Coleridge's Experimental Poetics

J. Mays

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137350237
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Coleridge has been perceived as the youthful author of a few brilliant poems. This study argues that his poetry is actually a continuous process of experimentation and provides a new perspective on both familiar and unfamiliar poems, as well as the relation between Coleridge's poetry and philosophical thinking.

C H A P T E R 1

MAKING A POET

What is your aim in philosophy?—To

show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein¹

POETRY AND BIOGRAPHY

Coleridge’s actions and behavior have always attracted interest. He was a gifted and charismatic student, an outspoken advocate of reform during a time of upheaval and repression, a widely circulated writer of the then “New Poetry” and, in later years, a popular lecturer on literary and philosophical topics as well as an influential writer on theological matters. He lived out much of his life in the public sphere; a number of his poems take sides in a way that inevitably drew attention to their (often anonymous) author, and an unusual number make a point of specifying the occasion on which they were written in a way that invites curiosity. His influence on a younger generation through the medium of conversation, albeit conversation of a one-sided kind, was particularly strong. At the same time, the reputation of the man and his writing was never comfortable. His family did not forgive his early political opinions, and his radical friends felt betrayed when he modified them. Various failed projects and an attachment to things German when this was not a popular position to take made him appear simultaneously irresolute and wilful. It also did not help that he largely abandoned his wife and family to the care of his brother-in-law; and that, quickly following his death, charges of plagiarism emerged, along with details of a heavy dependence on laudanum.

In short, whatever Coleridge achieved, a sense of unrealized possibility followed close behind. He was not always at fault, but he freely admitted a sense of postponement and misjudgment, and in the process became his own worst advocate. The bringing together of “Christabel,” “Kubla Khan,” and “The Pains of Sleep” in one volume in 1816, for example, made a statement as clearly as the collocation of “Fears in Solitude,” “France: An Ode,” and “Frost at Midnight” did 18 years before. Just as the earlier volume mapped the realignment of his political and domestic values, so also the later one suggested how innocence and beauty can be despoiled, with an emphasis on the surrounding damage. Consequent on the impression of faltering purpose, another question arose: “Why is the harp of Quantock silent?” Wordsworth doubtless meant his words as fond encouragement,² but taken along with the surrounding gossip, they could be understood as a wounding accusation. Specifically, was the mind-rot of German metaphysics to blame? Or was the lack of further “Ancient Mariners” due to simple lack of application or of willpower or even moral fiber?

In such circumstances, the story of the man and the poet inevitably became interconnected. Coleridge said more than enough to invite confusion, so it helps considerably to withdraw to a position outside the situation. His life can indeed be pictured as beginning full of promise and achievement, despite some colorful mistakes, followed by a time when failings of personality overtook him, from which he found respite in solipsistic prose and dull monologue. The fact that the well-known poems—poems like nothing else in their time or since—were written at the turning point, when the earlier stage gave way to the later, makes it almost impossible to conceive the narrative as anything but a falling off. Put another way: if his prose reflections are not taken with proper seriousness, his career cannot be other than one in which poetry was a casualty. Even if an informed and sensitive hand balances the scales, the majority of readers would still reckon another “Ancient Mariner” or “Kubla Khan” of greater worth than, say, the recently recovered Opus Maximum.

Richard Holmes’s acclaimed body of writing on Coleridge is a fair measure of the current view of the poetry in relation to the life-story and the prose. The first volume of his biography overflows with variety and incident, and was an immediate bestseller. The second volume, covering the second half of Coleridge’s life, loses narrative momentum and has been less popular. Holmes’s various poetry selections reflect the same story. He posits a category of Walking Poems in tune with the open-air, adventuring protagonist of the earlier years; and the poems selected from the later years, in number and contrasting tone, stand for narrowed concerns and and less sense of fun. Holmes’s work undoubtedly attracted new readers to Coleridge’s poetry and brought about an appreciation of his prodigious athleticism in his youth, but it also had the effect of tacitly endorsing the pattern of decline. It unfortunately served to refresh the traditional skewed interpretation, and what I attempt here is another look at all of the poetry in light of what Coleridge understood as its purpose. Although he was occasionally daunted and depressed by poems that stalled, there is reason to believe his poetry developed pretty much as he wished; and from this point of view, what may look like failure can truly be the reverse. While he was never fully satisfied with the “Ancient Mariner,” as his many adjustments attest, it achieved its purpose at the time of writing, and repeats were not an option. His eye settled on what he learned from it and the other earlier poems so as to advance a poetical project that extended to the end of his days.

The present chapter therefore begins the task of disentangling the crossover between Coleridge’s biography and poetry. It describes reactions to his verse by readers primarily or solely concerned with his poetic accomplishment. My premise is that his verse is not to be understood as it often is nowadays, when so many poets introduce their readings with a running commentary of personal anecdotes. When he provided such pointers or contexts, they tended to be technical—to do with matters of sound in the short first paragraph of “Christabel,” for example—leaving open the ends to which such means were applied. His poems are written out of a space in his head that is separate from the part occupied by the everyday man: a space that was more in tune with the body, mind, and soul of what one could call the “ideal man.” The example of “Dejection: An Ode” (293) is instructive in being addressed to a succession of persons, real and invented, on successive occasions. The poems come simultaneously from nowhere and from depths deeper than personality, which is (again) why they need to be seen independently from the biographical narrative.

Poets write as they have to and in response to their readers. Coleridge was particularly sensitive to his readers and auditors, and frequently modified poems to avoid criticism and, just as often, to suit the occasion. His reading voice is reported to have been a chant—regular and somewhat soporific—which must have overlaid characteristics of the writing he heard in his head; but he was generally his own ideal reader, with the following qualification. Unlike Wordsworth who had self-belief sufficient to write confidently for himself, and from early days strove to establish himself in the great tradition, Coleridge was not motivated by the desire for poetical fame. With few exceptions, he set himself to explore a process of self-reflection that bears an oblique relation, or no relation at all, to the subject of popular biography. I repeat, this man who wrote verse is not the same as the one reflected in other eyes, even to many who counted him friend. The private man entered another place with a specific task in mind, ruled by challenges and opportunities afforded by the occasion. The world so composed touches the ordinary world, but is both simpler and more complex. It exists separately from the world of everyday, though it holds implications for the everyday that can be learned from no other source.

The reputation of Coleridge’s verse developed through three broad phases. The first extends from the time when he was still at school and university to the time after his death when a rough consensus emerged, that is, when contemporaries looked back and brought their views into focus. This early and mid-Victorian sense of Coleridge’s poetry was occluded by his influence as a theologian—just a few star anthology pieces shone through—though revelations and assertions by some disappointed and disbelieving contemporaries complicated the matter even as they consolidated the myth of congenital failure. The second phase began in the 1860s—a decade Walter Houghton repeatedly returns to in his magisterial survey as a turning point in ideas as the century developed³—when what had been disapproved of earlier became for that very reason of greater interest and attractiveness. Coleridge’s poetry was taken up and celebrated by more discerning readers of poetry than it ever has been at any other time. As Aubrey de Vere said, if Coleridge’s life failed, it is because the highest kind of truth can be shown to us but not given.⁴ The only pity was that, in reacting against stiff-collared earnestness, these later Victorians were purblind to an essential component of Coleridge’s poetry: with few notable exceptions, they underestimated its moral dimension. This phase might be said to have continued into the early decades of the twentieth century, although Yeats and some others who imbibed Nineties attitudes continued to develop as Modernist writers afterwards. Significantly, although Yeats took a view of Coleridge’s verse that saw it as a forerunner of French symbolisme, the principal text by which his own later writing was influenced was the Biographia Literaria.

The third phase of Coleridge’s reputation as a poet was complicated during the twentieth century by an overemphasis on his literary criticism, or rather, an emphasis on literature to the exclusion of other aspects of his thought. English Practical Criticism quickly became American New Criticism and a dominant norm that affected the taste of readers at all levels. Selections by James Reeves (Heinemann 1959), John Colmer (Oxford 1965), and Raymond Wilson (Macmillan 1968) conveniently illustrate the consensus pattern that at least another 11 selections, both popular and academic, repeat with minor variations during the same two decades. A biographical introduction is followed by poems in chronological order, so arranged to demonstrate a career of burgeoning experiment culminating in an annus mirabilis at Alfoxden in the company of Wordsworth, followed in turn by a retreat into metaphysics and drugs: in short, ending in poetical decline and fall. It makes a depressing package, with the famous three left high, dry, and available to symbolic interpretation. In truth, despite the push toward more “scientific” reading initiated on a wide scale by I. A. Richards, the syllabus remained much the same as before, the only significant change being that it narrowed.

MUDSLINGING AND MUD SETTLING (TO 1860)

Coleridge’s name was relatively well known from early days onwards in several overlapping circles and in political ones in particular. His collaboration with Southey, The Fall of Robespierre (76.X1), and poetical interventions like “Religious Musings” (101), “Ode on the Departing Year” (142), and “France: An Ode” (174) evoked strong responses. However, his reputation as a poet also rested on lyrics like “Domestic Peace” (66) and, though this last stood at the heart of the Robespierre play, such poems appealed to readers who thought themselves outside party politics. In similar fashion tinged with irony, Coleridge’s journalistic and political contacts facilitated the wide distribution of apolitical poems through magazine reprintings and anthologies, such as Poetical Beauties of Modern Writers (1798) and The British Poetical Miscellany (Huddersfield 1799)⁵—the latter having been originally published weekly in numbered parts costing a penny each. An early critic, Nathan Drake, associated the lyric dimension of Coleridge’s style with the Elizabethans.⁶ Henry Nelson Coleridge, writing in The Etonian in February 1821, maintained that lyric sentiment was central in his uncle’s writing: “It is Petrarch and Shakespeare transfused into each other. It is, if I may be allowed so fanciful an illustration, the Midsummer Moonlight of Love Poetry.” The same quality of sentiment linked the young Coleridge with poets of sensibility like William Bowles and Mary Robinson. Toward the end of his life, when poetry publishing had dramatically slumped, it gave him entrance to the newly fashionable albums alongside Letitia Landon, Felicia Hemans, and their like.

Coleridge’s early settling at Bristol was almost fortuitous, but it had the effect of putting him at the center of a thriving intellectual and cultural community. His association with Southey and Wordsworth developed into lifelong friendships that formed the vanguard of the poetical revolution of their time, which in the 1790s was felt as only an eddy but which was picked up by young disciples like Hazlitt and De Quincey who recognized Lyrical Ballads for the bombshell it was. However, ironically, it was the accidental recitation by John Stoddart of the unpublished “Christabel” a few years later to Walter Scott, who in turn employed the meter in his best-selling Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), that had the most widespread effect. Scott’s version of the supernatural put the style of “Christabel” into the public domain and helped shape the context in which the next generation of poets grew up: Scott’s writing even conditioned the way “Christabel” was received in 1816.⁷ Coleridge’s meetings with Byron and Keats were occasional, and he was away from home when Shelley called. His dealings with them were never intimate as they had been with Southey and Wordsworth, and the younger writers approached his example with a divided frame of mind. He was seen as a member of the generation that they—abetted by estranged disciples like Hazlitt and dismayed by the revival of monarchism in Europe following Waterloo—conceived as having betrayed the cause of reform. Byron, Shelley, and Keats all paid a degree of homage to Coleridge, but each borrowed something different to make the new kind of poetry over again. Shelley, in particular, stated his intellectual differences from Coleridge head-on.

Against such a background, which represents the advanced writing of the early nineteenth century, the “Ancient Mariner” and “Love” (253) established themselves as favorites of a wider reading public. The “Ancient Mariner,”⁸ a series of vivid scenes in bewildering juxtaposition, gained currency as separate lines and passages that lodged in the memory. The critics were frequently dismissive—“a Dutch attempt at German sublimity,” “the strangest story of a cock and a bull that we ever saw on paper” (Southey in the Critical Review, Charles Burney in the Monthly Review)—but, without necessarily disagreeing with them or necessarily knowing of Charles Lamb’s subtle defense, the public took the poem to heart. It did not appear under Coleridge’s name until it appeared in Sibylline Leav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction
• 1   Making a Poet
• 2   A Poet Making
• 3   Matters of Style
• 4   Root and Branch
• 5   Translucent Mechanics
• 6   “So viel Anfang war noch nie”
• 7   Readerly Reflections
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index