scathingly observes, in avowing the benevolence of necessity on general grounds. The closing reference to Priestley occasions little surprise: Coleridge’s condemnation of “necessity and general Law” glances specifically at Priestley’s vindication of evil in The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated: Where could there be clemency, fortitude, elevation of soul, and deep resignation to the will of God, which form the most glorious and excellent of characters, but in struggling with the difficulties that arise from injustice, ingratitude, and vice, of all other kinds, as well as from outward adversity and distress; so that even the supposition of there being no general laws of nature (which would, probably, be the greatest of all evils) but of God doing every thing singly, and in a manner independent of every thing else, would not be of any advantage in this case. (PN, 514)

The supposition would offer no advantage, that is, for a faith in benevolence willing to overlook instances of individual misery in celebrating the glorious pattern God establishes through “general laws of nature.” By 1799 Coleridge believed, conversely, that the Deity “works in all for each,” that the fate of every individual person remained centrally implicated in the question of cosmic justice. He grew dissatisfied with necessity, in short, as its optimism came to seem morally inhumane. As suspect as overly neat solutions can appear, it is difficult not to read the problems of Christabel as a variation on this exact moral crisis: a heightened awareness of human anguish and corresponding inability to affirm any

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kind of providential necessity. The torments of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are contextualized by the One Life. Arguments that The Rime dramatizes not salvation but nightmare may call the effectiveness of Coleridge’s One Life frame into question, but the frame remains present as an element of the text, one capable of inspiring a love-as-prayer homily in which at least the Mariner himself seems sincerely to believe. And certainly the moral dialectic that energizes Coleridge’s greatest poetry requires some compelling conception of goodness. Coleridge began Christabel, I suggest, interested in Original Sin but satisfied that his heroine’s well-intentioned openness to others could anchor his plot in the requisite image of goodness. His story ended up as beguiled by Geraldine as Christabel herself became. The girl’s personal character could not effectively counterbalance so potent a representation of evil in the absence of a complementary representation of transcendent goodness. That inability, signifying Coleridge’s enhanced sense of human fallenness, stands as the narrative analogue of his moral conviction that people cannot simply save themselves with the readiness envisioned by Priestleyan rational theology. Nor, of course, would the Lochinvar-like arrival of Christabel’s wandering knight avail: Magnuson is right to say that Christabel’s “restoration must come from within.”58 She cannot be redeemed by her lover’s active gallantry any more than he can be saved by her passive suffering. So as part 2 of Christabel reaches its term, Coleridge manages to paint himself into a corner: the poem can imagine moral corruption but not moral redemption. We do not lack explanations of Coleridge’s inability to finish Christabel. One need only summon the poet’s disintegrating personal life and medical condition or point to Wordsworth’s crippling decision to remove the poem from Lyrical Ballads (see CL, 1.623) to account for the text’s fragmentariness. If we look to the plot of Christabel, however, an additional reason suggests itself: the poem outgrew the Unitarian optimism inherent in its conception. Through its failure to place human loneliness and anguish within a convincing moral teleology, Christabel anticipates Coleridge’s 1805 conversion to Anglicanism: “it burst upon me at once as an awful Truth,” he confided to his notebook, “No Christ, No God! . . . Unitarianism in all its Forms is Idolatry” (CN, 2.2448). “No Christ, no God” indeed: central to Coleridge’s conversion experience was his longstanding need—and newfound ability—to bring human suffering and spiritual transcendence together in a single image.

No t e s 1. Coleridge’s entry is number 161 f21 [c] from vol. 1 of The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, M. Christensen, and A. J. Harding, 5 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957–2002), hereafter abbreviated CN; for Lamb’s reminiscence, see The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin

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W. Marrs, Jr., 3 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975–78), 1:97 (boldface in original). Coleridge’s correspondence is cited from the Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), hereafter abbreviated CL. For Coleridge’s prose, I use The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, gen. ed. Coburn, 16 vols., Bollingen Series 75 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971–2002): individual vols. cited include vol. 1, Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (1971), hereafter abbreviated LPR; vol. 2, The Watchman, ed. Patton (1970); vol. 6, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (1972); vol. 8, Lectures 1818–1818: On the History of Philosophy, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols. (2000); vol. 14, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols. (1990); vol. 16, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays, 3 vols. (2001), hereafter abbreviated PW. For convenience, however, I cite Christabel from Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano, Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 2004), hereafter CPP, which prints a reading text of the first published version of the poem. All future references to the above works will be cited parenthetically within the text. Christabel will be cited by line number only. The problem of evil was one of Coleridge’s longstanding philosophical interests: the “origin of evil” (LPR, 89) was among the topics of the first Unitarian lecture he delivered in Bristol in 1795 (see LPR, 103–11). 2. Whalley, “Coleridge and Southey in Bristol, 1795,” Review of English Books, n.s., 1 (1950) 334–35 n. 3; Kitson, “Coleridge, Milton and the Millennium,” The Wordsworth Circle 18 (1987): 64. 3. See, for instance, Jonas Spatz, “The Mystery of Eros: Sexual Initiation in Coleridge’s ‘Christabel,’ ” PMLA 90 (1975): 107–16. Spatz accommodates Christabel’s disorientation and anguish to an affirmative reading by seeing them as elements of a necessary rite of passage, with Geraldine representing “the part of itself that innocence must finally encounter on the way to knowledge” (“The Mystery of Eros,” 111). While “erotic affirmation” readings of Christabel abound, three others to which I am particularly indebted are Harold Bloom’s The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, rev. and enlarged ed. (1961; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 212–17; Gerald Enscoe’s Eros and the Romantics: Sexual Love as a Theme in Coleridge, Shelley and Keats (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), and Michael Holstein’s “Coleridge’s Christabel as Psychodrama: Five Perspectives on the Intruder,” The Wordsworth Circle 7 (1976):119–28. Readings in this sort are related to another common approach—often dependent on Jung or Lévi-Strauss, and also opposed to my own approach—which sees Christabel as oriented toward a redemptive mythic wholeness: see Anthony John Harding, “Mythopoesis: The Unity of Christabel,” in Coleridge’s Imagination: Essays in Honor of Peter Laver, ed. Richard Gravil, Lucy Newlyn, and Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 207–17; Jane A. Nelson, “Entelechy and Structure in ‘Christabel,’ ” Studies in Romanticism 19 (1980): 375–93; and Edward Strickland, “Metamorphoses of the Muse in Romantic Poesis: Christabel,” ELH 44 (1978) 641–58. 4. Barth, “ ‘In the Midnight Wood’: The Power and Limits of Prayer in Christabel,” The Wordsworth Circle 32 (2001): 81. I am also indebted to Barth’s Coleridge and the Power of Love (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988) and Coleridge and Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969); and to Anya Taylor, “Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and the Phantom Soul,” Studies in English Literature, 1800–1900 42 (2002): 707–30, a reading energetically opposed to “the joy and sexual rapture that many critics have seen in the poem” (711). Above all my essay seeks to develop Virginia Radley’s claim, made forty years ago, that Christabel is “a

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study in ambivalent love-relationships” (“Christabel: Directions Old and New,” Studies in English Literature, 1800–1900 4 [1964]: 537).   5. Robert H. Siegel, “The Serpent and the Dove: ‘Christabel’ and the Problem of Evil,” in Imagination and the Spirit: Essays in Literature and the Christian Faith, ed. Charles Huttar (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), 159; and Bloom, The Visionary Company, 213.   6. Carl Woodring, “Christabel of Cumberland,” Review of English Literature 7 (1966): 47. Pointing to such evidence as Christabel’s protectiveness toward Geraldine in the forest and interest in seeing Geraldine’s body in the bedroom, many critics qualify their affirmations of Christabel’s innocence. My contention is simply that such qualifications, their theological import to Coleridge recognized, significantly alter the stakes for any moral interpretation of his poem.   7. Spatz, “The Mystery of Eros,” 112.   8. Beer, Coleridge the Visionary (1959; repr., New York: Collier Books, 1962), 206.   9. Cooper, “Who’s Afraid of the Mastiff Bitch? Gothic Parody and Original Sin in Christabel,” reprinted in Critical Essays on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Leonard Orr (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994), 89, 88, 88–89, and 93. 10. As Harding suggests in “Mythopoesis” (215). I cite Paradise Lost from John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), abbreviated PL. Biblical passages are cited from the King James Version. For Coleridge’s borrowings from Paradise Lost in Christabel, also see Siegel, “The Serpent and the Dove,” 175–76; Beverly Fields, Reality’s Dark Dream: Dejection in Coleridge (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1967), 76–78; and Stuart Peterfreund, “The Way of Immanence, Coleridge, and the Problem of Evil,” ELH 55 (1988): 125–58, especially 141–48. 11. Priestley, The History of the Corruptions of Christianity, in The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, ed. John Towill Ruff, 25 vols. in 26 (London, 1817–32), 5158–59. I also cite Priestley’s The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, from vol. 3 of this edition, abbreviated PN. 12. Coleridge’s Unitarianism was closely modeled on Priestley’s theology: that much is clear from his tendency, evident as late as the Lay Sermons of 1817, to identify Unitarianism with belief in necessity (see Lay Sermons, 182 nn. 1 and 2 [Coleridge’s notes]). The connection is actually closer than is sometimes claimed: while Coleridge’s early willingness to “deny the existence of any Evil” (LLR, 105) is thoroughly Priestleyan, Priestley’s moral theory in truth conceded the reality of earthly evils and could therefore accommodate Coleridge’s less-optimistic later acknowledgements of pain and injustice. Yet as the 1798 “original Sin” letter shows, Coleridge did not follow Priestley unfailingly. In a 1796 letter to Thelwall summarizing the essential tenets of Christianity as he understood them, Coleridge departs from Priestley even more significantly in affirming the existence of an immortal soul that, upon the death of the body, entered a state either of enjoyment or suffering— apparently Heaven or Hell since Coleridge could assure a grieving Lamb, “your mother is in heaven” (CL, 1.280 and 239). My discussions of Coleridge’s understanding of “original Sin” and of necessity—a concept to which my essay returns in concluding—depend upon the more detailed analyses in my “Virtue of Necessity: Coleridge’s Unitarian Moral Theory,” Modern Philology 102 (2005): 372–404. 13. Ewing, Coleridge’s Moral Philosophy, 1795–1800, and the Symbolism of “Christabel ” (PhD diss., Texas A&M University, 1977), 9. Ewing’s phrase recalls

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Coleridge alluding to Scripture in the same 1796 letter to Thelwall mentioned above (CL, 1.283). 14. Fruman, Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel (New York: George Braziller, 1971), 386. 15. As Coleridge told Thomas Allsop (Table Talk, ed. Woodring, 2:369). I cite Crashaw’s poems from The Poems of Richard Crashaw, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927): “Hymn to St. Theresa,” 131, lines 44, 19–22; “The Flaming Heart,” 324. For Coleridge’s familiarity with the tradition that St. Theresa represented, see Thomas R. Preston, “Christabel and the Mystical Tradition,” in Essays and Studies in Language and Literature, ed. Herbert H. Petit, Duquesne Studies Philological Series 5 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964), 138–57. 16. Magnuson, Coleridge’s Nightmare Poetry (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1974) 97. 17. Lectures 1818–1819, 2.464–66. Jackson’s edition of the Lectures includes brackets indicating where omissions in Coleridge’s manuscript are supplied with material from his Notebooks. 18. La Cassagnère, “The Strangeness of Christabel,” Wordsworth Circle 32 (2001): 86. 19. These quotations are from Barbara Johnson’s comments on deconstruction in The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), x. 20. Basler, “Christabel,” Sewanee Review 51 (1943): 73–95; Enscoe, Eros and the Romantics. Naturally, early commentators, Walter Scott and William Hazlitt among them, also noted the sexual ambience of Coleridge’s poem. The most perceptive discussion of contemporary reactions to Christabel is Karen Swann’s “Literary Gentlemen and Lovely Ladies: The Debate on the Character of Christabel,” ELH 52 (1985): 397–418. 21. Coburn, “Coleridge and Wordsworth and ‘the Supernatural,’ ” University of Toronto Quarterly 25 (1956): 130. 22. Peterfreund, “The Way of Immanence,” 143–44. 23. Siegel, “The Serpent and the Dove,” 176. 24. Beer, Coleridge the Visionary, 134–35. 25. Rzepka, “Christabel’s ‘Wandering Mother’ and the Discourse of the Self: A Lacanian Reading of Repressed Narration,” Romanticism Past and Present 10 (1986): 27–30. 26. Dennis Welch made the incest accusation initially in “Coleridge’s Christabel: Aversion of a Family Romance,” Women’s Studies 21 (1992): 163–84; and then later in his “Christabel, King Lear, and the Cinderella Folktale,” Papers on Language and Literature 32 (1996) 291–314. 27. Rzepka, “Christabel’s ‘Wandering Mother,’ ” 35. 28. Spatz, “The Mystery of Eros,” 112, 115. 29. My understanding of Geraldine as a figure of the mother depends especially on the discussions of Rzepka, “Christabel’s ‘Wandering Mother,’ ” 17–43; Karen Swann, “ ‘Christabel’: The Wandering Mother and the Enigma of Form,” Studies in Romanticism 23 (1984) 533–53; and Barbara A. Schapiro, The Romantic Mother: Narcissistic Patterns in Romantic Poetry (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 61–85. 30. For a lesbian reading of the interaction between Christabel and Geraldine, see Benjamin Scott Grossberg’s “Making Christabel: Sexual Transgression and Its

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Implications in Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’,” Journal of Homosexuality 41 (2001): 145–65. Other critics acknowledge the text’s lesbianism in passing: Cooper mentions “the implicit lesbianism of the poem’s bedchamber scene” (“Who’s Afraid,” 85), for instance, and William Keach associates “the central erotic aspect of the poem” with “its inescapable suggestion of lesbian sexuality” in his edition, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Complete Poems ([London: Penguin Books, 19971, 507). For a reading of the Christabel/Geraldine relationship as a revelation of Christabel’s (transposed) oedipal desire for her father, see Spatz, “The Mystery of Eros,” 113. For Swann, “the law of ‘the mother’ ” becomes implicated in the text’s reflections on gender and genre when Christabel “invites us to speculate that the ‘law’ of gender, which legislates the systematic exclusion of feminine forms, is connected to the experience of maternal attention” (Swann, “The Wandering Mother,” 548 and 551). Earlier I mentioned Rzepka’s reading of the mother as a sign of Christabel’s fears of sexual experience for its the potential deathliness (“Christabel’s ‘Wandering Mother,’ ” 27–30). 31. Fruman remarks that “we find Coleridge again and again, almost compulsively, referring to himself or to personal problems in bird images” (Damaged Archangel, 360). For Coleridge’s tendency to see himself as an orphan, see CL, 3.103. 32. Ashton cites the Christ’s Hospital admission petition and comments on Coleridge’s brothers in The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography, Blackwell Critical Biographies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 19, 18. For Coleridge’s biography I also depend on Fruman (Damaged Archangel) and Richard Holmes (Coleridge: Early Visions [New York: Viking, 1989]). 33. Holmes, Early Visions, 22 and 9. 34. Beres offered his suggestion in his respected “A Dream, a Vision, and a Poem: A Psycho-Analytic Study of the Origins of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 32 (1951): 97–116, 107. 35. Coburn, “Coleridge and Wordsworth,” 128. 36. Beer, Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977), 236. Beer anticipates the direction of my argument in remarking further that for Coleridge “all such energies were related to the desire which should unite the human being with God, but which, through failure of connection, turn back to ravage it under forms of wrathful destruction” (Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence, 236). 37. Rzepka summarizes many Lacanian doctrines in his essay on Christabel, but there is an especially lucid discussion of Lacan’s mirror stage theory—the key doctrine for my reading—in Ellie Ragland-Sullivan’s Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 16–30. 38. Shelley, “On Love,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd ed., Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 503. 39. Gillman, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1838), 301–2. Coleridge scholars will identify my quotation as part of the longer of two accounts of the poet’s plans for completing Christabel furnished by Gillman; the other brief version is quoted in its entirety later in this essay. 40. For Geraldine as a figure of the problem of representation, see Richard A. Rand (“Geraldine,” reprinted in Untying the Text: A Post Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young [Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981], 281–315) and Susan Eilenberg (Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992]), to whose rhetorical analysis of Geraldine I am particularly indebted. Calling Geraldine “a vampire of the semiotic variety,”

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Eilenberg declares her “evil because she enforces the condition of allegory, turning those around her into signifiers of the identity she depends upon them to supply and depriving them of the power to make known the truth about themselves. She makes intolerably clear what representation implies: not self-evidence . . . but the subversion of identity” (Strange Power of Speech, 103 and 105). 41. Barth, Coleridge and the Power of Love, 18–19. For God as the final cause of love, see also Harding, Coleridge and the Idea of Love: Aspects of Relationship in Coleridge’s Thought and Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 96–101. The traditional Christian theology of love is admirably summarized in Kenelm Foster, “The Mind in Love: Dante’s Philosophy,” reprinted in Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Freccero, Twentieth Century Views (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 43–60. 42. Barth, Coleridge and the Power of Love, 85. 43. Ray, “Geraldine as Usurper of Christ: An Un-Mystical Union,” Philological Quarterly 63 (1984): 511; Jane Chambers, “Geraldine’s Real Obscenity: The Perverted Passion and Resurrection in Christabel,” Essays in Literature 12 (1985): 61. 44. Taylor, “Coleridge’s ‘Christabel,’ ” 718. 45. PW, 1.1.338. 46. Beer, Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence, 114. 47. Harding declares, for instance, that “there is a reason for Christabel’s suffering . . . but it is not to be found in any sin or inadequacy of her own,” but rather “she is made to expiate not her own guilt but her father’s” (Coleridge and the Idea of Love, 69–70). Basler speculates that “Geraldine might derive a kind of salvation from Christabel” (“Christabel,” 81), and Spatz, as I will discuss subsequently, offers a variation on this possibility (“The Mystery of Eros”). 48. From Derwent Coleridge’s “Introductory Essay” in his 1870 edition of Coleridge’s Poems, as cited by Humphry House, Coleridge: The Clark Lectures, 1951–52 (1953; repr., London: Rupert Hart-David, 1969), 127. 49. House, The Clark Lectures, 128–29. 50. Ibid., 129. 51. Siegel, “The Serpent and the Dove,” 159 and 160; Perkins, from his headnote to Christabel in English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins, 2nd ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1995) 529. Mays calls attention to additional comments by Derwent Coleridge recorded by Barclay Fox in his Journal: “He considers it [Christabel] to be founded on the Roman Catholic notion of expiation for others’ sins” (PW, 1.1.479), a statement which, in its reference to Catholicism, actually underscores the unlikelihood of Coleridge basing Christabel on the Atonement, particularly prior to his return to orthodoxy. 52. Magnuson is especially acute on the problems of the longer Gillman conclusion: “the difficulty in accepting such a plot continuance is that it does not grow naturally out of the sections already written. Christabel has been rendered utterly passive, and in Gillman’s account she is saved only by the return of her former lover, who produces the ring. She is saved by an intercession when the restoration must come from within; for any conclusion to be convincing she must cope with her own evil. Furthermore, Gillman’s account does not support the moral that he himself gives. . . . [since] Christabel’s passive suffering has little effect upon the knight’s exploits and spiritual state” (Coleridge’s Nightmare Poetry, 96). 53. Magnuson suggests that the Gillman continuation “is probably a fabrication produced for Gillman” (Coleridge’s Nightmare Poetry, 96) even as W. J. Bate

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observed that Coleridge provided the Gillman summary (along with other conflicting versions) because he was “teased to say how the poem would have ended” (Coleridge, Masters of World Literature [New York: Collier Books, 1968], 74). It is a commonplace of Coleridge scholarship that, as a letter writer, Coleridge needed to please, which often led him to adopt the values of his correspondents. 54. Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749), ed. with introduction by Theodore L. Huguelet, 2 vols. in 1 (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1966), 1:vi. 55. Spatz, “The Mystery of Eros,” 115. 56. House, The Clark Lectures, 127. 57. Mann, LPR, lxvi. 58. Magnuson, Coleridge’s Nightmare Poetry, 96.

Chronology

1772

Born in the vicarage at Ottery, St. Mary, Devonshire, on October 21.

1775

Begins formal schooling at Dame Key’s Reading School.

1778

Attends Henry VIII Free Grammar School.

1781

Father, John Coleridge, dies.

1782

Admitted to Christ’s Hospital School in July.

1791

Enters Jesus College, Cambridge, in July.

1793

Enlists in the Kind’s Regiment, 15th Light Dragoons, under the pseudonym Silas Tomkyn Comberback.

1794

Obtains a discharge from the King’s Regiment and returns to Cambridge. Meets Southey at Oxford. The Fall of Robespierre published (with Southey) under Coleridge’s name. Meets Godwin. Leaves Cambridge in December, without a degree, in order to pursue the scheme of Pantisocracy.

1795

Moves to Bristol in January and meets William Wordsworth. Marries Sara Fricker of Bristol; they settle at Clevedon, Somerset. Lectures in Bristol through November on politics and history.

1796

Hartley Coleridge born. Publishes Poems on Various Subjects and edits the March–May issues of The Watchman. Moves with family to Nether Stowey.

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Chronology

1797

The Wordsworths move to Alfoxden to be near Coleridge. Composes “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and publishes Poems by himself, Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd.

1798

A second son, Berkeley, born, who later dies. Josiah and Thomas Wedgwood settle a lifetime annuity of £150 on Coleridge. Writes part I of “Christabel,” “Frost at Midnight,” “France: An Ode,” “Fears in Solitude,” and (?) “Kubla Khan.” In September the first edition of Lyrical Ballads is published anonymously with Wordsworth, while they are traveling through Germany with Dorothy Wordsworth and John Chester.

1799

Enters the University of Göttingen, alone, in February. Returns to England in July and contributes to the Morning Post. Meets Sara Hutchinson.

1800

Settles with family at Greta Hall, Keswick, where Derwent is born. Finishes translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein in late spring. Second edition of Lyrical Ballads published with a preface by Wordsworth.

1802

The Southeys move to Greta Hall. Sara Coleridge born. Writes “Dejection: An Ode.” Third edition of Lyrical Ballads published.

1803

Abandons a tour of Scotland with William and Dorothy Wordsworth.

1804

In May leaves for Rome and Malta, having decided to separate from his wife, and with hopes that the climate will be good for his health, which has been weakened by rheumatism and opium addiction.

1806

Returns to England by way of Italy. Separates from his wife.

1807

De Quincey meets Coleridge in Somerset.

1808

January–June gives his first series of lectures, on “Principles of Poetry,” at the Royal Institution in London. Later is guest, along with De Quincey, at the Wordsworth home at Grasmere.

1809

Begins The Friend. Contributions to The Courier to 1817.

1810

The Friend ended. Leaves the Lake District for London and breaks with Wordsworth.

1811

Lectures on the English poets in London. Josiah Wedgwood withdraws his half of the legacy.

Chronology

205

1812

Lectures in London and Bristol. Makes up with Wordsworth.

1813

Early play Osario, revised as Remorse, performed at Drury Lane Theatre in London.

1814

Stays with his friend John Morgan in London and Calne, Wiltshire.

1815

Begins dictating Biographia Literaria in Calne. Health declining.

1816

Stays at Highgate, London, as patient of Dr. James Gillman. In June publishes a volume of poetry containing “Christabel,” Kubla Khan,” and “The Pains of Sleep.” Also brings out The Statesman’s Manual: or The Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight.

1817

Publishes Biographia Literaria, Sibyline Leaves, and his two Lay Sermons.

1818

Lectures on English poetry and history of philosophy. Publishes a selection from The Friend and On Method, a preliminary treatise to the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana.

1819

Ends lectures on history of philosophy.

1825

May–June publishes Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character.

1828

Poetical Works published. Tours Germany with Wordsworth.

1830

On the Constitution of Church and State published.

1834

Dies on July 25 at Gillman residence, Highgate.

1836

Four volumes of Coleridge’s Literary Remains edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge.

1840

Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit published.

Contributors

Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of 30 books, including Shelley’s Mythmaking, The Visionary Company, Blake’s Apocalypse, Yeats, A Map of Misreading, Kabbalah and Criticism, Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism, The American Religion, The Western Canon, and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection. The Anxiety of Influence sets forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, a 1998 National Book Award finalist, How to Read and Why, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine. In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism. He has also received the International Prize of Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and the Hans Christian Andersen Bicentennial Prize of Denmark. Jerome J. McGann is a professor at the University of Virginia. He has published many titles, including a wide variety of works on Romanticism, such as The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse and The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. David Perkins is a professor emeritus of English and American literature at Harvard University. Among his titles are The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats and A History of Modern Poetry, Volume I, From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode.

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Contributors

Paul Magnuson, now deceased, was a professor at New York University. His books include Coleridge’s Nightmare Poetry and Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue. He was book review editor of the journal The Wordsworth Circle for many years. William Empson, now deceased, was a professor at Sheffield University and also was a poet. His publications include Seven Types of Ambiguity and Some Versions of Pastoral. Thomas McFarland is an emeritus professor of Princeton University. He is the editor of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 15: Opus Maximum (published by Princeton University Press) and the author of numerous books, including Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Modalities of Fragmentation and Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition. J. Douglas Kneale is a professor at the University of Western Ontario. He authored Monumental Writing: Aspects of Rhetoric in Wordsworth’s Poetry and is the editor of The Mind in Creation: Essays on English Romantic Literature in Honour of Ross G. Woodman. Seamus Perry is lecturer and tutorial fellow at Balliol College, the University of Oxford, and also is deputy chair of the board of the faculty of English language and literature. Among his works are Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection and Coleridge’s Responses. Selected Writings on Literary Criticism, the Bible and Nature. Volume I: Coleridge on Writing and Writers, both of which he edited. He also has written on Coleridge for other texts. Jack Stillinger is a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is the author of many books, articles, and reviews, including Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems. He is coeditor of the fifth, sixth, and seventh editions of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and of The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors. William A. Ulmer is a full member of the graduate faculty at the University of Alabama where he also is graduate department chair of the English department. His publications include The Christian Wordsworth, 1798–1805 and Shelleyan Eros: The Rhetoric of Romantic Love.

Bibliography

Ashton, Rosemary. The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996. Barbeau, Jeffrey W. Coleridge’s Assertion of Religion: Essays on the Opus Maximum. Louvain, Belgium: Peeters, 2006.

Barth, J. Robert. The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and the Romantic Tradition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2001.

     . Romanticism and Transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Religious Imagination. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Berkeley, Richard. Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason. Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave, 2007.

Blades, John. Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Brice, Ben. Coleridge and Scepticism. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Burwick, Frederick, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

     . Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1996.

Bygrave, Stephen. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Plymouth, United Kingdom: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 1997. Crawford, Walter. Reading Coleridge. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979.

De Paolo, Charles. Coleridge: Historian of Ideas. [Victoria] B.C.: English Literary Studies, Department of English, University of Victoria, 1992.

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Dilworth, Thomas. “Symbolic Spatial Form in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and the Problem of God.” Review of English Studies 58, no. 236 (September 2007): 500–30. Fairer, David, ed. English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1789. London: Longman-Pearson, 2003.

Fleissner, Robert F. Sources, Meaning, and Influences of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan: Xanadu Re-routed: A Study in the Ways of Romantic Variety. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000.

Gibson, Matthew. Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage. Houndmills [England]: Macmillan Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Gravil, Richard, and Molly Lefebure, ed. The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas McFarland. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1990.

Gregory, Alan P. R. Coleridge and the Conservative Imagination. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2003.

Hamilton, Paul. Coleridge and German Philosophy: The Poet in the Land of Logic. London; New York: Continuum, 2007.

Haney, David P. The Challenge of Coleridge: Ethics and Interpretation in Romanticism and Modern Philosophy. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Keane, Patrick J. Coleridge’s Submerged Politics: The Ancient Mariner and Robinson Crusoe. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994.

Kearns, Sheila M. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Romantic Autobiography: Reading Strategies of Self-Representation. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press: London; Cranbury, N.J.; Associated University Presses, 1995. Kitson, Peter J., ed. Coleridge, Keats and Shelley. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996.

Lindgren, Agneta. The Fallen World in Coleridge’s Poetry. Lund: Lund University Press, 1999. Magnuson, Paul. Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

     . “ ‘The Eolian Harp’ in Context.” Studies in Romanticism 24, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 3–20.

McFarland, Thomas. “Coleridge, The Stoics, and the Epicureans.” Hellas: A Journal of Poetry and the Humanities 7, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 1996): 195–212.

McNiece, Gerald. The Knowledge that Endures: Coleridge, German Philosophy, and the Logic of Romantic Thought. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Natarajan, Uttara, ed. The Romantic Poets: A Guide to Criticism. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007.

O’Gorman, Francis. “Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’, and Anticipating the Future.” Romanticism 14, no. 3 (2008): 232–244. Parker, Reeve. “Osorio’s Dark Employments: Tricking Out Coleridgean Tragedy.” Studies in Romanticism 33, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 119–60.

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Peckham, Morse. The Birth of Romanticism: Cultural Crisis 1790–1815. Greenwood, Fla.: Penkevill, 1986. Perkins, David. “Compassion for Animals and Radical Politics: Coleridge’s ‘To a Young Ass.’ ” ELH 65, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 929–44.

Reid, Nicholas. Coleridge, Form and Symbol, or The Ascertaining Vision. Aldershot, England; Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006.

Roberts, Daniel Sanjiv. Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge, and the High Romantic Argument. Liverpool [England]: Liverpool University Press, 2000.

Ruf, Frederick J. Entangled Voices: Genre and the Religious Construction of the Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Shairp, John Campbell. Studies in Poetry and Philosophy. Bristol, England; Sterling, Va.: Thoemmes, 1999. Sitterson, Joseph C., Jr. Romantic Poems, Poets, and Narrators. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2000.

Stevenson, Warren. A Study of Coleridge’s Three Great Poems—Christabel, Kubla Khan, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001.

Vallins, David. Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism: Feeling and Thought. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000, [1999].

Vallins, David, ed. On the Sublime. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Watson, Jeanie. Risking Enchantment: Coleridge’s Symbolic World of Faery. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.

West, Sally. Coleridge and Shelley: Textual Engagement. Aldershot, England; Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007.

Wheeler, Kathleen M. “Disruption and Displacement in Coleridge’s ‘Christabel.’ ” The Wordsworth Circle 20, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 85–90.

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Acknowledgments

Jerome J. McGann, “The Biographia Literaria and the Contentions of English Romanticism.” From Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria: Text and Meaning, edited by Frederick Burwick. Ohio State University Press, 1989. David Perkins, “The Imaginative Vision of Kubla Khan on Coleridge’s Introductory Note.” From Coleridge, Keats, and the Imagination: Romanticism and Adam’s Dream, edited by J. Robert Barth, S. J., and John L. Mahoney. Reprinted by permission of the University of Missouri Press. Copyright © 1990 by the Curators of the University of Missouri. Paul Magnuson, “The Politics of ‘Frost at Midnight.’” From The Wordsworth Circle, vol. XXII, no. 1, Winter 1991: 3–11. © 1991 Marilyn Gaull. William Empson, “The Ancient Mariner: An Answer to Warren,” edited by John Haffenden. From The Kenyon Review, 15, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 155–77. © 1993 by William Empson. Thomas McFarland, “Coleridge: Prescience, Tenacity and the Origin of Sociology.” From Romanticism 4, no. 1 (1998): 40–59. © 1998 by Edinburgh University Press, www.euppublishing.com J. Douglas Kneale, “‘Between Poetry and Oratory’: Coleridge’s Romantic Effusions.” From Romantic Aversions: Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge. © 1999 by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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Acknowledgments

Seamus Perry, “Coda: The Incomprehensible Mariner.” From Coleridge and the Uses of Division. Published by Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press. © 1999 by Seamus Perry. Jack Stillinger, “Pictorialism and Matter-of-Factness in Coleridge’s Poems of Somerset.” From Romantic Complexity: Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. © 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. William A. Ulmer, “Christabel and the Origin of Evil.” From Studies in Philology, vol. 104, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 376–407. © 2007 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher, www.uncpress.unc.edu

Every effort has been made to contact the owners of copyrighted material and secure copyright permission. Articles appearing in this volume generally appear much as they did in their original publication with few or no editorial changes. In some cases, foreign language text has been removed from the original essay. Those interested in locating the original source will find the information cited above.

Index Characters in literary works are indexed by first name (if any), followed by the name of the work in parentheses Beres, David, 184 Bertram (Maturin) critique of, 30–32 Biographia Literaria, 8, 12, 48 and English romanticism, 17–38 guidelines of poetry in, 19–20, 23–25, 27–30, 33–34, 36–37, 122, 126, 128–129, 164, 168 model of criticism, 20–21, 30–33, 36, 86, 92, 95, 114–115 narrative, 20 Blake, William, 2, 7, 13, 15, 37, 54 The Four Zoas, 4, 45 Jerusalem, 4, 16 Milton: A Poem in 2 Books, To Justify the Ways of God to Men, 16 on poetry, 28–29 Bloom, Harold, 140 introduction, 1–16 Bowles, William, 13, 126 Monody, Written at Matlock, October 1791, 122, 133–137 “To the River Itchin,” 164–165 Boyer, James, 164–165 Brown, Marshall Preromanticism, 121

Abrams, M. H., 169 The Mirror and the Lamp, 6, 121–122, 148 “Address to a Young Jack-Ass,” 127 “Address to X,” 128 Aikin, John, 123 Akenside, Mark, 13 “Among School Children” (Yeats), 160–161 Ancient City, The (Fustel), 106–107 “Argufying in Poetry” (Empson), 72 Aristotle, 158 Arnold, Matthew, 161 Ashbery, John, 44 Ashton, Rosemary, 184 Bahti, Timothy, 39 Bakhtin, Mikhail The Dialogic Imagination, 52 “Ballad of the Dark Ladie, The,” 189 Barth, J. Robert, 172, 187 Bate, Walter Jackson, 4, 39, 43, 71 Beer, John on Coleridge, 156, 173, 181, 185, 189 “Belle Dame sans Merci, La” (Keats), 168

215

216

Index

Burke, Edmund, 64–65, 67–68 Letter to a Noble Lord, 7 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 63 Burke, Kenneth, 13 Byron, Lord, 22, 37, 48 Don Juan, 16, 30–36 The Lament of Tasso, 34 Manfred, 31 satirical verse, 1–2, 162 Candidate, The (Churchill) effusions in, 123–124, 126 Castle of Indolence (Thomson), 137 Chambers, Jane, 188 Chayes, Irene H., 40–41 Christabel, 157, 164, 168 Christabel in, 3–4, 163, 166, 171–193, 195 daemonic mode, 3–4, 14 Geraldine in, 3–4, 14, 171, 173– 174, 176–189, 193, 195 guilt in, 173, 175, 179–180, 182, 185 imagery in, 171 Leoline in, 176, 181–182, 184, 186, 189–190 narrative, 176, 191–192, 195 notion of innocence in, 172–173, 178–179 Original Sin in, 171–179, 185– 186, 188–190 origin of evil in, 171–174, 178– 181, 188, 190, 192 problem of mediation in, 179–189 Unitarianism in, 171–172, 174– 176, 180, 189–195 sexuality in, 171–172, 179–183, 186, 188 vampirism in, 158 Christensen, Paul, 18 Churchill, Charles, 141 The Candidate, 123–124, 126 Clarkson, Thomas, 101 Coburn, Kathleen, 4, 180 Coleridge, Berkeley, 193

Coleridge, George letters to, 59, 65, 165, 175, 186 Coleridge, Hartley, 166, 185 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor childhood, 1, 183–184 education, 1 imagination, 15 lectures, 2, 51, 60, 63, 99 letters, 2, 80, 88, 175, 193 mental condition, 73, 111 politics, 1, 51–69, 83, 109–110 public, 52, 60 religion, 1, 5, 65, 74–76, 87, 89–90, 99–100, 104–106, 109, 149–151, 171–172, 175–176, 180, 187–195 and science, 87–88 and sociology, 99–119 Coleridge, Sara Fricker in poetry, 165–166 Collected Coleridge, 110 Collected Letters, 88 Collins, Wilkie, 13 Collins, William “Kisses,” 124 “The Passions: An Ode for Music,” 138 “The Rose,” 124 Colmer, John, 71 Complete Poetical Works, 162 “Complaint of Ninathoma,” 122 Comte, Auguste, 103 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness, 152 Cooper, Andrew M., 173–174 Cowper, William, 16 The Task, 13, 164 Crane, Hart, 4 Crashaw, Richard “The Flaming Heart,” 177 “Hymn to Saint Theresa,” 177, 190 Damaged Archangel (Fruman), 110 Dante, 2, 6, 33–34

Index

“Dejection: An Ode,” 2, 14–15, 164 effusion poem, 127, 168 irregular ode, 3 De Quincey, Thomas, 15, 139–140 “Descriptive Sketches” (Wordsworth), 167 “Destiny of Nations, The,” 8, 166 Dialogic Imagination, The (Bakhtin), 52 Division of Labor (Durkheim), 105 Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, The (Priestley), 114– 115, 194 Don Juan (Byron), 16 critique of, 30–36 Donne, John, 87 “The Flea,” 137 Dryden, John “Song for St Cecilia’s Day,” 139–140 Durkheim, Emile Division of Labor, 105 Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 105 Rules of Sociological Method, 105 and sociology, 102–107 Effusions of Friendship and Fancy, The (Langhorne) effusions in, 123–124, 126, 128, 131 Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Durkheim), 105 Eliot, T. S., 87, 147 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 3 Empson, William “Argufying in Poetry,” 72 “Marvell’s Garden,” 71 on symbolism in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 71–97, 147, 152–153 “Endymion” (Keats), 158 Enlargement of the Mind . . . Written on Belvidere, The (Langhorne), 124

217

“Eolian Harp, The,” 13, 48 conversational mode, 3, 52, 166, 168–169 effusion poem, 121, 127, 134– 140, 157 imagery and sentiment in, 134 vision of nature in, 159, 163 wife in, 165 Epistola Barbato Sulmonensi (Petrarch), 126–127 “Epitaph,” 133 Essays on His Times (Erdman), 56–57 “Essays on Method,” 18 Estlin, J. P., 88 “Evening Walk, An” (Wordsworth), 167 “Eve of St. Agnes, The” (Keats), 158, 168–169 Ewing, James McCartney, 176 Excursion, The (Wordsworth), 4, 9 “Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg” (Wordsworth), 141 Fairie Queen (Spenser), 88 “Fall of Hyperion, The” (Keats), 14, 16, 45 Fall of Robespierre, The (play), 167 “Fears in Solitude,” 95, 157, 164 politics in, 51–52, 54, 57–58, 60, 62, 67, 83, 128, 166 reviews of, 66, 167, 169 Fenwick, Isabella, 152 “Flaming Heart, The” (Crashaw), 177 “Flea, The” (Donne), 137 Fletcher, Angus, 111 Four Zoas, The (Blake), 4, 45 “France: An Ode” politics in, 52, 56–57, 59, 61, 83, 167 French Revolution, 60, 83 Frere, John H. “Whistlecraft,” 35 Freud, Sigmund, 91, 178 Fricker, George, 90

218

Index

Friend, The, 18–20, 58 “Frost at Midnight,” 2, 8, 13 conversational mode, 3, 12, 159, 163–164, 166–169 effusion poem, 127, 133 infant son in, 165–166 language of, 66–68 politics of, 51–69 reviews of, 58–59, 66 writing of, 52–53 Fruman, Norman, 177 Damaged Archangel, 110 Fustel de Coulanges The Ancient City, 106–107 Gillman, James on Coleridge, 3, 186, 190–192 Gillray, James, 54 Godwin, William, 63–64, 66, 68 Political Justice, 115 Goethe, 5 Gray, Thomas “Ode on the Spring,” 160–162 Harp, The (MacNeill), 136 Hartley, David, 86 Observations on Man, 114–116, 192 Hartman, Geoffrey, 25 Hazlitt, William, 12, 45, 68, 90, 168 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 152 Holcroft, Thomas, 89 Horace, 141 Satires, 128, 131 House, Humphry Clark lectures, 51–52 on Coleridge, 8, 13, 87, 93, 155, 190 Hutchinson, Sara, 2 “Hymn Before Sun-Rise, in the Vale of Chamouni,” 5, 9 “Hymn to Saint Theresa” (Crashaw), 177, 190 “Idiot Boy, The,” 25 Illustrations of Philosophical Necessity (Priestley), 192

Jackson, Alan, 18 James, Henry Turn of the Screw, 152 Jaspers, Karl, 107 Jerusalem (Blake), 4, 16 Johnson, Joseph and Coleridge, 52–53, 58–59, 62, 68 Johnson, Samuel, 135 The Lives of the Poets, 16 Kant, Immanuel, 27, 112 Keats, John, 2, 13, 37 “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” 168 Coleridge’s influence on, 157– 159, 162, 166, 168–169 “Endymion,” 158 “The Eve of St. Agnes,” 158, 168–169 “The Fall of Hyperion,” 14, 16, 45 gothicism, 168 “Lamia,” 158, 168 “Ode to a Nightingale,” 136, 158 “Ode to Psyche,” 43 “To Autumn,” 158 Kenner, Hugh, 111 Kinnaird, Douglas, 36 “Kiss, The,” 137 “Kisses” (Collins), 124 Kitson, Peter, 148, 171 Kneale, J. Douglas on Coleridge’s romantic effusions, 121–145 Kohut, Heinz, 100 “Kubla Khan,” 157 daemonic mode, 3, 14 dream poem, 39, 45–46 fragmentation theme of, 47, 127, 168 imaginative vision of, 39–50 introductory note to, 39–45 lost poem myth in, 39 myth of the poet in, 39 person from Porlock in, 39, 41, 43–44, 47–48

Index

romantic theme of, 40–47, 163, 166 Xanadu in, 42 Lamb, Charles and Coleridge, 1, 15, 45, 53–54, 128, 164–165, 171, 189 Lament of Tasso, The (Byron), 34 “Lamia” (Keats), 158, 168 Langhorne, John, 125, 141 The Effusions of Friendship and Fancy, 123–124, 126, 128, 131 The Enlargement of the Mind. . . Written at Belvidere, 124 La Réveillè Lépeaux, 53–54, 65 Last Poems (Yeats), 15 Lectures on Revealed Religion, 176 Letters, 73 Letter to a Noble Lord (Burke), 7 “Limbo” daemonic mode, 3, 14–15 Literary Memoirs of Living Authors of Great Britain (Rivers), 166–167 Lives of the Poets, The (Johnson), 16 Lloyd, Charles, 53–54, 88 Locke, John, 112–114 “Love,” 189 Lowes, John Livingston, 10, 39, 47 The Road to Xanadu, 84 Lukes, Steven, 103–104 “Lycidas” (Milton), 14 repeated frustrations in, 133–135, 138–140 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth), 2, 22, 149, 157, 195 Preface to, 24–25, 29–30, 152, 160, 167–168 MacNeill, Hector The Harp, 136 Macrae, Donald, 107 Magnuson, Paul, 122, 177, 195 on the politics of “Frost at Midnight,” 51–69 Manfred (Buron), 31

219

Martineau, Harriet, 101–102 “Marvell’s Garden” (Empson), 71 Mathew, George Felton, 168 Maturin, Charles, 20 Bertram, 30–32 Mauss, Marcel, 102 McFarland, Elizabeth, 18 McFarland, Thomas, 43 on Coleridge and sociology, 99–119 Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, 47 McGann, Jerome J., 151 on the Biographia Literaria, 17–38 Mileur, Jean-Pierre, 40 Mill, John Stuart, 127 On Liberty, 109–110 Milton, John influence of, 2, 4–10, 12–15, 124, 128, 139, 155, 165, 173, 181 “Lycidas,” 14, 133–135 Paradise Lost, 7–9, 13–15, 128, 136, 174, 179 Milton: A Poem in 2 Books, To Justify the Ways of God to Men (Blake), 16 Mirror and the Lamp, The (Abrams), 6, 121–122, 148 “Monody on the Death of Chatterton,” 8, 162 Monody, Written at Matlock, October 1791 (Bowles), 122, 133–137 Montesquieu, Baron de, 102 “Ne Plus Ultra” daemonic mode, 3, 14–15 “New Morality,” 64–66 Newton, Isaac, 47, 113 “Nightingale, The,” 157, 164 conversation poem, 121, 166, 168 effusion poem, 127, 136 Wordsworth in, 165 Nightmare Abbey (Peacock), 81 Notebooks, 15, 73, 151–152 Observations on Man (Hartley), 114–116, 192

220 “Ode on the Spring” (Gray), 160–162 “Ode to the Departing Year,” 8, 149 conversation poem, 162–163, 166 “Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats), 136, 158 “Ode to Psyche” (Keats), 43 Ode to the West Wind (Shelley), 43 On Liberty (Mill), 109–110 “On Receiving a Letter Informing Me of the Birth of a Son,” 127 Opus Maximum, 3 sociology in, 99–119 Paglia, Camille, 139 Paine, Thomas, 65–66, 68 Paradise Lost (Milton), 7–9, 15, 128, 136 Adam in, 13, 174 Eve in, 13–14, 179 Satan in, 14 Parker, Theodore, 3 Parsons, Talcott, 103 “Passions: An Ode for Music, The” (Collins), 138 Pater, Walter on Coleridge, 2, 5–7, 15 Peacock, Thomas Love Nightmare Abbey, 81 Perkins, David, 191 on “Kubla Khan,” 39–50 Perry, Seamus on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 147–156 Petrarch, Francesco Epistola Barbato Sulmonensi, 126–127 Philosophical Lectures Saint Theresa in, 177–178 “Picture; or, the Lover’s Resolution, The” romance of, 40 vision of, 42, 44, 47–48 Piper, H. W., 71 Pirie, David, 71

Index

“Poem of Pure Imagination: an Experiment in Reading, A” (Warren) symbolism in, 71–84, 87, 89, 91–92, 94–95 Poems on Various Subjects, 167 effusions in, 121–123, 133, 141, 168 preface to, 129–130 Political Justice (Godwin), 115 Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge (Woodring), 61 Pope, Alexander, 139 Prelude, The (Wordsworth) dreams in, 45 poetry in, 4, 9, 14, 16, 25, 29, 140, 167 Priestley, J. B., 65, 68, 88 The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, 114–115, 194 Illustrations of Philosophical Necessity, 192 on Original Sin, 174–175, 191– 192 Preromanticism (Brown), 121 Prometheus Unbound (Shelley), 16 Rank, Otto, 178 Ray, Rhonda Johnson, 188 “Recantation, The,” 56 “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement,” 127–128, 157 imaginative return in, 159, 163, 166 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke), 63 “Religious Musings,” 8, 10, 13, 166 origin of evil in, 171 Reply to Some Parts of the Bishop of Llandaff ’s Address to the People of Great Britain, A (Wakefield), 53 Reynolds, John Hamilton, 168 Ricks, Christopher, 111

Index

Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The, 2, 41, 51, 157, 168 Albatross in, 73–78, 82–84, 91, 148–150, 152 the crew in, 73–76, 78–80, 83–84 curse in, 150–151 daemonic mode, 3, 14 epic theme in, 171 fog in, 78–79, 82–84, 149 ghost ship in, 78, 84–86, 91, 93, 95–96, 163 glosses in, 73–76, 78, 80, 93–94, 96 guilt and punishment in, 74, 77, 149, 152 imagination in, 77, 94–95 irony in, 154 Life-in-Death lady in, 85, 91, 96, 181 Mariner in, 13–14, 48, 73–83, 85–86, 91–96, 148–155, 158– 159, 163, 167, 189, 195 moon in, 77–81 narrative, 79, 150–151, 153–154, 159, 164, 195 nature in, 77, 88–89, 91, 95, 166 sun in, 77, 81, 83–84, 86, 91–95 symbolism in, 71–97 unity and division in, 147 water-snakes in, 79, 86, 92, 95, 148–149, 153 wind in, 73, 79–81, 93 Rivers, David Literary Memoirs of Living Authors of Great Britain, 166–167 Road to Xanadu, The (Lowes), 84 Robinson, Perdita, 46 Rock, The (Stevens), 15 romantic themes English, 17–38 in Coleridge, 40–47, 52, 81, 91, 121, 139–140, 157–158, 165, 168–169, 172, 185–186 German, 46

221

Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (McFarland), 47 “Rose, The” (Collins), 124 Rousseau, Jacques, 58, 66 Social Contract, 102–103 Rubenstein, Jill, 139 Rules of Sociological Method (Durkheim), 105 Rzepka, Charles J., 181 “Salisbury Plain” (Wordsworth), 165 Satires (Horace), 128, 131 Schelling, Friedrich, 26 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 100 Schneider, Elizabeth, 39, 43 Schubert, G. H. Symbolik des Traumes, 46 Shakespeare, William, 123 influence of, 6–7, 20, 155 The Winter’s Tale, 76 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 2, 7, 13, 26, 37, 185 Ode to the West Wind, 43 Prometheus Unbound, 16 Sibylline Leaves, 52, 81 language in, 157, 168–169 Siegel, Robert H., 180, 191 Simmel, Georg, 107 Smith, Robertson, 107 Social Contract (Rousseau), 102–103 “Soldier’s Wife: Dactylics, The” (Southey), 55, 57 “Song for St Cecilia’s Day” (Dryden), 139–140 Sonnets from Various Authors, 135 “Sonnets on Eminent Characters,” 165 Southey, Robert and Coleridge, 1, 30, 35, 53–54, 68, 79, 83, 89, 115, 155, 164–165 “The Soldier’s Wife: Dactylics,” 55, 57

222

Index

Spenser, Edmund Fairie Queen, 88 Spinoza, Benedictus de, 68 Spitz, David, 100 Statesman’s Manual, A Lay Sermon, The, 18–19 Stephen, Leslie, 147, 149 Stevens, Wallace, 169 The Rock, 15 Stillinger, Jack on Coleridge’s poems of Somerset, 157–170 Strand, Mark “The Whole Story,” 161 Stuart, Daniel, 57, 59, 68 Swift, Jonathan Tale of a Tub, 62 Symbolik des Traumes (Schubert), 46 Symbolist theory and Coleridge, 71–73, 82, 84–86, 91–92 “Tale, A,” 60–61 Tale of a Tub (Swift), 62 Task, The (Cowper), 13, 164 Taylor, Anya, 189 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 169 Thelwall, John, 64, 89, 175 “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” 13, 68, 157 Charles Lamb in, 165 conversation poem, 52, 163–164, 166, 168 effusion poem, 127 imaginative walk in, 159, 161 nature in, 161–162 sunlit world of, 150 Thompson, E. P., 111, 117 Thomson, James Castle of Indolence, 137 “Thorn, The” (Wordsworth), 152, 167 “Three Graves, The,” 189 “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth), 2, 8, 52, 167, 169 “To Autumn” (Keats), 158

“To the Autumnal Moon,” 122 “To an Infant,” 132 “To Kosciusco,” 131 “To the River Itchin” (Bowles), 164–165 “To Schiller,” 122 “To William Wordsworth,” 2, 14, 140, 164 conversational mode, 3, 168 effusion poem, 127 transcendentalism American, 2 Turn of the Screw (James), 152 Ulmer, William A. on Christabel, 171–201 “Visions of the Maid of Orleans, The,” 51 Wakefield, Gilbert A Reply to Some Parts of the Bishop of Llandaff ’s Address to the People of Great Britain, 53 Wallace, Catherine, 18, 23 “Wanderings of Cain, The,” 189–190 Warren, Robert Penn, 155 “A Poem of Pure Imagination: an Experiment in Reading,” 71–84, 87, 89, 91–92, 94–95 Watchman, The, 56, 85, 166–167, 175 Weber, Max, 107 Wedgwood, Tom, 80 Whalley, George, 171 Wheeler, Kathleen M., 40–41, 139 Wheeler, Susan, 18 “Whistlecraft” (Frere), 35 “Whole Story, The” (Strand), 161 Wilde, Oscar, 4 Williams, William Carlos, 169 Winnicott, D.W., 100 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare), 76 Wooding, Carl Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge, 61

223

Index

Wordsworth, Dorothy and Coleridge, 2, 8, 163, 166– 167 Wordsworth, William, 54 and Coleridge, 2–3, 5–10, 12–14, 19, 77, 113, 127, 148–149, 151, 163, 166–169 critique of poetry, 20–30, 33–37, 52, 128, 158–159, 162, 164– 169 “Descriptive Sketches,” 167 “An Evening Walk,” 167 The Excursion, 4, 9 “Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg,” 141 “The Idiot Boy,” 25

Lyrical Ballads, 2, 22, 24–25, 29–30, 149, 152, 157, 160, 167–168, 195 The Prelude, 4, 9, 14, 16, 25, 29, 45, 140, 167 “Salisbury Plain,” 165 “Tintern Abbey,” 2, 8, 52, 167, 169 “The Thorn,” 152, 167 Yarlott, Geoffrey, 43 Yeats, William Butler “Among School Children,” 160–161 Last Poems, 15 Zall, Paul M., 135