Coleridge's Imagination

Coleridge's Imagination
ESSAYS IN MEMORY OF
PETE LAVER
Edited by
Richard Gravil, Lucy Newlyn
and Nicholas Roe

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 Contents

Pete Laver: a memoir page vii

Abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
Romantic imagination, nature and the pastoral ideal
Thomas McFarland 5
'The infinite I AM': Coleridge and the Ascent of being
Jonathan Wordsworth 22
Struggling with the contingent: self-conscious imagination in
Coleridge's notebooks Kristine Dugas 53
Coleridge's rejection of nature and the natural man
Norman Fruman 69
The imagination of Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge: unknown
inspiration of an unknown tongue Molly Lefebure 79
'As much diversity as the heart that trembles': Coleridge's
notes on the lakeland fells William Ruddick 88
'Leaping and lingering': Coleridge's lyrical ballads
Stephen Parrish 102
'Radical Difference': Coleridge and Wordsworth, 1802
Lucy Newlyn 117
Imagining Wordsworth: 1797-1807-1817 Richard Gravil 129
The Otway connection David V. Erdman 143
Imagining Robespierre Nicholas Roe 161
Coleridge's Dejection', imagination, joy and the power of love
J. Robert Barth, S.J. 179
Imagining naming shaping: stanza VI of Dejection: an Ode
Peter Larkin 193
Mythopoesis: the unity of Christabel
Anthony John Harding 207
The languages of Kubla Khan John Beer 218
Notes on the contributors 263
Index 267
Pete Laver
 Pete Laver
Nor has the rolling year twice measured,
From sign to sign, its steadfast course,
Since every mortal power of Coleridge
Was frozen at its marvellous source.
Towards the top of Grains Ghyll, where its banks begin to form a distinct
gorge, walkers ascending from Seathwaite on their way to Scafell may see
on their left a substantial cairn. It stands where a stream falls to the path,
which here is solid rock, crosses it, and drops some sixty feet to the main beck.
In winter, both falls are frozen over. Ahead is the dark face of Great End.
Looking back, one can see through Borrowdale and along Derwentwater as
far as Skiddaw, and below it, Coleridge's Keswick.
The cairn commemorates Pete Laver, for seven years Resident Librarian
at Dove Cottage, Grasmere. On 24 August 1983 he died at this spot from a
heart attack, while climbing Scafell Pike. He was thirty-six. Only a few weeks
later he was to have become a Librarian to the English Faculty at Oxford.
He and his wife, Mags, were in the final stages of buying a house, and their
two children, Jacob and Amy, were looking forward to the move. Friends
and colleagues in Grasmere were getting used to the idea of their going -
sad from their own point of view, but glad about the prospects opening up
for Pete and his family. Everyone assumed they would be back for the 1984
Wordsworth Summer Conference, if not before.
The contributors to this volume were indebted to Pete's knowledge of the
Wordsworth Library, where he provided cheerful and indispensable help to
visiting scholars. Outside the Library, he conveyed his enthusiasm for
literature as a tutor for the Summer Conference, and, locally in Cumbria,
by teaching for the Open University, and organizing school visits to Dove
Cottage. His sensitivity and insight as a teacher were complemented by the
vigorous originality of his own creative work as poet and draughtsman. His
early work was published in the Newcastle journals, Ashes and Iron, and in
three individual collections - Guillotine, Pete Laver }s Anarcho-Marxist Fun Book,
and Water, Glass, The Toad of Guilt.
When he died, Pete had recently completed a reading tour of northern
England, where his work was becoming increasingly well known, and he had
prepared a collection of his poetry for publication. He will be mourned by
all the many people he reached as librarian, teacher, poet and artist. Above
all, though, his gift for friendship will be missed, for it was this that gave his
talent a special life. For these and many other reasons, we should like to
dedicate this book to his memory.

vn
 Abbreviations

BL S. T. G oleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J . Engell and

W.Jackson Bate, CC vn (2 vols., 1983)
BLS S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J . Shawcross
(2 vols., Oxford, 1907)
BRH Bulletin of Research in the Humanities
Bristol LB George Whalley, 'The Bristol Library Borrowings of
Southey and Coleridge', Library, iv (Sept. 1949) pp.
114-31
CC The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen
Series LXXV, (London and New York, 1969-)
CL The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L.
Griggs (6 vols., Oxford, 1956-71)
CM S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley, CC
XII (5 vols., London and Princeton, N.J., 1980-)
CN The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. K. Coburn
(6 vols., New York, 1957-73)
C&S S. T. C oleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State,
According to the Idea of Each, ed. J . Colmer, CCx (1976)
DWJ TheJournals ofDorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt
(2 vols., Oxford, 1941)
EC Essays in Criticism
ELH English Literary History
EO T S. T. C oleridge, Essays on his Times, ed. D. V. Erdman,
CC ill (3 vols., 1978)
EY The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de
Selincourt, 2ndedn, The Early Years, 1787-1805, revised
by C. L. Shaver (Oxford, 1967)
Friend S. T. Coleridge, The Friend, ed. B. Rooke, CC IV (2
vols., 1969)
H Works TheComplete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe(21
vols., 1930-4)
Lects 1795 S. T. C oleridge, Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, ed.
L. P a t t o n a n d P . Mann, CC I (1971)
LL(M) The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. Marrs (3 vols.,
New York, 1975-8).
X Abbreviations

LS S. T. Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White, CC VI

(1972)
McFarland, 'SI' Thomas McFarland, 'The Origin and Significance of
Coleridge's Theory of Secondary Imagination', New
Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, ed. Geoffrey
Hartman (New York and London, 1972), pp. 195-246
Misc C Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor
(Cambridge, Mass., 1936)
MLA Modern Language Association of America
M Phil Modern Philology
N&Q Notes & Queries
Norton 'Prelude' William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850,
eds. J. Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, S. Gill (New
York and London, 1979)
Oxford 'Prelude' William Wordsworth, The Prelude, ed. E. de
Selincourt, 2nd edn, revised by H. Darbishire
(Oxford, 1959)
P Lects The Philosophical Lectures ofSamuel Taylor Coleridge, ed.
K. Coburn (London and New York, 1949)
PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association
(Baltimore, 1886-)
Prose Works The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J . B.
Owen a n d j . W. Smyser (3 vols., Oxford, 1974)
PW The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
ed. E. H. Coleridge (2 vols., Oxford, 1912)
Sh C Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor
(2 vols., 1930)
SIR Studies in Romanticism
SM S. T. Coleridge, The Statesman's Manual, ed. R. J .
White, CCvi(1972)
TLS The Times Literary Supplement
TWC The Wordsworth Circle
WPW The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de
Selincourt and H. Darbishire (5 vols., Oxford, 1940-9)
 Introduction

Imagination was many things to Coleridge, and the contributors to this

book have been as varied in their preoccupations and approaches as the
writer himself. Thomas McFarland, in the first and most general of the
essays - 'Romantic imagination, nature and the pastoral ideal' - is
concerned with the origins of Romanticism in the years that followed the
French Revolution, and its relation to 'the vision of a simpler existence'
proffered by pastoral. Distinguishing between 'solitude of identity' and
'solitude of alienation', he takes as his texts Alastor and This Lime-Tree
Bower My Prison. 'Both solitudes', he argues, 'are Romantic in that they
arise from the accelerating external pressures on the ego that were deter-
minants of Romanticism'; but only the 'solitude of identity' can find a
balm in its extension of Theocritan pastoral. Shelley's poet leaves 'His
cold fireside and alienated home/ To seek strange truths in distant lands',
but can find no reconciliation; for the Coleridge of This Lime-Tree Bower;
however, 'imagination's invocation of nature can serve to align Roman-
tic solitude with the essentials of the pastoral ideal'.
Jonathan Wordsworth too is concerned with the finding of identity
through an act of imagination. In 'The infinite I AM', he examines two
persistent and related assumptions: that Coleridge's thinking about im-
agination in Biographia Literaria derived from German metaphysics; and
that, despite his choice of words, Coleridge regarded the primary im-
agination as of secondary importance. Evidence is produced to show not
only that Coleridge's thought is rooted in a native English tradition, but
that, for all his eclectic and passionate reading, he remained broadly con-
sistent in his beliefs throughout the twenty-year period between the first
definitions of imagination in 1795, and the writing of Biographia. At all
times Coleridge was primarily concerned not with artistic creativity
(however important that might seem, or be), but with the 'Ascent of Be-
ing' - man's ability to transcend the merely human, to 'lose and find
all self in God'.
Kristine Dugas and Norman Fruman lay emphasis rather on the loss,
and the repression, that are implied in Coleridge's 'quest for grace'. For
Dugas, in her study of the Notebooks, Coleridge is a divided being, one
who ' strove for the ideal, [ but ] was tortured by the real'. The yearning
2 Introduction
for oneness led him to suppress precisely the 'sharp and restless sensitivi-
ty' which the Notebooks suggest might have released him from lethargy
and self-doubt. Fruman presents a view of the 'final, frozen recoil from
the warm and vivid world of Nature and the natural man'. 'For Col-
eridge', he writes, 'truly human life "begins in its detachment from
Nature, and is to end in union with God" '. Such life could only be of
the mind - 'all else is from the bestial':
He spent the Highgate years more or less in the garb and stance of a priest, clad
from head to toe in black, and declaiming against the evils of the age and the
animal in us all. He was still a young man when he ceased to be a husband, father,
brother, or a lover to anyone.
Meanwhile, as Molly Lefebure points out, the deserted Mrs Coleridge
was leading a life that could be surprisingly lighthearted. Her brother-
in-law Sou they was making up for some of Coleridge's deficiencies as hus-
band and father, and generating at Greta Hall a Shandyan atmosphere
in which Sara flourished to the extent of creating a private language. 'She
asks me', Southey writes affectionately in a letter of 1821,
how I can be such a Tomnoddycum (though my name, as she knows, is Robert),
and calls me a detesty, a maffrum, a goffrum, a chatterpye, a sillycum, and a great
mawkinfort.
In a rather different sense, as William Ruddick reminds us, Coleridge
too had evolved a special language at Keswick - a highly distinctive
prose capable of evoking his new-found joy in the fells: 'As I bounded
down, noticed the moving stones under the soft moss, hurting my feet.'
In place of the picturesque guides, and statuesque 'taking' of views, is
a vivid excitement in the physical realities of the Lake District. Coleridge
had come as a stranger to Wordsworth's native region, but in fact walk-
ed higher and harder than Wordsworth ever did.
Coleridge-Wordsworth relations, and the nature and effect of what
Thomas McFarland has called their symbiosis, concern several contri-
butors. Stephen Parrish, who focusses on the poems intended for Lyrical
Ballads, advances the argument that the most revolutionary early poems
of Wordsworth and Coleridge rose 'not so much out of harmonious col-
laboration as out of deep and unresolved conflicts of critical opinion'. In
March 1801, however, writing to Godwin, Coleridge describes his im-
agination as no longer 'mitred with flame' but 'like a cold snuff on the
circular rim of a brass candlestick'. Can we attribute Coleridge's im-
aginative extinction, Stephen Parrish asks, to his friend's failure to res-
pond to an imagination more allegorical and mythic than his own?
Lucy Newlyn is also concerned with strains and complexities in the
relationship. Why is it that Coleridge's detection of a 'radical difference'
 Introduction 3
in their theoretical positions should belong to 1802, when Wordsworth
writes his most overtly fanciful poetry, and Coleridge himself chooses to
downgrade Fancy to the merely mechanical? In evolving the Fancy/Im-
agination definitions, she suggests, Coleridge is unconsciously pointing
to a distinction between Wordsworth's literal-mindedness and his own
increasingly confirmed symbolic thinking. As in Biographia, theoretical
difference masks deeper incompatibilities. Richard Gravil, too, is con-
cerned with antithetical imaginations, but finds Coleridge's destructively
dominant over his friend's. His essay sees the friendship as marked by
Coleridge's long struggle to 'totalise' Wordsworth - to make 'a perfectly
congruous whole' out of a brother poet who remained, in his most
characteristic work, disappointingly unregenerate.
David Erdman's 'The Otway connection' touches on similar areas of
discussion, but its preoccupations are very different. The paper is a com-
plex investigation into the relations between The Mad Monk, Otway's
Complaint, Lucy, Christabel and Dejection: it would be robbed of some of
its capacity to please and surprise if the reader were forewarned of its con-
clusions. There is a corpse, and possibly a villain; Wordsworth and Col-
eridge are featured as commander poet and demon power, and one's
sense of their creative/destructive sparring is greatly enhanced. Nicholas
Roe in taking Robespierre for his subject has the surprising task of
rendering undemonic a leader who in the popular mind ranks with
Caligula, Stalin and Hitler. To Coleridge, it transpires, Robespierre was
an inspiration - the Man of Imagination on an heroic scale, flawed only
by his lack of faith. In this respect, Roe suggests, Coleridge's idea of
Robespierre corresponds to Wordsworth's account of his Godwinian self
in The Prelude. Looking back to that time, he did not find imagination dor-
mant: rather, it was rampant, and generative of chimaeras, having slip-
ped the control of love, the affections, the sense of intellectual fallibili-
ty. Roe's essay not merely calls attention to the fascination Robespierre
exercised upon Coleridge in this respect - as the prophet of futurity -
but also points to his role as one who, prior to Wordsworth, put Coleridge
on the track of imagination itself.
The book concludes with four essays on individual Coleridge poems.
Robert Barth and Peter Larkin both take Dejection as their subject, but
come to it from different directions. Barth, who is particularly concerned
with the development from verse-letter to printed text, sees it as a poem
about love, joy and imagination - all of them so bound together that they
cannot 'stand dividually'. The word 'love', which appears twenty-one
times in the Letter to Sara, disappears in Dejection: an Ode, but this merely
implies that the principle itself has (as Barth puts it) 'gone underground'.
Dejection becomes, in fact, 'a love poem in a broader and deeper sense -
4 Introduction

now not merely the lament of a frustrated lover, but an ode to the power
of love'. Peter Larkin's concerns are more abstract. He sees the relation
between two different modes of Coleridge's writing (poetic and
philosophical) as a difficult one, and Dejection itself as a fraught text.
'Which voice', he asks, 'might best name imagination?' 'Theory does
not blend with poetry', in his view, 'without some liability.' And in this
particular poem the cost is that 'to a philosophic eye works of imagina-
tion may always in practice stray to the fanciful'.
If Barth's Coleridge strives for wholeness, and Larkin's finds division,
Anthony Harding's does both. His title, 'Mythopoesis: the unity of
ChristabeV sets up holistic expectations, but it is with fallen vision (and
fragmentation) that Harding is centrally concerned. Distancing the poem
from Lewis, Radcliffe and the Gothic, he takes it closer to Blake's Visions
of the Daughters of Albion and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. In this new,
mythic context, Christabelis seen as a study of creative spirit held in thrall
by nature and the natural man. If the poem reaches no conclusion, Har-
ding argues, that is because its real subject is less a story than a state: the
loss of speech, prayer, and wholeness, in an invasion of the unregenerate.
Coleridge's greatest poem of and about imagination must be Kubla
Khan, and it is fitting that the volume should end with an essay by John
Beer on the poem's 'languages'. To what extent, though passively, was
Coleridge carrying forward, in the creation of Kubla Khan, a project
already begun by Spenser, Milton, and Cowper? Why does his Abyssi-
nian maid haunt a Tartar landscape through which there flows a Greek
river? John Beer's search in Coleridge's literary haunts for comparable
occurrences of rocks and rills, music and mazes, domes and dulcimers,
is subsidiary here - though fascinating in itself - to a search for a way
of seeing 'the effusions of unchecked libido' in significant relation to
evocations of earlier 'tamers of chaos'. Kubla Khan is read as a ferment
of competing languages which dramatise the conflicts of Coleridge's be-
ing: an imploded myth, as it were, of the tensions others of our essays have
explored.
 Romantic imagination, nature, and the
pastoral ideal
THOMAS McFARLAND

There exists a natural and almost inevitable affinity between the Roman-
tic and the pastoral, what in good Romantic terminology might be called
a Wahlverwandschaft. Romanticism might be sickness, as Goethe said, but
pastoral was its balm. Romanticism was frenzy, and pastoral was peace.
It was the disruptive force of the French Revolution, said Hazlitt, that
stirred English poetry into Romanticism and moulded its character:
From the impulse it thus received, it rose at once from the most servile imitation
and tamest common-place, to the utmost pitch of singularity and paradox. . . .
There was a mighty ferment in the heads of statesmen and poets, kings and
people. . . . According to the prevailing notions, all was to be natural and new.
Nothing that was established was to be tolerated. . . . A striking effect produced
where it was least expected, something new and original, no matter whether good,
bad, or indifferent. . . was all that was aimed at. ... The world was to be turned
topsy-turvy; and poetry, by the good will of our Adam-wits, was to share its fate
and begin denovo.
Above all, Romanticism was a convulsive response to a growing sense
of perplexity and confusion with regard to received assumptions of social
order, religious assurance, and economic possibility. Against this expan-
ding complexity, pastoral proffered the vision of a simpler existence. It
had muted since its Theocritan origins the eternal hurly-burly of city and
court (the 'court news' of which 'poor rogues' talk has always been a mat-
ter of'Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out'). Now once again,
though transformed in emphasis, pastoral tendered to the Romantic im-
agination a nostalgic invitation to a life more in harmony with nature.
It was this invitation that Rousseau accepted when he abandoned Paris
for the bucolic balm of the Hermitage:
Although for some years I had fairly frequently gone into the country, I had hardly
tasted its pleasures. Indeed my trips, generally made in the company of preten-
tious people and always ruined by a feeling of constraint, had merely whetted my
appetite for rural delights; the closer the glimpse I got of them the more I felt the
want of them. I was so tired of reception rooms, fountains, shrubberies, and
flower-beds . . . I was so weary of pamphlets, clavichords . . . and great dinners,
that when I spied a poor simple thorn bush, a hedge, a barn, or a meadow . . .
when I heard in the distance the rustic refrain of the goat-women's song, I con-
signed all rouge,flounces,and perfumes to the devil.
6 THOMAS McFARLAND
To be sure, the Romantic imagination felt obliged to transform this
reawakened urge to pastoral. As a classical form both artificial and con-
ventional, pastoral to that extent seemed alien to Romanticism, which
was fascinated by spontaneous overflows and effusions, by unstudied
naturalness, by the rejection of imitation and the apotheosis of originality
- it wanted, as Hazlitt said, to 'begin de novo', all had 'to be natural and
new'. As Hazlitt also observed, in continuation of that passage, a
characteristic of the Romantic upheaval was that 'kings and queens were
dethroned from their rank and station in legitimate tragedy or epic
poetry, as they were decapitated elsewhere; rhyme was looked upon as
a relic of the feudal system, and regular metre was abolished along with
regular government'. The tradition of formal imitation so essential to
pastoral could not flourish in such an atmosphere.
But another and no less important emphasis of pastoral was precisely
congruent to Hazlitt's normative specification of kings and queens be-
ing dethroned; for pastoral, as Frederick Garber has pointed out, derives
much of its appeal from the fact that amid conditions of tyranny in the
real world it presented an ideal world free of social and political hierar-
chy. The relation of the Romantic imagination and pastoral conceiving
is thus inherently paradoxical, and the paradox extends along all
historical lines of their convergence. Pastoral does not loom large on the
surface of Romanticism; just beneath that surface it is everywhere. It is
not even necessary to rely wholly on Empson's recognition of transfor-
mations of the pastoral impulse to document this perception. On the con-
trary, though pastoral awareness was relegated to the background by the
Romantic emphasis on originality, it was widely diffused in that
background and again and again emerges briefly to view. 'I envy you the
first reading of Theocritus', wrote Shelley to John Gisborne; and
elsewhere Mary Shelley notes of 'a record of the books that Shelley read'
during the years 1814 and 1815, that it 'includes, in Greek, Homer,
Hesiod, Theocritus, the histories of Thucydides and Herodotus, and
Diogenes Laertius'; for 1816 she finds 'in Greek, Theocritus, the Pro-
metheus of Aeschylus, several of Plutarch's Lives, and the works of Lucian'.
'Every ten lines almost' of Theocritus, wrote Coleridge, 'furnish one or
more instances of Greek words, whose specific meaning is not to be found
in the best Lexicons', and he then gives examples.
Shelley and Coleridge perhaps knew Greek better than the other
English Romantics, but there was a corollary Latin tradition stemming
from Virgil, and from this almost all the Romantic writers could claim
edification. Wordsworth was of course an excellent Latinist, and his
Michael is not merely a pastoral poem by grace of the Empsonian formula,
but is in fact firmly subtitled A Pastoral Poem by Wordsworth himself.
 Romantic imagination 7
Again, the youthful De Quincey (who boasted of his prowess in both
Latin and Greek) notes offhandedly, but significantly in terms of the lurk-
ing presence of specifically classical awarenesses, that 'there is no good
pastoral in the world but Wordsworth's Brothers'.
Still again, the seacoast idyll ofJuan and Haidee in the second canto
ofDonJuan seems a version of pastoral by way of a tradition running from
Virgil through Sannazaro. Byron was of course well versed in Italian
literature, and that specific pastoralism was present to his mind is attested
by his sardonic reflections in the first canto on Juan's 'classic studies',
where he says that 'Virgil's songs are pure, except that horrid one/ Begin-
ning "Formosum Pastor Corydon" '. But it was not merely the Second
Eclogue that came to Byron's notice; he seems to have been virtually
saturated in the Eclogues. He quotes the Third Eclogue to Hobhouse in
1811, quotes it again in his journal in 1813, and once again to Moore in
1814. To Moore in that same year he quotes the Seventh Eclogue, as he
does to Hobhouse in 1820 and to Murray in 1822. Rousseau, too, who
quit urban society for the bucolic otium of the country ('I felt that I was
born for retirement and the country; it was impossible for me to live hap-
pily anywhere else') was conditioned by Virgilian awareness: 'I must
have learned and re-learned Virgil's Eclogues a good twenty times', he
recalls.
How specific, and how firmly based in knowledge of Greek and Latin
texts, was the knowledge of pastoral that underlay Romanticism's love
of the natural has been somewhat obscured by their dislike of imitation
and imposed form. Mont Blanc, said Shelley himself, was 'an undisciplin-
ed overflowing of the soul.' Yet Shelley translated fragments of Bion's
Death of Adonis and of the Death o/Bion attributed to Moschus, and he also
translated a fragment from the Latin of Virgil's Tenth Eclogue.
Moreover, there are places where all the elements of pastoral are present,
although the poem itself is not formally of that genre. An example is pro-
vided by his Hymn to Pan, which runs in part:
From the forests and highlands
We come, we come;
From the river-girt islands,
Where loud waves are dumb
Listening to my sweet pipings.
The wind in the reeds and the rushes,
The bees on the bells of thyme,
The birds on the myrtle bushes,
The cicade above in the lime,
And the lizards below in the grass,
Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was,
Listening to my sweet pipings.
8 THOMAS McFARLAND
II

Liquid Peneus was flowing,

And all dark Tempe lay
In Pelion's shadow, outgrowing
The light of the dying day,
Speeded by my sweet pipings.

Bees are especially important in Theocritus; lizards figure prominently

in both Theocritus and Virgil; and Pan himself, as Bruno Snell points
out in The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, was
part of the reason for Virgil's transfer of the pastoral locale from
Theocritan Sicily to Arcadia:

Polybius who came from the humdrum Arcadia cherished a great affection for
his country. Although there was not much of interest to be related of this land
behind the hills, he could at least report (4.20) that the Arcadians were, from the
days of their infancy onwards, accustomed to practice the art of singing, and that
they displayed much eagerness in organizing musical contests. Virgil came across
this passage when he was composing his shepherd songs, the Eclogues, and at once
understood it to refer to the Arcadian shepherds; for Arcadia was shepherds' coun-
try and the home of Pan, the god of the herdsmen, inventor of the syrinx.
Shelley's great formal effort, Adonais, is prefixed by a Greek passage
from the Epitaphios Bionos, and in Adonais itself the pastoral conventions
are activated in a dazzlingly effective manner. This mighty poem is
atypical, however, not only for Romanticism in general, but even for
Shelley himself. Nothing else in his canon has such rhetorical splendor,
slow-paced dignity, decorum andgravitas. For the most part - the truth
deserves reiteration - the reaching for spontaneity (perhaps the most
descriptive term for the rise of this new element is provided by the rubric
of Wackenroder, Herzensergiessungen . . . - outpourings of the heart) oc-
cluded the sophisticated infrastructure of Romantic pastoralism. In most
situations, as his wife recalls and as was stressed above in his own words,
Shelley 'wrote because his mind overflowed'.
One place where the infrastructure is not occluded, though, is in the
common emphasis of the two traditions upon external nature. Of the
various criteria for Romanticism, complexly interwoven into an almost
seamless cultural texture, first one, then another is put forward by com-
mentators as the ruling passion of that sensibility: imagination,
organicism, medievalism, subjectivism. But the most constant of all
defining factors is nature. It was as though literature in the neo-classic
age had been enclosed, and Romanticism opened a door and stepped out-
side to bathe in a new reality. 'My imagination', said Rousseau,
'languishes and dies in a room beneath the rafters of a ceiling'; it 'only
 Romantic imagination 9

thrives in the country and under the trees'. 'Come forth into the light of
things', counseled Wordsworth, 'Let Nature be your Teacher.' In his
very first statement, Goethe's Werther complains that 'the city itself is
unpleasant; but then, all around it, nature is inexpressibly beautiful'; and
in the next letter he is in rapture:

When the lovely valley teems with mist around me, and the high sun strikes the
impenetrable foliage of my forest, and but a few rays steal into the inner sanc-
tuary, I lie in the tall grass by the trickling brook and notice a thousand familiar
things: when I hear the humming of the little world among the stalks, and am near
the countless indescribable forms of the worms and insects, then I feel the presence
of the Almighty . . .

Wordsworth, again, laments that

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours . . .
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours . . . .
For this, for every thing, we are out of tune; . . .
Still again, Keats in his youthful Sleep and Poetry attacked his neo-classic
predecessors as men who 'sway'd about on a rocking horse,/And thought
it Pegasus'. 'Ah dismal soul'd!', he continues,

The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd

Its gathering waves - ye felt it not. The blue
Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew
Of summer nights collected still to make
The morning precious: beauty was awake!
Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead
To things ye knew not of . . .
But Romanticism was not dead to these wonders. ' T o every natural
form, rock, fruit or flower', said Wordsworth,

Even the loose stones that cover the highway,

I gave a moral life: I saw them feel,
Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass
Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning.
In short, one must in the main agree with Paul de M a n that
An abundant imagery coinciding with an equally abundant quantity of natural
objects, the theme of imagination linked closely to the theme of nature, such is
the fundamental ambiguity that characterizes the poetics of romanticism.
The primacy of nature must be stressed, because even in de M a n ' s
passage, and much more so in certain emphases of Geoffrey H a r t m a n
10 THOMAS McFARLAND
and Harold Bloom, the role of nature in the Romantic sensibility is
misconceived or diminished. Bloom, for instance, sees the 'context of
nature as a trap for the mature imagination'. 'The internalization of
quest-romance', he says again, 'made of the poet-hero a seeker not after
nature but after his own mature powers, and so the Romantic poet turned
away, not from society to nature, but from nature to what was more in-
tegral than nature, within himself.' Hartman, for his part, speaks of 'the
deeply paradoxical character of Wordsworth's dealings with nature' and
suggests that what Wordsworth calls imagination 'may be intrinsically op-
posed to Nature'. Hartman goes on to make extended play with an
'unresolved opposition between Imagination and Nature' that he posits
for Wordsworth.
These views, which are versions of Blake's idiosyncratic position that
'Natural objects always did & now do Weaken deaden & obliterate Im-
agination in Me', cannot it seems to me be maintained either for Words-
worth or for Romanticism as such except by disregarding overwhelm-
ing evidence to the contrary. Nature was not in opposition to Words-
worth's imagination; the vision of nature was itself the richest fulfillment
of that imagination. The irreducible truth about Wordsworth is the one
presented in Shelley's apostrophe to him: 'Poet of Nature, thou hast wept
to know/ That things depart which never may return.' Mary Shelley says
that 'The love and knowledge of Nature developed by Wordsworth' com-
posed part of Shelley's 'favourite reading'; and she also reports of her hus-
band that 'Mountain and lake and forest were his home; the phenomena
of Nature were his favourite study.' She testifies again that Shelley 'loved
to shelter himself in 'such imaginations as borrowed their hues from
sunrise or sunset, from the yellow moonshine or paly twilight, from the
aspect of the far ocean or the shadows of the woods, - which celebrated
the singing of the winds among the pines, the flow of a murmuring
stream, and the thousand harmonious sounds which Nature creates in
her solitudes'.
Wordsworth's witness is still more unequivocal. His highest vision of
what he and Coleridge were trying to do was to preach the gospel of
nature. They were to be 'joint labourers' in the work of men's
'deliverance'; they were, in fact, to be 'Prophets of Nature':

Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak

A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how . . .
To say that Wordsworth merely approved of nature would be radically
to understate the situation. He recognized
 11
Romantic imagination

In nature and the language of the sense,

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
If he still retains a faith
That fails not, in all sorrow my support,
The blessing of my life; the gift is yours,
Ye mountains! Thine, O Nature! Thou hast fed
My lofty speculations; and in thee,
For this uneasy heart of ours, I find
A never-failing principle of joy
And purest passion.
From 'Nature and her overflowing soul', he says,

I had received so much, that all my thoughts

Were steeped in feeling
and he speaks of 'That spirit of religious love in which/I walked with
Nature'. The chief memory he bequested to his sister was

That on the banks of this delightful stream

We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service; . . .
Similarly, Keats's earliest poetry is replete with a kind of intoxication
with nature. 'What has made the sage or poet write', he asks, 'But the
fair paradise of Nature's light?' The same intensity is maintained in
Holderlin's impassioned statement that 'to re-establish the peace above
all peace, which passeth all understanding, to unite ourselves with
Nature, into one infinite entity, that is the aim of all our aspiration'. 'He
is made one with Nature', confirms Shelley in elegy of the dead Keats,
there is heard

His voice in all her music, from the moan

Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird . . .
Pastoral too is preoccupied with nature, to an extent indeed only
marginally less insistent than in the Romantic upheaval. Green grass,
shading trees, humming bees, and purling brooks are indispensable to
the pastoral vision, however the details of that vision may vary in other
respects. As Renato Poggioli emphasizes, in The Oaten Flute: Essays on
Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal, 'When the poet is unable to escape into
Arcadia, pastoral strategy requires that he retreat at least into an orchard
12 THOMAS McFARLAND
or a park.' Ellen Zetzel Lambert, again, in her book called Placing Sor-
row: A Study of the Pastoral Convention from Theocritus to Milton, notes that
'Pastoral consoles us by enfolding us in nature's sympathies.'
In high pastoralism the invocation of nature's richness and benigni-
ty can become extraordinarily intense. It is no accident that Milton,
whose imagination was so profoundly moved by pastoral implication,
described the Garden of Eden itself as a pastoral landscape. And no
evocation of nature's texture could be more rich than that summoned by
Theocritus in his Seventh Idyll:

Many an aspen, many an elm bowed and rustled overhead, and near by, the
hallowed water gushed purling from a cave of the nymphs, while the brown cricket
chirped busily amid the shady leafage, and the tree-frog murmured aloof in the
dense thornbrake. Lark and goldfinch sang and turtledove moaned, and about
the spring the bees hummed and hovered to and fro. All nature smelled of the
opulent summertime, smelled of the season of fruit. Pears lay at our feet, apples
on either side, rolling abundantly, and the young branches lay splayed upon the
ground because of the weight of their damsons.
How readily this opulent vision coincides with the Romantic imagina-
tion's apprehension of nature can be illustrated from Keats's apprentice
poem, I Stood Tiptoe, where the poet focuses the Romantic awareness of
nature by his own untrained but intuitively prescient Hellenism. In a
context of 'Fauns, and Dryades' and 'Arcadian Pan', Keats invokes
A bush of May flowers with the bees about them;
Ah, sure no tasteful nook would be without them;
And let a lush laburnum oversweep them,
And let long grass grow round the roots to keep them
Moist, cool and green; and shade the violets,
That they may bind the moss in leafy nets.
Again, Rousseau's very statement, 'my imagination, which only
thrives in the country and under trees, languishes and dies in a room
beneath the rafters of the ceiling', which was adduced above as normative
of the Romantic discovery of nature, is immediately followed by a
sentence from the realm of pure pastoral: 'J'ai souvent regrette qu'il n'ex-
istat pas des Dryades; c'eut infailliblement ete parmi elles que j'aurois
fixe mon attachement' - I often have regretted that dryads do not ex-
ist; for among them I should assuredly have found an object for my love.
A few paragraphs later, Rousseau again connects the real landscape of
Romantic discovery with the imaginary landscape of pastoral: 'I found
no woodland fresh enough, no countryside moving enough, to suit me.
The valleys of Thessaly would have satisfied me, if I had seen them; but
my imagination was tired of inventing, and wanted some real locality to
serve as a basis.'
 Romantic imagination 13
Nevertheless, though pastoral nature and Romantic nature can be vir-
tually identical presentations, a certain specific element, present in
Romanticism but absent in the pastoral, makes the Romantic form at
best a problematic version of pastoral and possibly one that in some in-
stances should not even be called a version of pastoral at all. The uncer-
tainty of the relationship is correlate with an uncertainty in defining
pastoral as such. For there exists alongside a primary vision of the pastoral
what one might call a laminated vision of pastoral. Both are important
for pastoral meaning, and both are historically valid.
The primary vision is simply the sum of those factors to be found in
Theocritus's idylls. The laminated vision, however, bonds to the primary
vision certain historical accretions that fulfill the implication of the
primary vision even though they were not present in it. A notable exam-
ple is the idea of the 'golden age'. This conception does not occur in
Theocritus; it stems rather from the earlier source of Hesiod, who speaks
of a 'golden race' of men. Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, invokes a 'golden
age' (aurea aetas), and Virgil, in his Fourth Eclogue, takes the conception
into the realm of pastoral, forecasting that there will spring up a 'golden
race' (gens aurea) throughout the world. By the time of the Renaissance,
the golden age was incessantly invoked, by Tasso, by Guarini, by Ron-
sard, by Shakespeare, among others, and by 1659 Rapin, in his Disser-
tatio de carminepastorali, theoretically bonded golden age and pastoral by
saying that 'pastoral belongs properly to the golden age'. By Pope's A
Discourse on Pastoral Poetry, published in 1717 but possibly written as ear-
ly as 1704, the lamination was complete, because Pope there says that
'pastoral is an image of what they call the Golden age', while he still
recognizes that' Theocritus excells all others in nature and simplicity. The
subjects of his Idyllia are purely pastoral.... all others learn'd their ex-
cellencies from him'.
Another lamination occurred by the joining of the motifs of Virgil's
Georgics to those of his Eclogues. Indeed, a fine example of the discrimina-
tion of laminated pastoral and primary pastoral is afforded by two ex-
amples noted earlier: that Wordsworth's Michael is subtitled;! Pastoral
Poem, while De Quincey chooses not Michaelbut The Brothers as his exam-
ple of 'good pastoral'. The choice is significant, for Michael and The
Brothers are closely linked in tone, diction, and theme, and in fact these
two poems were the ones Wordsworth sent to the statesman Charles
James Fox as co-operatively honoring the domestic affections. Michael,
however, has laminated to its pastoralism the tradition of the Georgics. Its
shepherd is not in a state of pastoral otium, but instead labors. 'I have been
toiling more than seventy years', says Michael, thereby activating the
principle of toil that rules the world of the Georgics, where 'labor omnia
14 THOMAS McFARLAND
vicit9. On the other hand, The Brothers incorporates no such rejection of
otium and accordingly exhibits the characteristics of primary pastoral.
De Quincey's classical sophistication appears to advantage in his
choice of The Brothers as 'good pastoral'. But Wordsworth, too, it must
be stressed, knew exactly what he was doing in pastoral matters. Paul
Alpers has recently praised lines from The Prelude''s eighth book as reveal-
ing Wordsworth's clear understanding of the pastoral tradition, and
earlier critics such as Herbert Lindenberger, Stephen Parrish, and I
myself have discussed the topic as well, not to mention Leslie Broughton's
volume of 1920 called The Theocritan Element in the Works of William
Wordsworth.
Yet, though both Michael and The Brothers can properly be termed
pastorals, many Romantic invocations of nature perhaps cannot, even
by the conception of laminated pastoral, be seen as according with
pastoral implication. The possible rupture occurs not in the view of
nature as such, but in the view of the relation of man to nature. A cer-
tain social interaction is necessary to pastoral; the natural landscape is
merely the arena for the interplay of a group. Alpers, indeed, in the same
article in which he praises Wordsworth's knowledge of pastoral ('What
is Pastoral?', CriticalInquiry, 8 (Spring, 1982), pp. 437-60), argues that
the 'representative anecdote' of pastoral (he is using a conception from
Kenneth Burke) is the lives of the shepherds within the landscape, rather
than the landscape itself. 'Whatever the specific features and emphases',
he says, 'it is the representative anecdote of shepherds' lives that makes
certain landscapes pastoral.'
Romantic nature, on the other hand, is customarily not the arena for
social interaction, but for solitude. The 'representative anecdote' in this
case may be indicated by Tieck's'Waldeinsamkeit' - forest loneliness -
the 'wondrous song' in Der blonde Eckbert that resounded throughout Ger-
man Romanticism. Nature, in this instance the forest, is linked inex-
tricably to solitude. We need only think of Thoreau at Walden Pond. Or
consider Werther's comment in his first letter: 'Die Einsamkeit ist
meinem Herzen kostlicher Balsam in dieser paradiesischen Gegend' -
loneliness is precious balm to my heart in this paradisal region; and he
immediately specifies the paradisal region: 'Every tree, every bush is a
bouquet of flowers, and one might wish to be a spring beetle, to float
about in this ocean of fragrance and therein find all his nourishment.'
Chateaubriand, again, links Romantic nature not only to solitude but
also to the further Romantic criterion of freedom:
Primitive liberty, I regain thee at last! I pass as this bird that flies before me,
directed by chance and only encumbered by the choice of shades. Here I am, as
the All-Powerful created me, sovereign of nature. . . . Is it on the brow of the man
 Romantic imagination 15
of society, or on mine, that the immortal seal of our origin is set? Go, shut yourself
in your cities, obey your petty laws . . . while I go wandering through my solitudes.
In a different kind of expression, Wordsworth presents the bonding
of solitude to Romantic nature through a memorable salute to Coleridge:
For thou hast sought
The truth in solitude, and thou art one,
The most intense of Nature's worshippers;
In many things my brother, chiefly here
In this my deep devotion.
Now Romantic solitude is a topic of such depth and complexity that
it would rather require a treatise for its elucidation than the fleeting
remarks that can be accorded it here. Suffice it to say that the invocation
of solitude occurs in the most diverse contexts, and that solitude has its
own subsistence; that is to say, though it is frequently, it is not necessarily,
bonded to nature. In this noteworthy evocation by De Quincey, for in-
stance, it is bonded to another Romantic criterion, that of childhood:
. . . in solitude, above all things . . . God holds 'communion undisturbed' with
children. Solitude, though silent as light, is, like light, the mightiest of agencies,
for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone; all leave it alone
. . . . The solitude, therefore, which in this world appalls or fascinates a child's
heart is but the echo of a far deeper solitude through which he already has passed,
and of another solitude, deeper still through which he has to pass: reflex of one
solitude - prefiguration of another.
O burden of solitude, that cleavest to man through every stage of his being!
In his birth, which has been, in his life, which is, in his death, which shall he —
mighty and essential solitude that wast, and art, and art to be, thou broodest like
the spirit of God moving upon the surface of the deeps, over every heart that sleeps
in the nurseries of Christendom.
Solitude, in truth, is so fundamental to the Romantic complex that we
may even take as the representative anecdote of the passage from neo-
classic sensibility to that of Romanticism the breakdown of the friend-
ship of Diderot and Rousseau over that single conception. As Cassirer
remarks, Diderot
regarded Rousseau's untamable urge for solitude merely as a singular quirk. For
Diderot needed social intercourse not only as the essential medium for his activity
but also as the spiritual fluid in which alone he was capable of thinking. The will
to solitude accordingly appeared to him as nothing less than spiritual and moral
aberration. It is well known that Diderot's phrase in the postscript to the Fils
naturel, that only an evil man loves solitude - a phrase that Rousseau immediately
applied to himself and for which he took Diderot to task, gave the first impetus
to their break. After this break, Diderot's feeling of something uncanny in
Rousseau's nature rose until it became almost intolerable.
To be sure, the Romantics talked of solitude more frequently than they
practiced it. Rousseau's Hermitage was actually a cottage for three on the
16 THOMAS McFARLAND
estate of Mme d'Epinay, a dozen miles from Paris. His island retreat,
to which he looked forward with such anticipation of pastoral otium ('I
meant at last to carry out my great scheme for a life of idleness'), was
blessed by the repeated presence of Therese Levasseur. Wordsworth, too,
was in fact almost never alone throughout his adult life, and as Robert
Langbaum has pointed out, poems wherein he presents himself as being
solitary again and again distort the actual situation. For instance, 'the
bliss of solitude' is a phrase in his poem that begins 'I wandered lonely
as a cloud'; but we know from Dorothy's journal, where the same daf-
fodils are described, that the situation might more truly be described as
' We wandered companionably as two clouds'. Likewise, the solitary T who
was 'a Traveller . . . upon the moor' when he encountered the old leech-
gatherer was, as we also know from Dorothy's journal, really a 'we',
while the leech-gatherer himself, who in the poem surpasses even the 'vast
solitude' of the Old Cumberland Beggar, had fathered ten children.
But the discrepancy between the practice of solitude and its ideal ac-
tually strengthens rather than weakens the special force of that ideal.
However much company he may have had as man walking, Rousseau
as reveristic 'promeneur' was ineluctably 'solitaire'.
It is in the defining origins of Romantic solitude, I suggest and will try
to illustrate in the remainder of this essay, that there is contained the am-
bivalence of whether or not its bonding to nature can be considered a valid
extension of pastoral. Ultimately, I suppose, it is not some mechanical
formula but our intuitive sense of whether or not a representation fits the
rest of the tradition that determines our willingness to think of it as pas-
toral. As Charles Segal says, in his Poetry and Myth in Ancient Pastoral, 'the
homogeneity of the pastoral landscape and the generality of the pastoral
characters, whether in Theocritus or Milton, in Tasso or Pope, contri-
bute to [ the ] sense of the simultaneous and visible coexistence of all the
parts of the tradition, the latest developments with the first beginnings'.
In this context, I should argue that one aspect of Romanticism's bon-
ding of nature and solitude does fit into the pastoral tradition, while a se-
cond does not. The two versions are both representations of solitude, but
they take their origin from different situations. The first is what I may
provisionally call solitude of identity and the second solitude ofalienation. The
first is amenable to the pastoral tradition, the second is not; and I shall
try to illustrate the one by reference to Coleridge's This Lime-Tree Bower
my Prison and the other by reference to Shelley's Alastor.
Both solitudes are Romantic in that they arise from the accelerating
external pressures on the ego that were determinants of Romanticism.
Fichte's apotheosis of the ego as the font of all reality, for instance, seems
more a reaction formation occasioned by the ego's increasing beleaguer-
ment than a maintainable scientific hypothesis. Likewise, Romantic
 Romantic imagination 17
suicide and Romantic madness both seem to be symptoms of increasing
constriction: 'AchdieseLucke!', exclaims Werther, 'dieseentsetzliche
Lucke, die ich hier in meinem Busen fuhle' - Ah, this void, this terri-
ble void that I feel here in my breast. Solitude of alienation, I suggest, is a
variant of this awareness; it is the unhappy consciousness carried to ex-
ponential urgency. As such, it constitutes virtually an eviction of being,
as in the solitude of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein creature or in the many
Romantic avatars of the Wandering Jew. 'When early youth had pass-
ed', says Shelley in Alastor, the poet 'left/His cold fireside and alienated
home/ To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands'.
Solitude of identity, on the other hand, seems to be the pastoral retreat
from the city pushed one step further in the same line by the pressures
of Romanticism. All pastoral prefers the country to the city. In Roman-
ticism, however, the city, swollen and polluted by the industrial revolu-
tion, became increasingly malign. 'Hell', said Shelley, 'is a city much
like London.' A. J. George, in a study of French Romanticism that sees
the industrial revolution as one of its prime sources, notes that under in-
dustrialism's disruptive impact - which, as we might remember, was
the subject of Wordsworth's pastoral letter to Fox - the 'urban popula-
tion' of Paris 'jumped from 588,000 in 1801 to 890,000 in 1826'. The
Malthusian spectre was rearing its head, and Mai thus himself, we must
not forget, was Wordsworth's contemporary. To Wordsworth, London
was a 'monstrous ant-hill on the plain/ Of a too busy world'. 'What a
shock/ For eyes and ears! what anarchy and din,/ Barbarian and infer-
nal', he says of London's epitome, Bartholomew Fair:
Oh blank confusion! true epitome
Of what the mighty City is herself
To thousands upon thousands of her sons.
Living amid the same perpetual whirl
Of trivial objects, melted and reduced
To one identity. . .
It was to counter the city's threat of melting and reducing by restoring
the identity of the individual that solitude became an ideal. Other peo-
ple were the threat, and so other people were discarded until the in-
dividual identity could re-establish itself.
In any event, solitude of identity is marked by joy and fullness of
being. Tieck's ' Waldeinsamkeit' is such a solitude, and it resonates with
rejoicing:
Waldeinsamkeit,
Die mich erfreut,
So morgen wie heut,
Inew'ger Zeit,
O wie mich freut
Waldeinsamkeit.
18 THOMAS McFARLAND
Later, the forest loneliness is hailed as the 'onlyjoy', and still later it 'Von
neuem mich freut'. Wordsworth found in solitude 'Sublimer joy':

. . . for I would walk alone,

In storm and tempest, or in starlight nights
Beneath the quiet heavens, and at that time
Have felt whate'er there is of power in sound
To breathe an elevated mood, by form
Or image unprofaned; and I would stand,
Beneath some rock, listening to sounds that are
The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
Or make their dim abode in distant winds.
Thence did I drink the visionary power.

Chateaubriand, who contemptuously rejected the society of the city for

solitude ('Go, shut yourself in your cities, obey your petty laws . . . while
I go wandering through my solitudes'), drank the visionary power, too,
and exulted in his isolation:

Not a single beat of my heart shall be constrained, not a single one of my thoughts
shall be enchained; I shall be as free as nature; I shall recognize as sovereign on-
ly him who kindled the flame of the suns, and with one stroke of his hand set all
the worlds rolling.

Solitude of alienation, on the other hand, looks into the abyss. 'To trans-
form the world, to recreate it afresh', says the mysterious visitor to Father
Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov, 'men must turn into another path
psychologically':

'You ask when it will come to pass; it will come to pass, but first we have to go
through the period of isolation.'
'What do you mean by isolation?' I asked him.
'Why, the isolation that prevails everywhere, above all in our age. . . .For every
one strives to keep his individuality as apart as possible, wishes to secure the
greatest possible fulness of life for himself; but meantime all his efforts result not
in attaining fulness of life but self-destruction, for instead of self-realisation he
ends by arriving at complete solitude. All mankind in our age have split up into
units, they all keep apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof, hides
himself and hides what he has, from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by
others and repelling them... .For he is accustomed to rely upon himself alone and
to cut himself off from the whole... . Everywhere in these days men have, in their
mockery, ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social
solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort. But this terrible individualism
must inevitably have an end, and all will suddenly understand how unnaturally
they are separated from one another... . Sometimes even if he has to do it alone,
and his conduct seems crazy, a man must set an example, and so draw men's souls
out of their solitude, and spur them to some act of brotherly love, that the great
idea may not die.'
 Romantic imagination 19
Now pastoral as such tends to thin out the populace into what I have
elsewhere called a 'significant group' rather than to deny it altogether.
This is precisely what Wordsworth does in both Michael and The Brothers.
Even what Coleridge censured as aflawin Wordsworth's poetic practice,
that is, his 'undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems',
can be seen as a subliminal loyalty to pastoral groupings. Indeed, Words-
worth's own theoretical propensity for solitude is cast into pastoral
reference: 'Hitherto I had stood/ In my own mind remote from social
life/.. .Like a lone shepherd on a promontory'. But though Wordsworth
holds to solitude of identity, he repeatedly warns against solitude ofalienation,
as in the character of Vaudracour or the man in Lines Left Upon a Seat in
a Yew-Tree, who 'turned himself away,/ And with the food of pride sus-
tained his soul in solitude'. Such a person is a 'lost Man!'.
The representative anecdote for this kind of figure is supplied by
Shelley's A lastor, or, the Spirit of Solitude. Shelley's awesomely despairing
poem is surely one of literature's most painful testaments to wret-
chedness, a wretchedness so frantic, so alienated, and so alone that it
burdens the heart. The melancholy is compounded by Mrs Shelley's
testimony that 'None of Shelley's poems is more characteristic than this',
though Shelley himself sees the poem as an exemplum:
The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet's self-centered
seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to
speedy ruin. . . .They who . . . keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, re-
joicing neither in human joy nor mourning with human grief; these, and such
as they, have their apportioned curse. They languish, because none feel with them
their common nature. They are morally dead. . . .Those who love not their fellow-
beings live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.
Nature, in high Romantic fashion, figures importantly. 'The
magnificence and beauty of the external world', says the Preface, 'sinks
profoundly into the youth's conceptions.' In the poem itself Shelley writes
of 'the Poet's blood/ That ever beat in mystic sympathy/ With nature's
ebb and flow'. But nature here is nightmarish and alien:
At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore
He paused, a wide and melancholy waste
Of putrid marshes.
The setting is blasted, but it is co-ordinate with the frantic protagonist
himself: 'A gloomy smile/ Of desperate hope wrinkled his quivering lips.'
In other words, to cut discussion to the bone, the solitude ofalienation is here
not redeemed by nature; rather nature, or at least any pastoral possibility
of nature, is itself disfigured.
Coleridge's exquisite This Lime- Tree Bower my Prison, on the other hand,
constitutes, among other things, a careful progress, a manuductio, so to
20 THOMAS McFARLAND
speak, from a social group in the setting of pastoral to the solitude of iden-
tity also in the setting of pastoral. The poem, we will remember, is about
some friends taking a walk in nature, but the poet, Coleridge, must stay
behind because of an injury to his foot. So he imagines them on their
walk - first in umbrageous Theocritan recesses, where they
Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance
To that still roaring dell,
...o'erwooded, narrow, deep
And only speckled by the mid-day sun...
Then Coleridge imagines his friends coming onto high ground, with a
view
Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea...
Yes! they wander on
In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined
And hunger'd after Nature, many a year,
In the great City pent...
The passage, even after it has left the Theocritan dell, maintains its
pastoralism by invocation of the tension between city and country; then,
however, the pastoral tone changes to the heroic:
Ah! slowly sink
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun!
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,
Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue Ocean!
But even here a Theocritan propriety is maintained, for as Segal points
out, an
elusive . . . aspect of the bucolic world is closely associated with . . . sea and moun-
tains. Played off against the shady trees, soft grass, cool water, and the soothing
sounds of bees, cicadas, or birds, sea and mountain help shape that inner rhythm
of closed and open,finiteand infinite, which is so fundamental a part of the in-
ner dynamics of Theocritan bucolic.
Having established the pastoral credentials of his group, as it were,
Coleridge then transfers the mood to his own solitude, which is also
carefully placed in the pastoral matrix:
A delight
Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad
As I myself were there! Nor in this bower,
This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark'd
Much that has sooth'd me. Pale beneath the blaze
Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch'd
 Romantic imagination 21
Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov'd to see
The shadow of the leaf and stem above
Dappling its sunshine!
. . . and though now the bat
Wheels by, and not a swallow twitters,
Yet still the solitary humble-bee
Sings in the bean-flower!
The delight in the passage is characteristic of the solitude of identity. The
invocation of 'the humble-bee' points to Theocritus, for the humming
of bees is one of the chief evocations of his most characteristic moment.
Yet the humble-bee here is as 'solitary' as the poet himself. In the
passage from the Seventh Idyll quoted above, 'the bees hummed to and
fro' about the spring; in the Fifth Idyll there are 'bees humming brave-
ly at the hives'; here the solitary humble-bee 'Sings in the bean-flower'.
The delicacy of the single bee, symbolizing in the same way as its
Theocritan plural, points the path for the solitary poet to rejoin a pastoral
society, and the bonding of his solitariness to his friends' socialness is sup-
plied by the agency of nature:
Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there . . .
So we may conclude that in this kind of instance imagination's invoca-
tion of nature can serve to align Romantic solitude with the essentials of
the pastoral ideal.
 The Infinite I AM:
Coleridge and the Ascent of Being

JONATHAN WORDSWORTH

The main sections of Biographia Literaria were written - in fact largely

dictated - in the summer of 1815. Within three years Coleridge was
looking back on the work, and rejecting it as pantheist. His letter to J.
H. Green of September 1818 lies about how much Schelling he had
known at the time of writing, but makes the very interesting statement:
I was myself taken in by his system, retrograding from my own prior and better
lights, and adopted it in the metaphysical chapters of my Literary Life ... (CL,
iv, p. 874)
Two months later he commented to C. A. Tulk about Schelling:
as a System it is little more than Behmenism, translated from visions into Logic
and a sort of commanding eloquence: and like Behmen's it is reduced at last to
a mere Pantheism ... (CL, IV, p. 883)1
The presence of Schelling in the metaphysical chapters of Biographia
is well attested. Coleridge might choose to tell Green that he had known
'little or nothing of any of his works, excepting his Transcendental
Idealism' (CL, iv, p. 874), but scholars concerned with the issue of
plagiarism - the poet's nephew and daughter among the first, in 1847
- have listed up to a dozen Schelling volumes and individual tracts on
which he drew. Norman Fruman in The Damaged Archangel (1971) not only
brought out the extent of these unacknowledged borrowings - often run-
ning to several pages of verbatim translation - but revealed to a queasy
Coleridge establishment the pains taken to deceive the reader into believ-
ing the material was original.2 More recently, James Engell in the new
Bollingen edition of Biographia has categorized the ways in which Schell-
ing and others have been introduced into the text, and even tabulated the
borrowings. Among other things to emerge is the fact that the concen-
tration of Schelling as Coleridge builds up to the definitions of imagina-
tion and fancy at the end of Chapter 13 is especially heavy.
Those who do not know Biographia well might easily think that it was
the critics who have given the imagination definitions their prominence;
but there can't be many passages in English prose that have been so
22
 'The infinite I AM} 23
deliberately and skilfully thrown into relief by their author. As the final
page and a half of Volume One, the definitions are right at the centre of
the work, and it is clear that Coleridge gave thought to their placing. Not
only do they form a conclusion to the metaphysical section of Biographia;
they are prepared for in the matter of the preceding chapters, in their ar-
rangement, and in the very typography - again something that Col-
eridge cared about a great deal. The spoof letter from a friend advising
against an unwritten further chapter on imagination, both implies
(whimsically, but impressively) that the definitions concentrate material
that might normally have taken 100 pages, and at the same time has the
effect of marking them out visually. The letter is printed in italics, and
the definitions comprise the final roman paragraphs of the volume.
Coleridge staked a great deal on these paragraphs, and, though there
was no second edition of Biographia until Henry Nelson and Sara Col-
eridge's act of piety in 1847, the attention they have received in this cen-
tury surely justifies his faith. Since the Oxford edition of Shawcross in
1907 an orthodoxy has grown up among scholars which holds that the
secondary imagination, despite the usual force of the words, was more
important to Coleridge than the primary. 'The distinction appears to be
this', Shawcross writes, perhaps a little hesitantly:
The primary imagination is the organ of common perception, the faculty by which
we have experience of an actual world of phenomena. The secondary imagina-
tion is the same power in a heightened degree, which enables its possessor to see
the world of our common experience in its real significance. (BLS, I, p. 272)
According to I. A. Richards in 1934:
The primary imagination is normal perception that produces the usual world of
the senses,
That inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd
the world of motor-buses, beef-steaks and acquaintances . . .
The secondary imagination, by re-forming these banal perceptions,

gives us not only poetry - in the limited sense . . . - but every aspect of the
routine world in which it is invested with other values than those necessary for
our bare continuance as living beings . . .3

Engell in the most recent statement of this position puts it in more

philosophical terms:

The primary imagination is spontaneous, involuntary.... It is a reflex or instinct

of the mind and what Kant calls an empirical - as distinct from a transcenden-
tal - degree of the imagination. It 'unifies' by bringing together sensory data
into larger units of understanding . . . (BL, I, p. lxxxix)
24 JONATHAN WORDSWORTH
It is Jackson Bate, a silent presence as Engell's co-editor of the Boll-
ingen volumes, who in 1950 was the first to put the alternative point of
view. 'The entire direction of Coleridge's criticism', he writes,
is opposed to the belief that he regarded the poetic imagination as merely an 'echo'
of a capacity common to us all. The primary imagination is rather the highest ex-
ertion of the imagination that the 'finite mind' has to offer; and its scope . . .
necessarily includes universals which lie beyond the restricted field of the 'secon-
dary' imagination. For the appointed task of the 'secondary' imagination is to
'idealize and unify' its objects; and it can hardly 'unify' the universals.4
As Coleridge is credited with inventing the term, and as Richards
strangely failed to apply the method he himself had patented, one might
pause for a little Practical Criticism.5 Sentence One of Coleridge's
definition is brisk and to the point: 'The IMAGINATION then I con-
sider either as primary, or secondary.' One's expectations at this stage
are surely that the primary will be more important? Under 'secondary'
the NED does of course permit 'Belonging to the second phase in a pro-
cess or temporal sequence', but its first definition - the primary mean-
ing of 'secondary' - is quite unequivocal:
Belonging to the second class in respect of dignity or importance; entitled to con-
sideration only in the second place.6
Sentence Two of the Biographia definition is so famous that it is embar-
rassing to quote - which does not mean that it has always received the
detailed attention that it needs:
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.
By side-reference it can, I believe, be shown that Coleridge is being en-
tirely precise in his use of language, but for the practical critic it is the
grandeur that is most impressive. The sentence is magnificently affir-
mative. Stress in both halves falls on the adjectives. Those in the first
could hardly be more positive: 'living Power', 'prime Agent', W/human
Perception'; while in the second there is an escalation, 'finite' - 'eter-
nal' - 'infinite', that speaks for itself. Whatever its purpose, the prose
exultantly proclaims an incarnation of the eternal in the finite, a personal
reenactment of God's original, and endlessly continuous, moment of self-
naming.
The tone of Sentence Three is by comparison business-like, even a little
flat:
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 kind of its agency, and differing
only in degree, and in the mode of its operation.
 'The infinite IAM} 25
Grandiloquence, swelling rhythm, vaunting of scriptural authority, have
been replaced by a prose dependent on logical and painstaking opposi-
tions. Because it can be directed consciously, the secondary imagination
might be expected to be different in kind from the spontaneous primary,
but we are told that in fact the two shade into each other - are different
merely in degree and mode. If one asks the question which imagination
is meant to seem more impressive, the drop in style, the common associa-
tions of'secondary', the diminishment implied by the word 'echo', all
point to the same conclusion. Only the phrase 'coinciding with the con-
scious will' for a moment seems to imply that the secondary might be
valued as a special human achievement; and here the tones of the quali-
fying clause ('yet still as identical with the primary . . .') counteract any
suggestion that in such a context deliberation could be important.7 'It
dissolves', Coleridge goes on in Sentence Four, defining more precisely
the way in which the secondary works -

It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is

rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify.

With the primary imagination there had been no uncertainty, no en-

visaging of failure: the finite human mind had been said categorically to
be capable of its godlike act of creative perception. The feebleness of
struggling 'at all events . . . to idealize' replaces a process that had been
clearly and unwaveringly ideal. As Bate pointed out, the secondary im-
agination must inevitably be restricted in scope if it deals with materials
that the human mind is able to unify. One cannot unify the universals.
Sentence Five - the last of this paragraph - seems concerned mainly
to set up the comparison that is to follow between imagination and fan-
cy: 'It [the secondary imagination] is essentially vital, even as all objects
(as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.' In a tacit reference back to 'the
living Power' of the primary, Coleridge first reaffirms the link between
the two degrees of imagination, and then moves on to oppose the vitali-
ty found in both to the mechanical nature of fancy, which can do no more
than 'play with . . . fixities and definites'. With the primary imagination
man unknowingly reenacts God's original and eternal creative moment;
with the secondary he consciously vitalizes an object-world that would
otherwise be dead; with the fancy he plays unvital games, dependent
upon choice and the laws of association. There can be no doubt whatever
that the least of the three powers is fancy; looking merely at the words on
the page, one would surely conclude that Coleridge was
scaling from the godlike primary at the top, downwards through its secon-
dary echo, to the merely mechanical at the bottom?
26 JONATHAN WORDSWORTH
Why then the consensus that reads the secondary as coming first? The
answer must lie not in the definitions themselves, but in the preconcep-
tions with which they have been approached. One is taken back at once
to the relationship of Coleridge and German philosophy. The material
that leads up to the definitions is almost all borrowed - stolen would be
more accurate - and it seems reasonable to assume that they too will
have a German source. The two most impressive recent accounts of Col-
eridge in terms of German thinking, Thomas McFarland's essay in New
Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth (1972) and Engell's Creative Imagina-
tion (1981), both make play with the origins of Coleridge's three-fold
scheme. McFarland claims that in the Philosophische Versuche (1777) of
Kant's older contemporary Tetens, is to be found

not only the formulation of the theory of secondary imagination, but also the entire
threefold division of the imaginative faculty that (Coleridge) deposits at the end
of the thirteenth chapter of the Biographia Literaria. (McFarland, 'SI', p. 208)
His case that Tetens' Dichtungsvermogen is the basis of the secondary im-
agination is very persuasive, but he then goes on to list the three com-
ponents of Tetens' overall scheme, glossing them as perception, fancy,
imagination; and quietly on the following page reorders them so that fan-
cy shall come last, and the pattern shall correspond more closely to Col-
eridge. The fact that has to be sidestepped in this account is that Tetens'
Phantasie, though it can obviously be translated as fancy, is an ordinary
thinking process that necessarily follows the initial perception, and which
is replaced only in the favoured few by the creative Dichtungsvermogen.
For Coleridge, of course, fancy has no inevitable part to play. It is an un-
vital alternative; by implication the fully imaginative mind would have
nothing to do with it.8
Engell exchanges Tetens for Schelling, but also has a threefold scheme
to offer. Again the 'erste Potenz' is sense perception; the 'zweite Potenz'
is the mind's building up of a comprehensible picture of the external
world (Engell, CI, p. 307); and the 'hochste Potenz', or highest power,
is art. It is not clear how far the two intermediate powers coincide, but
if Coleridge came to Schelling after Tetens he would have found little to
surprise him: the two schemes are broadly alike. Three things will follow
from approaching Biographia with either of them - or with any related
system - in one's mind. It will seem that for all the grandeur of Col-
eridge's language he can mean nothing more by the primary imagina-
tion than mere sense perception. It will seem that despite the normal con-
notations of the word (and his own usage at other times in Biographia and
elsewhere), Coleridge must have intended 'secondary' to be read as
'more important'. Finally, it will seem that for Coleridge as for Tetens,
 'The infinite I AM} 27
and still more emphatically for Schelling, man's highest achievement is
art.
This last position is quite untenable. As Engell points out, Schelling
defines the human creative genius as 'the indwelling divinity in man . . .
so to speak, a portion of the absolute nature of God' (Engell, CI, p. 320).
Coleridge was undoubtedly aware of these views, and he adopted them
three years later in his 1818 Lecture, Poesy or Art, which is borrowed whol-
ly from Schelling, and proclaims that lArt is the mediatress and recon-
ciliator of Man and Nature' (Misc C, p. 205). The metaphysical chapters
of Biographia, however, though they draw from many different parts of
Schelling, are preoccupied with his Nature-philosophy, not his theory
of art. 9 Added to which there is the evidence of the letters quoted at the
beginning of this essay that Coleridge regarded Schelling as having
seduced him to Behmenism. Jacob Boehme had no interest in art or
human creativity; he was an early seventeenth-century Lutheran mystic.
The views of Schelling that depend upon him, or are closest to him, are
pantheist statements of oneness with the God in Nature.
Coleridge in his 1818 letters was putting the blame on Schelling for the
continuation in his own thinking of the pantheism that had been his faith
in the mid-1790s before he ever read the Germans. He was also of course
regarding pantheism as central to Biographia although it is present neither
in his definition of the secondary imagination (which, be it said, is notably
unlike Schelling's exalted claims), nor in the commonly accepted reading
of the primary. It seems that a rather more complex view may have to
be taken of the definitions. May they be doing more than one thing at
once? Does not their consciously evocative language in fact invite us to
read associatively and with an awareness of differing possibilities? There
can be no doubt that the primary is, as Engell terms it, the 'necessary im-
agination' - the power that enables us to interpret the evidence of the
senses, make the other kind of sense of our surroundings. But does it do
merely that? May not 'the supreme Power and prime Agent of all human
Perception' enable us to perceive God as well as 'the routine world . . .
[ of] our bare continuance as living beings' (Richards)? There had cer-
tainly been a time when Coleridge thought so. And what of the human
repetition of God's self-naming? Might it not be expected to lead to a self-
awareness rather more impressive than the ability to deduce one's own
existence from the presence of an object-world? Are we to ignore the
pointers towards a pantheist reading that are so frequent in preceding
chapters? What for instance of the great assertion in Chapter 12: 'We
begin with the I KNOW MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I
AM. We proceed from the SELF, in order to lose and find all self in GOD'
(BL, i, p. 283).
28 JONATHAN WORDSWORTH
It may be significant that those who view the primary imagination as
secondary seem never to have approached the definitions by way of the
period in which Coleridge's thinking was originally formed. They come
via the Germans who Coleridge was scarcely aware of until the end of
1798, and whom he made no attempt to come to terms with until 1801.
Because German metaphysics supplied so much copy for the later Col-
eridge, and so many of the niceties of his thinking, they assume that
everything is there - or at least, everything of importance. To go to the
opposite extreme would be ridiculous, but I am not very far from believ-
ing that Coleridge was telling the truth when he said in Biographia that 'all
the main and fundamental ideas were born and matured in [ his ] mind
before [he] had ever seen a single page' of Schelling.10 The 'main and
fundamental ideas' were not of course 'born' in Coleridge's mind at all,
in the sense of originating there, but they derive from a native English
tradition, not a German one. For an understanding of his later positions,
and especially of the language and preoccupations ofBiographia Chapters
12 and 13, it is essential to go back to the 1790s. One might for a start turn
to the Lecture on the Slave Trade of June 1795:

To develope the powers of the Creator is our proper employment - and to im-
itate Creativeness by combination our most exalted and self-satisfying Delight.
But we are progressive and must not rest content with present blessings. Our
Almighty Parent hath therefore given to us Imagination . . . (Lects 1795, p. 235)
Already, twenty years before Biographia, imagination is associated with
fulfilment of the self through the attainment of godlike power: 'To
develope the powers of the Creator is our proper employment.' The stress
on progressiveness is especially important. Coleridge's source is Aken-
side, Pleasures ojImagination (17'44), and behind him lie Addison, and the
Milton of Paradise Lost, Book v. 'Imagination', Coleridge goes on, ex-
tending the metaphor of mountain-climbing that will appear again and
again in his and Wordsworth's poetry:

stimulates to the attainment of real excellence by the contemplation of splendid

Possibilities that still revivifies the dying motive within us; and, fixing our eye on
the glittering Summits that rise one above the other in Alpine endlessness, still
urges us up the ascent of Being . . . (ibid.)

Notes in the beautifully edited Bollingen volume of the 1795 Lectures point
us both to Pleasures of Imagination, Book n -

To climb th' ascent of being, and approach

For ever nearer to the life divine . . . (11. 362-3)

and to the similar passage in Book i, where God has ordained that the
soul
 'The infinite I AM' 29
Thro' all th' ascent of things inlarge her view,
Till every bound at length should disappear,
And infinite perfection close the scene. (11. 219-21)
Progressiveness had of course its political, or millenarian, aspect for
the Coleridge of 1795. To use Wordsworth's phrase from the Prospec-
tus to The Recluse, he was concerned with 'the progressive powers . . . Of
the whole species'11 - and concerned especially to present them in
Christian, Hartleyan terms, in opposition to the atheist rationalism of
Godwin. The theological fragment that lies behind the Lecture on the Slave
Trade, however, confirms that in this context the Ascent of Being is that
of the individual soul to God. 'The noblest gift of Imagination', Coleridge
writes, in words that explain one important aspect of the primary in
Biographia, 'is the power of discerning the Cause in the Effect.' The power,
that is, of perceiving God in His creation. 'We see our God everywhere',
Coleridge adds in the next sentence, 'the Universe in the most literal
Sense is his written Language' (Lectsl795, pp. 338-9). In May 1795, a
month before the Slave Trade lecture, Coleridge had told his Bristol au-
dience in the first of the series on Revealed Religion:
The existence of the Deity, and his Power and his Intelligence are manifested . . .
The Omnipotent has unfolded to us the Volume of the World, and there we may
read the Transcript of himself. (ibid., p. 94)
Again the source is Akenside -
To these the sire omnipotent unfolds
The world's harmonious volume, there to read
A transcript of himself . . .
(Pleasures of Imagination ,1,99-101)
- but these were views that may already have been associated in Col-
eridge's mind with Bishop Berkeley. Akenside merged into Berkeley, and
to some extent Berkeley himself later merged into German transcenden-
talism. But this was never wholly the case. He was strong enough to keep
his own identity, and references to his thinking occur throughout Col-
eridge's writings. However facetious the context, it is interesting that one
should appear in Biographia less than a page before the imagination defini-
tions of Chapter 13. 'Be assured', writes the spurious Friend in his letter,
if you do publish this Chapter in the present work, you will be reminded of Bishop
Berkley's Siris, announced as an Essay on Tar-water, which beginning with Tar
ends with the Trinity . . . (BL, I, p. 303)
The laughable progression from tar-water to the Trinity is indeed to be
found in Siris, but there is also a subtler version of the Ascent of Being that
Coleridge undoubtedly read in 1796, and that could not fail to be of in-
terest to him in the period when he was formulating his views of a
30 JONATHAN WORDSWORTH
transcendental human power. 'The perceptions of sense are gross', writes
Berkeley towards the end of the work,
but even in the senses there is a difference . . . and from them, whether by gradual
evolution, or ascent, we arrive at the highest. Sense supplies images to memory.
These become subjects for fancy to work upon. Reason considers and judges of
the imaginations. And these acts of reason become new objects to the understan-
ding. In this scale, each lower faculty is a step that leads to the one above it. And
the uppermost naturally leads to the deity . . .12
Berkeley's terms are not identical to Coleridge's - imagination is still
a comparatively low faculty, and of course it is not as yet distinguished
from the fancy - but his assumptions, and his upward scale, are very
similar. In both thinkers we see imagination playing its part in a mental
process, or progression (not, incidentally, at all unlike those of Tetens
and Schelling), and in both, the 'uppermost' human faculty 'naturally
leads to the deity'.
It also, as Coleridge recognizes in Religious Musings (in lines that date
from the end of 1794, or very early '95) leads to the loss of self - the loss,
that is, of all the merely human faculties. Moving in a progression from
hope to faith, the spirit becomes at last absorbed in perfect love,
and center'd there
God only to behold, and know, and feel,
Till by exclusive consciousness of GOD
All self-annihilated, it shall make
God it's Identity: God all in all!
We and our Father ONE!13
The source this time is Hartley, and such is his proselytizing zeal that Col-
eridge, so far from covering his tracks, adds chapter and verse in the foot-
note of 1797:
See this demonstrated by Hartley, vol. 1, p. 114, and vol. 2, p. 329. See it likewise
proved, and freed from the charge of Mysticism, by Pistorius in his Notes and
Additions . . .
Hartley's demonstration - needlessly elaborated in the 1791 edition by
Hermann Pistorius - proves to be an Ascent of Being logically deduc-
ed from the principle of association:
Since God is the source of all good, and consequently must at last appear to be
so, i. e. be associated with all our pleasures, it seems to follow . . . that the idea of
God . . . must, at last, take place of, and absorb all other ideas, and HE become,
according to the language of the scriptures, all in all}*
Coleridge, who reads Hartley in terms of Priestley's Unitarian pan-
theism, in fact goes a lot further. The concept of God's becoming all in
all is replaced by an active power in the human spirit to 'make/GOD it's
 'The infinite I AM 31
Identity'; and the final half-line, 'We and our Father ONE', is quite un-
equivocal. Man can ascend to godhead, arrive there by his own
endeavours. There follows in Religious Musings a vision of the Priestleyan
elect treading 'all visible things' of the world beneath them, treating them
as steps that in a Miltonic pun 'lead gradual' to the throne of God:
And blest are they,
Who in this fleshly World, the elect of Heaven . . .
Adore with stedfast unpresuming gaze
Him, Nature's Essence, Mind, and Energy!
And gazing, trembling, patiently ascend
Treading beneath their feet all visible things
As steps, that upward to their Father's Throne
Lead gradual. . . (11.51-9)
In this early period Coleridge himself does not often refer to the up-
permost human faculty as imagination. In fact he doesn't usually iden-
tify it at all; he evokes its powers, shows supreme confidence in its
achievements, and feels no need to give it a name. As it leads to a merg-
ing in the godhead it can be associated with any of the attributes of God
himself. It is an ultimate stage of love, or consciousness, or perception.
At the opening of The Destiny ofNations (written for Southey'syoaw ofArc
in June-July 1795), emphasis is placed on vision, the ability to part the
substance from the shadow, see through the clouds that veil the blaze of
the sun. God is 'Great Father', 'Rightful King', 'Eternal Father', 'King
Omnipotent' - all of which is much to be expected - but he is also
the Will Absolute, the One, the Good!
The I AM, the Word, the Life, the Living God! (11. 5-6)
All these names have their later implications; but 'the I AM', with its
capital letters, leaps out from the page. Forty lines later one comes across
a specific reference to God's self-naming: 'His one eternal self-affirming
act' which, as if to mark Coleridge's new reading of Berkeley, occurs
'with absolute ubiquity of thought' (11. 4 5 - 6 ) . He might not have put
it to himself in exactly the terms that he was to use in Chapter 12 of
Biographia, but already Coleridge believes that
in the very first revelation of his absolute being [ 'And God said unto Moses I AM
THAT I AM' ] Jehovah at the same time revealed the fundamental truth of all
philosophy, which must either commence with the absolute or have no fixed com-
mencement; i.e. cease to be philosophy. (5L, I, p. 275)
'True metaphysics', as he commented at the end of Chapter 12, 'are
nothing else but true divinity' (ibid., p. 291).
Coleridge is at all times a Christian thinker. Philosophy is not a
pastime, or an intellectual pursuit; it is a means of understanding the
32 JONATHAN WORDSWORTH
nature of God, and the nature of man's relation to God. 'For what is
Freedom', he asks in The Destiny of Nations,
But the unfettered use
Of all the powers that God for use has given?
To which predictably he adds:
But chiefly this, him First, him Last to view
Through meaner powers and secondary things
Effulgent, as through clouds that veil his blaze.(11. 13-17)
'If the doors of perception were cleansed', Blake had remarked only five
years before, 'everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. '15 There
might well have been agreement too about the 'meaner powers and
secondary things' that dim the imagination, stand in the way of percep-
tion. For both poets 'the sublime of man,/ Our noontide Majesty', was
'to know ourselves/ Parts and proportions of one wond'rous whole'
{ReligiousMusings, 135-7). And both would have named selfhood as the
great impediment to such knowledge. 'A sordid solitary thing', Coleridge
writes a few lines further on in Religious Musings,
Mid countless brethren with a lonely heart
Thro' courts and cities the smooth Savage roams
Feeling himself, his own low Self the whole
When he by sacred sympathy might make
The whole ONE SELF! SELF, that no alien knows!
SELF, far diffus'd as Fancy's wing can travel!
SELF, spreading still! Oblivious of it's own
Yet all of all possessing! (11.163-71)
Coleridge scarcely needs to add,
This is FAITH!
This the MESSIAH'S destin'd victory! (11.171-2)
to tell us that his lines are a moment of personal apocalypse, an account
of imaginative transcendence in which the individual loses and finds all
self in God. It is interesting to look briefly at the language used. Fancy
is still merely a synonym for imagination (and will be for another five
years, or so), but 'sacred sympathy' and 'faith' lead straight through to
later definitions. In The Friend, for instance, 'faith is a total did of the soul:
it is the whole state of the mind, or it is not at a\V (Friend, I. 315). And in
The Statesman's Manual this losing of selfhood is evoked in terms that are
still closer to those of Religious Musings twenty years before. 'Self, Col-
eridge writes,
which then only is, when/or itself it hath ceased to be. Even so doth Religion finitely
express the unity of the infinite Spirit by being a total act of the soul.(5M, p. 90)
 'The infinite I AM' 33
For all the prominence he gives to it, Coleridge uses the term 'primary
imagination' only once. It is difficult, however, not to think that the
power that enables the human being finitely to 'express the unity of the
infinite spirit by . . . a total act of the soul' is not also a total act of imagina-
tion - 'a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation'. And
it is difficult not to think that Coleridge was evoking precisely the same
perceptive - creative power of achieving union with God in the Slave
Trade lecture, Religious Musings and The Destiny of the Nations.
These early definitions, or invokings, of primary imagination are not
of course restricted to the years 1794-6 - the Berkeleyan readings of the
eternal language of God in This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison (July 1797) and
Frost at Midnight (February 1798) are sufficiently well known - but from
1798 there are several new factors to be taken into account. Coleridge
begins to write less poetry himself, and to use Wordsworth as spokesman
for the more serious thinking that the poetry has tended to examine.16
He forms at least an acquaintance with German philosophy in 1798-9,
and starts to read it seriously in 1801. And at some stage, about which
it is impossible to be clear, he begins to argue himself out of his
Unitarianism. And in addition to all this, there is the fact that in the
period following the 1798 Lyrical Ballads both Coleridge and Wordsworth
come to be interested in literary criticism - the theory of what they have
been doing as poets.Definitions of the secondary imagination begin to
appear; and as a corollary it now becomes useful to separate imagination
and fancy. The 1800 note to The Thorn suggests that Wordsworth from
the first was rather more positive about fancy; but for Coleridge the
distinction was effectively between good and bad poetry - ' good' mean-
ing something akin to 'prophetic', 'having as its object a true understan-
ding of the individual's relationship to God'.
Coleridge'sfirstpronouncement on the subject of imagination and fan-
cy, in September 1802, exactly parallels Blake's distinction in the Preface
to Milton, between literary works that are 'Daughters of Inspiration', and
those that are merely 'Daughters of Memory'. The first are associated
by Blake with imagination, 'the Sublime of the Bible', truth, justice and
eternity; the second with artifice, imitation, classical poetry and
philosophy, and also war (seen as the conflict between parts that ought
to be in harmony). Coleridge, writing very possibly in the same year, is
con cerned for a start with the errors of Greek polytheism (as indeed Blake
had been in Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 11). 'It must occur to every
Reader', he writes
that the Greeks in their religious poems address always the Numina Loci, the
Genii, the Dryads, the Naiads, etc. etc. All natural Objects were dead - mere
hollow Statues - but there was a Godkin or Goddessling included in each.
34 JONATHAN WORDSWORTH
'In the Hebrew Poetry', he goes on,
youfindnothing of this poor Stuff - as poor in genuine Imagination, as it is mean
in Intellect. At best, it is but Fancy, or the aggregating Faculty of the mind -
not Imagination, or the modifying, and co-adunating Faculty. (CL, II, 856-6)
'Co-adunating', as one might expect, comes from Latin 'co-adunare',
'to join into one'. Fancy is cumulative - and her works are the
Daughters of Memory: imagination modifies, and by recreating the
materials of experience produces the oneness that for Coleridge, as for
Blake, is ultimate truth. 'In the Hebrew Poets', the letter continues,
each Thing has a Life of it's own, & yet they are all one Life. In God they move
& live, & have their Being - not had, as the cold System of Newtonian Theology
represents, but have. (ibid., p. 866)
One recalls that in Jerusalem - the poem in which the parts of Blake's
fallen, or vegetable, world comefinallytogether - there are prefaces ad-
dressed respectively to The Deists and The Christians. Deism is 'the cold
System of Newtonian Theology', according to which God in the begin-
ning started the world going and left it. Christianity (in this context, at
least) is the universe pervaded by a God who is eternally present in his
Creation. There is no reason to think that Coleridge would at this period
have dissented from the gigantic claims made by Blake inJerusalem, Plate
77:
I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of
body and mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination - Imagination, the
real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow, &
in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies when these Vegetable
Mortal Bodies are no more.
Imagination is that which is eternal within the individual human being,
and thus 'a portion of eternity' itself. To put it in Coleridge's terms, 'In
God [we] move & live & have [our] Being'. Though by this stage one
might expect him to be moving towards Trinitarian ways of thinking, the
Hebrew poets are still for Coleridge prophets of Unitarian pantheism.
Earlier in his letter he had commented:
Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes & feels,
that every Thing has a Life of it's own, & that we are all one Life. (CL, II, p. 864)
The proper interest of Nature lies in its being permeated by the One Life
- 'tis God/Diffused through all, that doth make all one whole' (Religious
Musings, 11. 139-40) - and in its being, in Blake'swords,'a faint shadow'
of 'the real & eternal World'. The proper function of the poet is to pro-
claim the One Life, and to reveal the faint shadow as consisting of clouds
that veil the Almighty from the gaze of fallen man.17
Needless to say, the poet whom Coleridge thinks capable of achieving
this task is Wordsworth:
 'The infinite I AM' 35

the only man who has effected a compleat and constant synthesis of Thought &
Feeling and combined them with Poetic Forms, with the music of pleasurable pas-
sion and with Imagination, or the modifying Power, in that highest sense of the
word in which I have ventured to oppose it to Fancy, or the aggregating power . . .
(CL, II, p. 1034)
The date now is January 1804. Coleridge, who has just spent a month
in Grasmere on his way south to London and the Mediterranean, goes
on to explain what he means by 'the highest sense of the word' imagina-
tion. It is 'that sense in which it is a dim Analogue of Creation, not all that
we can believe, but all that we can conceive of creation' {ibid.). The context
is literary, and in terms oiBiographia Coleridge is discussing the secon-
dary imagination; yet in so doing he anticipates the language, and the
transcendental implication, of his primary definition. Already there is
the tacit assumption of different levels of importance - imaginative
modes that differ not in kind, but in degree. Context will establish which
it is that is being referred to in a given case, but the theological must
always have priority. In the Letter to Sara Hutchinson, for instance, one may
suspect that 'My shaping Spirit of Imagination', at line 242, is a reference
to creativity as a writer, but the great poetry -
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A Light, a Glory, and a luminous Cloud
Enveloping the Earth! (11. 302-4)
- is the celebration of a power,
That, wedding Nature to us, gives in Dower
A new Earth & new Heaven . . . (11. 316-17)
Coleridge may feel that he has lost the power himself, but there can be
no doubt of the fervour with which he continues to believe in its existence
- and with which he confers it upon Sara:
O pure of Heart! thou needst not ask of me
What this strong music in the Soul may be,
What, & wherein it doth exist,
This Light, this Glory, this fair luminous Mist,
This beautiful & beauty-making Power!
JOY, innocent Sara! Joy, that ne'er was given
Save to the Pure, & in their purest Hour . . . (11. 308-14)
In many ways the Letter is a retrospective poem, looking back to the
companionship and confidence of Alfoxden, when for both Coleridge and
Wordsworth joy had been a name given to the pantheist life-force: 'In
all things/He saw one life, and felt that it was joy' {Pedlar, 217-18). But
Coleridge's pantheism does not disappear with his new reading of Ger-
man philosophy. When the Letter was written in April 1802, the 'abstruse
Research' had been going on for well over a year, but he was still able to
36 JONATHAN WORDSWORTH
comment that 'we are all one Life' when writing to Sotheby six months
later. The first fruits of his research had been the four letters reexamin-
ing Locke, that were written for Josiah Wedgwood in February 1801, and
summed up for Thomas Poole the following month:
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)
How much had Coleridge really changed since the Lecture on the Slave Trade
in '95?
To develope the powers of the Creator is our proper employment . . . Our
Almighty Parent hath therefore given to us Imagination.
How much indeed - for all the reading of Kant and Fichte, Tetens, Leib-
nitz, Schelling, and others - did his most deeply held beliefs ever change,
until the period of rethinking, in about 1818, that follows Biographia?18
What is certain is that for Coleridge 'the sublime of man' continued,
despite his new interest in the poetic imagination and the fancy, to be a
transcendental power analogous to divine creativity. After the Letter to
Sara Hutchinson in 1802 the poetry that celebrates this power ceases to be
written by Coleridge; but there can be no doubt that the higher imagina-
tion that comes to dominate the later stages of The Prelude depends upon
his thinking. The Climbing of Snowdon of February 1804 presents us
with an equation of soul and imagination ('had Nature lodged / The soul,
the imagination of the whole' (1805 Prelude xm, 64-5)). The central lines
of Book vi, written the following month, show imagination coming
'athwart' the poet 'in all the might of its endowments'; at which he turns
grandly to his soul and says, 'I recognize thy glory' (11. 525-32). A year
later, the Snowdon gloss produces yet another version of the
creative/perceptive human mind made in the image of God:
it appeared to me
The perfect image of a mighty mind,
Of one that feeds upon infinity,
That is exalted by an under-presence,
The sense of God, or whatsoe'er is dim
Or vast in its own being . . . (XIII, 69-74)
And as he brings his poem to a close, Wordsworth not only comes to think
of imagination as having provided a structural principle (xm, 171-84),
but offers an amazing list of its 'endowments':
imagination, which in truth
Is but another name for absolute strength
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,
And reason in her most exalted mood. (XIII, 167-70)
It is certainly one of Wordsworth's most exalted statements. As with
the primary definition in Biographia, one is confronted by superlatives that
 'The infinite I AM' 37
easily seem hyperbolical, but which are capable of very precise meaning.
It is the last line that is most important. 'Reason in her most exalted
mood' is no doubt to be related to the Kantian 'vernunft', but Kant had
not been the first to distinguish pure reason from understanding
('verstandt'). Though it was a little disingenuous to parade his own
achievement, and to leave Kant out of the question, Coleridge was broad-
ly telling the truth when he wrote in Biographia Chapter 10,
I have cautiously discriminated the terms, the REASON, and the
UNDERSTANDING, encouraged and confirmed by the authority of our
genuine divines, and philosophers, before the revolution [of 1688].
(£L,i,p. 173)
And for those who wish to understand what is meant by the primary im-
agination nothing is of greater importance than the passage he then goes
on to quote from Paradise Lost. Raphael is explaining to Adam in Book
v the doctrine of perfectibility - how the different orders of Creation
not only become more spiritual as they come closer to God, but have each
the power to climb the next rung of the ladder. Because of the difficulty
of breaking into Milton's syntax, Coleridge's quotation begins rather
awkwardly:
- both life, and sense,
Fancy, and understanding: whence the soul
Reason receives, and REASON is her being,
DISCURSIVE or INTUITIVE.
'Discourse', Raphael continues, talking down from his angelic rung,
Is oftest your's, the latter most is our's,
Differing but in degree, in kind the same. (ibid., 11. 173-4)
Angels for most of the time are intuitive reasoners, men are chiefly
restricted to the level of understanding; but because the soul is reason's
being, man has the capacity to become angelic. Engell in the Bollingen
footnote remarks, 'The lines probably encouraged [Coleridge] in one
of his favourite qualifications: differing in degree but not in kind.' There
can't be much doubt that this is true; but it hardly explains why Coleridge
should return to the passage again and again, and it surely underplays
the importance to him of the Ascent of Being. In The Statesman's Manual
(published in 1816, the year before Biographia) he first comments that
'Milton opposes the discursive to the intuitive, as the lower to the higher',
then quotes 'Differing but in degree, in kind the same', and finally goes
on to say damningly that understanding 'contemplates the unity of things
in their limits only, and is consequently a knowledge of superficies without
substance'. Reason, by contrast, is 'the integral spirit of the regenerated
man . . . substantiated and vital'. In the words of the Wisdom of
38 JONATHAN WORDSWORTH
Solomon, it is 'the breath of the power of God, and a pure influence from
the glory of the Almighty' (SM, p. 69).
If it is possible to go further than this in equating reason with godhead,
then Coleridge does so in a famous passage in the 1818 Friend where the
argument is in fact clinched in Milton's words:
I should have no objection to define Reason withjacobi... as an organ bearing
the same relation to spiritual objects, the Universal, the Eternal, and the
Necessary, as the eye bears to material and contingent phaenomena.
'But then it must be added', Coleridge goes on, in terms that are unam-
biguously pantheist:
that it is an organ identical with its appropriate objects. Thus, God, the Soul, eter-
nal Truth, etc. are the objects of Reason; but they themselves are reason. We name
God the Supreme Reason; and Milton says, 'Whence the Soul Reason receives,
and Reason is her Being.' (Friend, II, pp. 155-6)
To say that for Coleridge 'reason in her most exalted mood' is imagina-
tion would take a little qualifying. In The Statesman's Manual, for instance,
imagination, though clearly akin, is defined as separate. It is the 'com-
pleting power' that creates reason by 'impregnating' the understanding
(SM, p. 69). To the case that I am making, however, such distinctions
are irrelevant. What we have in Coleridge is a lasting preoccupation with
'the sublime of man' - the power that enables him to become all spirit,
to 'lose and find all self in God'. Whether he calls this power love, or joy,
or imagination, or reason, doesn't matter in itself.
References to the divine reason in the years just before and just after
Biographia have an especial importance because they draw attention to
higher and lower powers that are linked in the Ascent of Being, and
resemble the primary and secondary imagination. They are important
too because they suggest that Coleridge is trying to tell us something when
he chooses to quote Raphael's words to Adam at length as thefirstof three
epigraphs to Biographia, Chapter 13:
O Adam! one Almighty is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return
If not depraved from good: created all
Such to perfection, onefirstnature all
Indued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and, more spiritous and pure,
As nearer to him plac'd or nearer tending,
Each in their several active spheres assigned,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportion'd to each kind. (BL, I, p. 295)
Even flowers and fruit, in this Ascent, have their 'sublime'. They can-
not, like men, know themselves 'Parts and proportions of one wond'rous
 'The infinite I AM' 39
whole' {Religious Musings, 137), but in providing man's nourishment,
they too are 'by gradual scale sublim'd'. They aspire in turn 'To vital
spirits', then 'to animal', and finally 'to intellectual' (the realm of
ultimate purity). En route they give to man

both life and sense,

Fancy and understanding: whence the soul
REASON receives. (BL, I, p. 295)
On this occasion Coleridge cuts short his quotation with the words 'And
reason is her being,/Discursive or intuitive'. There was little need to go
further. The fuller distinction between understanding and reason had
been made in Chapter 10; and in the new context Coleridge wished rather
to stress that reason was the being of the soul - the principle that enabled
her to climb the ladder back to God. More significant is the misquota-
tion - strictly, perhaps, the emendation - of Paradise Lost. Milton, in
keeping with his argument in DeDoctrina Christiana, had written that all
things proceed from God, created out of 'one first matter all': Coleridge
quietly changes 'matter' to 'nature'. The universe that is to us the
'natural' world is created not from preexisting matter, but out of the
spiritual 'nature' of God.19 The second epigraph to Biographia, Chapter
13, is again of great importance, and again subject to careful emenda-
tion by Coleridge. Quotations from two separate works by Leibnitz have
been welded together to form a whole that argues for the existence of a
spiritual principle in matter. The train of Coleridge's thought is obvious
- and confirmed by the choice as his third epigraph of lines from
Synesius, the fifth-century bishop who had been cited in a footnote to
Chapter 12 as evidence that pantheism is 'not necessarily irreligious or
heretical' (BL, I, 246-7). The appearance of Leibnitz at this moment
just before the imagination definitions is significant. He forms a par-
ticularly strong connection with Coleridge's early thinking, and has a
good claim to have been the first of the Germans to make an impression.
On seeing his bust at Hanover in March 1799, Coleridge writes: 'It is the
face of a God! & Leibnitz was almost more than a man in the wonderful
capaciousness of his Judgment & Imagination' (CL, I, p. 472).
By June 1800, Coleridge is looking forward to settling at Keswick so
that he can read Spinoza and Leibnitz, and asking Humphry Davy how
his own thinking differs from theirs (CL, n, p. 590). On 13 February
1801 he is still reading Leibnitz, but Spinoza has been replaced by Kant
(CL, II, p. 676). Five days later Coleridge writes the first of the letters to
Wedgwood that are designed to overthrow the 'sandy Sophisms of Locke'
and to establish both his own position as philosopher and that of Word-
sworth as author of The Recluse. It is Leibnitz who, in the Nouveau Essai
40 JONATHAN WORDSWORTH

sur L'Entendement (not published till 1765, fifty years after his death) pro-
vides the means of countering Locke's insistence on the mind as tabula
rasa. 'There are some ideas and principles', he writes,
which do not come to us from the senses, and which we find in ourselves without
forming them, although the senses give us occasion to perceive them.
McFarland draws attention to the passage in his essay on the secondary
imagination, and goes on to relate this belief in innate ideas to the doc-
trine of the monad for which Leibnitz is chiefly famous (McFarland, 'SI',
p. 219). Anyone who chooses to look up 'Monads and Monadology' in
the Encyclopedia of Philosophy will find that the topic is taken a good deal
more seriously than might be supposed. There are philosophers who put
their trust in monads before Plato, and there are philosophers who put
their trust in monads in the twentieth century. Basically, a monad is an
irreducible unit of life, or power, held to be present in the different
organisms of the material world. In its spiritual oneness the monad is
analogous to the human mind, and also to God. According to one view
each monad is a microcosm of the universe - Blake's 'world in a grain
of sand' - and yet entirely separate. According to another, which is of
course pantheist, the sum total of the monads in existence is God. Leib-
nitz held to the first view,20 but this does not prevent his making frequent
statements that have a pantheist implication.
The epigraph to Biographia 13 is a case in point:
If indeed corporeal things contained nothing but matter they might truly be said
to consist influxand to have no substance, as the Platonists once rightly recog-
nized . . . I have come to the conclusion that certain metaphysical elements percep-
tible to the mind alone should be admitted, and that some higher and, so to speak,
formal principle should be added to the material mass . . . It does not matter whether
we call this principle of things an entelechy or a power so long as we remember
that it is intelligibly to be explained only by the idea of powers. (BL, I, p. 296)
'Entelechy' is another word for monad, and the point of this last sentence
may be to warn those who prefer the concept of a life-force that they
should regard it as consisting of separate powers, not the pantheist totality
that is God. It is important, however, that 'metaphysical elements' in the
material world are said to be perceptible to the human mind. And it is
interesting that 'this principle of things', the phrase that so strongly
recalls Tintern Abbey, should be another Coleridge emendation. Leibnitz
is being read, and presented, in terms of Wordsworth's 'see [ing] into
the life of things', his evoking of the 'something far more deeply inter-
fused' that is both motion and spirit, and
impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. (Tintern A bbey, 101-3)
 'The infinite I AM' 41
The pattern becomes still clearer when one recollects that the source of
Wordsworth's lines is an address that Coleridge himself had written at
the end of Religious Musings to spirits of'plastic', or creative, power
that interfus'd
Roll thro' the grosser and material mass
In organizing surge!
'Holies of God', he had called them and added the parenthesis, 'And
what if Monads of the infinite mind' (11. 423-6).
Coleridge's own source in 1796 had been not Leibnitz but Cudworth,
the slightly earlier English neo-Platonist under whose influence he had
written the Lectures on Revealed Religion in the previous year. Cudworth's
immense, and immensely learned book, The True Intellectual System of the
Universe, is an attack on 'hylozoic atheism' - the belief that matter has
life. Like Leibnitz he had dealt in terms of separate plastic powers; as a
Unitarian, however, Coleridge had joined them up, turned them into
component parts of the mind of God. It is this kind of thinking that lies
behind the Biographia definitions. The Destiny of Nations beautifully ex-
plains how it is that the primary imagination in its highest power is 'a
repetition in the finite mind of the infinite I AM'. 'Properties', Coleridge
announces categorically,

are God: the naked mass

(If mass there be, fantastic guess or ghost)
Acts only by its inactivity. (11. 36-8)
God is not matter (which is Spinoza's view, attacked by Cudworth, and
at no point accepted by Coleridge); He is the sum total of 'properties',
individual attributes, within the world of His creation. The playful
reference to mass as 'fantastic guess or ghost' makes the point that Col-
eridge's position is not altered if one adopts an immaterialist view; in-
deed he is half inclined to do so himself. After a moment of not unbogus
humility, he continues to speculate:

Here we pause humbly. Others boldlier think

That as one body seems the aggregate
Of atoms numberless, each organized;
So by a strange and dim similitude
Infinite myriads of self-conscious minds
Are one all-conscious Spirit, which informs
With absolute ubiquity of thought
(His one eternal self-affirming act!)
All his involved Monads . . . (11. 39-47)
Monads are the expression of the divine imagination. Each has his in-
dividuality and separate job, as together they 'Evolve the process of
42 JONATHAN WORDSWORTH
eternal good' (1. 59); but they are informed, empowered, interfused, by
the 'eternal self-affirming act' of God - 'the infinite I AM' - which
already in the Slave Trade lecture Coleridge has said it is man's primary
duty to imitate.
Leibnitz must have seemed to take up where Cudworth left off; but
before coming across him in the winter of 1798-9, Coleridge had
assimilated the later, pantheist, thinking of Berkeley's Siris, with its em-
phasis on human creativity and the Ascent of Being. 'In this scale',
Berkeley had written, in words already quoted,
each lower faculty is a step that leads to the one above it. And the uppermost
naturally leads to the deity.
It was Leibnitz who above all enabled Coleridge to carry this central faith
of the early period into the years leading up to Biographia. Thinking of
Wordsworth, and of their shared aims, Coleridge made a note during his
voyage to Malta,
To write to the Recluse that he may insert something concerning Ego/ its
metaphysical Sublimity - & intimate Synthesis with the principle of Co-
adunation . . . (CN, II, 2057)
Quoting the passage in his essay, McFarland comments with surprise:
Although the 'principle of Co-adunation' here invoked is clearly the secondary
imagination or Dichtkrqft, the phrase about the ego's 'metaphysical Sublimity'
can refer neither to poetry nor to psychology, but only to metaphysics - that is,
not to Tetens, but to Leibnitz.
There could be no clearer example of approaching Coleridge with set
philosophical assumptions. Because he is determined that the primary
imagination is no more than sense-perception, McFarland is forced to
use the term 'secondary' in an instance that he knows to be inappropriate.
The last page-and-a-half of his essay produces in fact all the evidence that
is needed to distinguish a secondary imagination dependent on Tetens
from a transcendental primary going back through Leibnitz to Plato. It
is even suggested in a footnote that the visprimitiva of Leibnitz (the essen-
tial force that empowers the monads) may have given the primary its
name.
Before returning one last time to the definitions, it may be worth paus-
ing to ask why the Coleridge of 1818 thought his dependence on Schell-
ing in Biographia had been a case of 'retrograding from . . . prior and better
lights'. Pantheism for the early Coleridge, though it drew support from
many different sources (some of them incongruous), had consisted
basically of Priestleyan Unitarianism; the question to be asked is
therefore whether Coleridge at any time in the intervening period
 'The infinite I AM' 43
established a settled Trinitarian faith. From March 1796 onwards there
are criticisms of Priestley in the letters and notebooks that sound as if they
should be final, but then seem not to have been.21 When definitions of
the Trinity begin to appear, they show Coleridge arguing himself into
a metaphysical position, yet conscious that his underlying beliefs have
failed to change. On 12 February 1805 it burst upon him as 'an awful
Truth'that'No Christ, No God!' - that the Trinity is necessary to his
conception of God, and that 'Unitarianism in all its Forms is Idolatory'.
'O that this Conviction may work upon me and in me', he pleads,
and that my mind may be made up as to the character ofJesus, and of, historical
Christianity, as clearly as it is of the Logos and intellectual or spiritual Christian-
ity. (CN, II, 2448)
Coleridge's intellectual Christianity is very intellectual indeed. Three
notes earlier, he had written: 'the moment we conceive the divine energy,
that moment we co-conceive the Logos' (ibid., 2445). His position is not
in fact unorthodox, but the emphasis on metaphysical proof is significant.
The Unitarian Jesus, who is a human being and the son of Joseph, has
been replaced in Coleridge's thinking not by Christ as the incarnate Son
of God, but by the satisfyingly abstract concept of the Word. God in his
self-naming - I AM - creates himself as both subject and object, and,
in Coleridge's later explanation,
becometh God the Father, self-originant and self-subsistent, even as the Logos
or Supreme Idea is the co-eternal Son, self-subsistent but begotten by the Father
(SM, p. 694)
Instead of informing 'all his involved Monads', God's 'one eternal self-
affirming act' begets the Son (the portion of himself that, in Berkeley's
term, has 'outness'). Two months later, on 14 April 1805, Coleridge
wrote his now famous note on the Word as symbolic language:
In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim- glim-
mering thro' the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were ask-
ing, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever ex-
ists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have
always an obscure feeling as if the new phaenomenon were the dim Awaking of
a forgotten or hidden Truth of my inner Nature. It is still [i.e. always] interesting
as a Word, a Symbol! It is Logos, the Creator! (CN, II, 2546).
The Logos, or Creator, or Christ, within man, offers a symbolic cor-
respondence that forever exists between man and the natural world. Clearly
it is another definition of the primary imagination; and clearly the new
abstract Trinitarianism has not prevented Coleridge's pantheist yearn-
ings for oneness with the God in Nature from finding expression. Nor,
be it said, did his new views alter the pattern of his reading. Those who
44 JONATHAN WORDSWORTH
portray Coleridge either as by this stage safely orthodox, or as moving
away from Unitarianism because he was frightened by pantheism, have
to explain why in the period between his return from Malta and the
writing ot Biographia he should have taken pains to procure ten different
works of Schelling - all of them pantheist. And they have to explain how
it is that to the years 1808-10 belongs Coleridge's most committed
reading of Jacob Boehme.
Coleridge claims to have read Boehme at school, and seems to have
been aware of him at different times in the 1790s,22 but he was actually
given the four-volume 'Law' edition by De Quincey in February 1808.
Some of his notes, according to George Whalley in Volume One of the
BoWingen Marginalia, belong to this early period; but most look back upon
it from the vantage-point of 1817-18. To the Coleridge of these later notes
- the man who thinks of Biographia as pantheist and Behmenite -
Boehme's chief fault can be readily identified. It is

the confusion of the creaturely spirit in the great moments of its renascence . . .
thro' the Breath and Word of Comforter and Restorer, for the deific energies in
Deity itself. {CM, I, 602)

The confusion had of course been shared by the Coleridge who could
write, 'the moment we conceive the divine energy, that moment we co-
conceive the Logos', or who, looking out at the dim-glimmering Maltese
moon, could feel the Logos as a hidden truth of his inner nature. Boehme
had enabled Coleridge to go on believing that the experiences of spiritual
transcendence celebrated in his own and Wordsworth's earlier poetry
had been a losing and finding of the self in God. Such moments are no
less important to the Coleridge of 1818, but he sees them as visitings of
the Holy Spirit bestowed by God upon his creature man. Deific energy
in man himself, variously defined as love, joy, the pure reason, the
primary imagination, is now denied. Or, to put it another way, the soul
loses its status as a monad of the infinite mind. Aspiration goes, to be
replaced by duty. The ladder that has offered an Ascent of Being is pulled
away.
All this, however, takes place not in Biographia, but just after it.
Biographia itself, as Coleridge so soon realized, is a pantheist work, depen-
dent upon Schelling, who in turn both derives from Boehme and close-
ly resembles him. But there were two sides to Schelling: the early Nature-
philosopher, and the thinker who came to regard art as an expression of
the 'indwelling divinity in man'. It is the philosopher of art whom Engell,
in The Creative Imagination, takes to be central to Biographia. 'No other
romantic thinker', he writes of Schelling,
 'The infinite I AM* 45
more cogently backed his plea for the divine nature of imagination and art. It was
not a new idea, but Schelling's claim has an added dimension: for him, art is the
pursuit of objectivity. . . Art solves the dilemma of philosophy, the split between
man and nature, the riddle of creation and its relationship to the individual mind.
(pp.320-1)
This exalted power hardly sounds like the faculty that in Biographia ' strug-
gles at all events to idealize and to unify', but Engell never doubts either
that Schelling is behind the secondary imagination, or that the secondary
is for Coleridge more important than the primary. The two assumptions
depend above all on a belief that the Biographia definitions coincide with
Schelling's three-fold account of mental process; but they receive a fur-
ther support from Engell's shaping of his book. Hazlitt, Shelley, Word-
sworth, Keats are taken out of chronological sequence so that the last two
chapters of The Creative Imagination can be given, respectively, to Schell-
ing and Coleridge. Schelling's philosophy of art is dwelt upon at length,
and there is an implication - as indeed there has been throughout the
book - that we are leading up to a final assessment oi Biographia. In Col-
eridge's chapter, however - the long-expected climax - Schelling plays
no part. This despite the fact that Chapter 12 oi Biographia consists largely
of verbatim transcriptions from his Nature-philosophy. At some level,
it would seem, Engell himself is aware that the tendency of the Schelling
borrowings is to exalt the primary imagination in its transcendental role,
and thus to emphasize that for Coleridge the imagination of the artist is
not of comparable importance.
The notes that Engell produces wearing his other hat as editor of
Biographia are exemplary. Full translations are presented of the Schell-
ing plagiarisms, and attention is drawn also to the interpolations that
Coleridge made en route. These have a particular importance as they
cannot have been incorporated for convenience, or by mistake. As one
might expect they show Coleridge preparing the way for his final defini-
tions. One insertion in Chapter 12 stands out especially. 'The theory of
natural philosophy', Schelling and Coleridge write,

would then be completed, when all nature was demonstrated to be identical in

essence with that which in its highest known power exists in man as intelligence
and self-consciousness . . .
to which Coleridge on his own has added:
when the heavens and the earth shall declare not only the power of their maker,
but the glory and the presence of their God, even as he appeared to the great pro-
phet during the vision of the mount in the skirts of his divinity. (BL, I, p. 256)
The skirts of God's divinity are the clouds that shielded the Israelites from
the glory and presence of Jehovah as Moses went up alone to receive the
46 JONATHAN WORDSWORTH
tablets on Mount Sinai. In the portion of his sentence drawn from Schell-
ing, Coleridge looks forward to the fulfilment of natural philosophy when
it can demonstrate the pantheist assumption (seen for instance in Tintern
Abbey) that Nature and 'the mind of man' are in essence the same. In the
portion that he adds, Coleridge looks forward to the time when Creation
as a whole will be able to perceive the glory and presence of God as it was
perceived uniquely by Moses.
It is in the last paragraph of Chapter 13, before he breaks off for his
spoof letter, that Coleridge himself accepts the challenge to prove Nature
and the mind consubstantial. In a passage that shows awareness of Kant
and Fichte as well as Schelling, but draws its conclusion from none of
them, he affirms that in the reconciliation of subject and object, the I and
the not-I: 'no other conception is possible, but that the product must be
a tertium aliquid, or finite generation'. To which he adds the all-
important words: 'Now this tertium aliquid can be no other than an inter-
penetration of the counteracting powers, partaking of both' (BL, i, p.
300). McFarland's comment, as he strives to maintain the primacy of the
secondary imagination, seems a little desperate:

The tertium aliquid would metaphysically have to be God, so the solution

would be pantheistic. I suspect, however, that Coleridge did not see this
until the last moment because his mind was set on the poetic imagination.
(McFarland,'SI\p. 227)
If Coleridge's mind had been set on the poetic imagination - apart from
the fact that he would probably have made his definition a little more im-
pressive - he would in Chapters 12 and 13 have been translating from
Schelling the philosopher of art, not the Nature-philosopher. And if at
the climax of the metaphysical section ofBiographta he was truly surprised
by the pantheist tendency of his own thinking, he must have been writing
in his sleep since 1795.
It is not Coleridge but his critics who have been preoccupied with the
poetic imagination. The game of Pick-your-own-German- philosopher
has led to Kant, Fichte, Tetens, Schelling being ridden like hobby-horses
through the pages ofBiographia, and has distracted attention from the fact
that imagination is for Coleridge an act of faith. In Chapter 9, though he
is not too truthful about the number of Schelling's works he possesses,33
Coleridge gives an account of his own sources and intentions that is
basically accurate. Schelling is praised as

the founder of the PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE, and as the most successful

improver of the Dynamic System which, begun by Bruno, was reintroduced
. . .by KANT.
 'The infinite I AM' 47
'With the exception of one or two fundamental ideas which cannot be
withheld from FICHTE', Coleridge continues, 'to SCHELLING we
owe the completion . . . of this revolution of philosophy.' Having
established this pantheist succession,24 and made clear that Schelling is
to him the Nature-philosopher, not the philosopher of art, Coleridge
states his own position. The tones are unctuous, but the meaning is not
in doubt:
To me it will be happiness and honor enough, should I succeed in rendering the
system itself intelligible to my countrymen, and in the application of it to the most
awful of subjects, for the most important of purposes. (BL, I, pp. 162-4)
'By this', Engell writes, with comic incredulity, 'C[oleridge] ap-
parently means religion'. Then, fearing that he has gone too far, he takes
it back again: 'or a point where philosophy, art and religion become one'
(ibid.). Art has been inserted not because of anything Coleridge himself
has said, but because it is the preoccupation of the editor. Again and again
it is clear that Engell cannot take seriously the fact that Coleridge's
religion is the centre of his life. The Dynamic System, begun by Gior-
dano Bruno, 'completed' by Schelling, is the pantheist alternative to the
dead world of Newton, Locke, and 'the Mechanic Dogmatists' (CL, iv,
574). The histories and political economy of the present and preceding
century', writes Coleridge in The Statesman's Manual, 'partake in the
general contagion of its mechanic philosophy.' If, by contrast, we go back
to the histories of the Bible,
they are the educts of the Imagination, of that reconciling and mediatory power,
which . . . gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and con-
substantial with the truths of which they are the conductors. (SM, pp. 28-9)
'Consubstantial', Robert Barth reminds us, in a book that goes to the
heart of Coleridge's religious thinking, is 'the privileged word canonized
by the Council of Nicea in A. D. 325 to express the relationship of the Son
to the Father in the Trinity.' 'The Son', he continues, 'truly "sym-
bolizes" the Father; he "images him forth'', at the same time partaking
in the most perfect possible way of the inner reality of the Father. '25 In
giving birth to symbols 'consubstantial with the truths of which they are
the conductors', the imagination is inevitably divine. In reading the
symbol-language of God, man in his turn is enabled to partake of the in-
ner reality that is the Logos.
What then of the Biographia definitions? As 'the prime Agent of all
human perception', the primary imagination does have to include sense-
perceptions - or at least the faculty that orders them. Logically,
therefore, we have another triple process (though not one that is akin to
48 JONATHAN WORDSWORTH
Tetens or Schelling). The Ascent begins with the lower power of the
primary, and mounts thence through the poetic secondary to the sublime
of the primary at its highest. It can be argued that Coleridge, who by 1815
was concerned not to be thought unorthodox, allowed for the possibili-
ty that the pantheist third stage in the process might not be perceived.26
But is it seriously to be thought that the man who had earlier linked God's
'one eternal self-affirming act' with a view that

Infinite myriads of self-conscious minds

Are one all-conscious Spirit. . .
{Destiny of Nations, 11. 43-4)

- who in Biographia itself had considered Jehovah's self-naming to

reveal 'the fundamental truth of all philosophy\BL, i, p. 275), and
gone on to claim that 'true metaphysics are nothing else but true divini-
ty' (ibid., p. 291), should bring the philosophical section of his great
work to a close by claiming that sense-perception (of all things) is 'a
repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation'? Few peo-
ple have rated the evidence of their senses lower than Coleridge, or
would have been less inclined to celebrate it in exalted biblical
language. In his definitions he scaled downwards from the primary
at the top to the fancy at the bottom because he was thinking in terms
of human achievement, and the primary in its full potential showed
man at his closest to God. The primary definition is a statement of
faith. It may be that Coleridge did not intend it easily to be understood,
but by comparison with some of the material he incorporated from
Schelling and others it is by no means difficult.
So far from betraying himself unwittingly into the trap of pantheism,
Coleridge in his definition of the 'tertium aliquid' - the 'third
something' that is an inter-penetration of counteracting powers - is tell-
ing his readers firmly, and not for thefirsttime, how the primary imagina-
tion should be interpreted.27 Chapter 13 is brief, and argues its way step
by step from the epigraphs at the opening, through to the pantheist asser-
tion which they so clearly predict. The tertium aliquid is the angelic
reason in man that will enable him to climb the next rung in Milton's As-
cent of Being; it is the 'principle of things' in Coleridge's Wordsworthian
emendation of Leibnitz; it is the pantheism of Synesius that is 'not
necessarily irreligious or heretical' (though it may be so in the teaching
of others). The inter-penetration of subject and object, mind and the ex-
ternal world, can logically take place only in the self-assertion of God.
Here alone are the conditions under which the ground of existence, and
the ground of the knowledge of existence, are the same. Coleridge spells
this out carefully in Chapter 12, and his position is also made clear in a
 'The infinite I AM' 49
marginal comment to Omniana that is footnoted by Engell. Southey had
wished that Jehovah's 'I AM THAT I AM' should be translated, 'I am
he who am', and Coleridge writes emphatically:
No! the sense of that is because, or in that - I am in that I am! meaning I affirm
myself, [ and] affirming myself to be, I am. Causa Sui. My own act is the ground
of my own existence. (BL, I, p. 275).
A repetition of this eternal act in the finite mind is possible only in that
the tertium aliquid is God. It is the 'something far more deeply interfus-
ed', the 'motion and . . . spirit' that is present at once in the round ocean,
the living air, the blue sky, and in the mind of man (Tintern Abbey, 97-101).
The spirit is of course no less present in the minds of uncomprehen-
ding men, but its potential - 'the sublime of man' - is realized only in
those who have the imaginative capacity to 'see into the life of things',
to lose their individuality and find in God the oneness that is the true self.
It is for this reason that the higher role of the primary is at times refer-
red to as the 'philosophic imagination'. Quoting Plotinus (but with
Milton, and his own approaching definitions in mind), Coleridge in
Chapter 12 describes this power as 'the highest and intuitive knowledge,
as distinguished from the discursive' (BL, i, p. 241). It is 'the sacred
power of self-intuition', comprehensible to those
who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings
of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar . . . (ibid., pp. 241-2)
Coleridge might, one feels, have allegorized the butterfly as Psyche, or
the Soul; instead he comments simply that those who possess the
philosophic imagination 'know and feel' the potential that is working
within them. Self-intuition is intuition not of the limited temporal self,
but of future totality: 'We begin with the I KNOW MYSELF in order
to end with the absolute I AM' (ibid., p. 283).28
Coleridge, as he would soon recognize, was at this moment a
Behmenite. The primary imagination in its highest power is one with 'the
deific energies in Deity itself (CM, I, p. 602). By comparison, the secon-
dary can only be inferior: it is a merely human faculty, not an inter-
penetration of the divine. In the circumstances, however, Coleridge's
statement that the secondary is not different in kind is an astonishing
claim. Schelling came for a time to think of art as reconciling man and
Nature; Coleridge never adopts this position in Biographia, but the fact
that the creative imagination could merge into the primary gives to the
poet a special position in the Ascent of Being. His work is limited because
it 'coincid [es] with the conscious will', and true self-consciousness -
the losing and finding of self - is a spontaneous act of love, or blessing,
or imagination, which cannot be deliberately achieved. No bounds are
50 JONATHAN WORDSWORTH

set, however, on the poet's Ascent. His vision has an almost Blakean
power. H e
contemplate [ s ] the ANCIENT of Days and all his works with feelings as fresh,
as if all had then sprang forth at the first creative Fiat. . .
He has a 'mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel
it' (BL, I, p. 80). The primary imagination at its highest is the supreme
human achievement of oneness with God; the secondary, though limited
by comparison, contains the hope that in the act of writing the poet may at-
tain to a similar power.

Notes
1
For Coleridge's reading of Jacob Boehme (Behmen), and Boehme's rela-
tion to Schelling, see p. 44, below.
2
Fruman, pp. 80-3, and passim.
3
I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (1934), p. 58.
4
W. Jackson Bate, 'Coleridge on the Function of Art', Perspectives of Criticism,
XX (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), p. 145. Bate's definitions are cited approv-
ingly by James Volant Baker, The Sacred River: Coleridge's Theory of The
Imagination (Louisiana, 1957), p. 121, but have not been widely accepted.
5
See BL, II, p. 15 and I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (1929).
6
The first recorded usage of the phrase 'secondary education', at which
critics tend to clutch at this point in the discussion, is by Matthew Arnold in
1861. The use of'primary' to mean earlier, primal, is not uncommon (it oc-
curs in Coleridge himself, for instance, atMisc C, p. 205); the use of'secon-
dary' to imply greater importance is decidedly rare. I have not found a clear
example in Coleridge.
7
It should be stressed that Coleridge follows Schelling (see BL, I, pp. 279-80)
in defining the will as the highest act of self-consciousness, but yet spon-
taneous. The Mariner blesses the water-snakes 'unawares', but his doing
so is an expression of will. The 'conscious will' - will under control of the
conscious mind - is not different in kind, but inevitably lesser in degree.
8
McFarland's essay has the support of Kathleen M. Wheeler, Sources, Pro-
cesses and Methods in Coleridge }s cBiographia Literaria' (C ambridge, 1980), p. 127
andn.
9
At one point, just before the Theses of Chapter 12, Coleridge says that in the
following Chapter the results of his enquiry 'will be applied to the deduction
of imagination, and with it the principles of production and of genial criticism
in the fine arts' {BL, I, p. 264). It doesn't happen - or, at least, it doesn't
happen until Volume Two, after the transcendental implications have first
been drawn in Chapter 13.
10
For a more sceptical view, see Fruman, pp. 85-6. Coleridge's claim to have
had the ideas before Schelling ever wrote them, is not defensible.
11
Home at Grasmere, 1007-8.
12
Paragraph 303; Works of George Berkeley, D. D. (2 vols., 1784), II, p. 600.
13
Religious Musings, 46-50; Coleridge's poetry in this essay is quoted from
Poems, selected and ed. John Beer, revised edition 1974.
 'The infinite I AM' 51
14
David Hartley, Observations on Man, reissued with Notes by H. Pistorius (3
vols., 1791), I, p. 114.
15
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 14; Blake quotations are drawn from
Poetry and Prose, ed. David V. Erdman and Harold Bloom (New York, 1965).
16
'Why so violent against metaphysics in poetry?' Coleridge wrote to Thelwall
in May 1796, and added, 'IsnotAkenside's a metaphysical poem?'Word-
sworth is cited later in the same letter as liking best the most exalted
philosophical sequences in Religious Musings (CL, I, pp. 215—16). To Lamb
it seemed that Religious Musings was second only to Paradise Lost, and in some
respects greater still in that Milton did not contain 'Such grand truths' (LL,
I, p. 95).
17
As in Destiny of Nations, 15-26, Religious Musings, 413-19, This Lime Tree
Bower My Prison, 37-43.
18
Rethinking in 1818 is associated with the Philosophical Lectures and with
the new version of The Friend; Coleridge did not, however, cease to make
statements that imply his earlier pantheist views. See, for instance, the note
of 1827 quoted by Henry Nelson in the 1839 edition of The Statesman's Manual:
'By reason we know that god is: but God is himself the Supreme Reason
. . . the organs of spiritual apprehension having objects consubstantial with
themselves' {SM, p. 68n). Cf. SM, pp. 28-9 (quoted above, p. 47) and, for
the rethinking of 1818, n26 below.
19
It is tempting to say that Coleridge's reading is pantheist, Milton's is not;
but DeDoctrina (not published until 1825) shows Milton arguing for creatio
ex Deo, the Platonist belief held by Plotinus among others that the preexisting
matter from which the world was fashioned had itself been created out of the
Godhead; see Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven and London,
8 vols., 1953-82), VI, pp. 305-9. Coleridge's reading serves to emphasize
that the material universe derives from the spiritual existence of God.
20
In February 1805 Coleridge notes the 'instructive Truth of the presence of
all meanings in every meaning, as Leibnitz felt and layed [ down ] as the foun-
dation of metaphysics in his representative Monads' (CN, II, 2442).
21
See for example March 1796, 'How is it that Dr. Priestley is not an atheist
. . .' (CL, I, p. 192); April 1799, 'the more I think, the more I am
discontented with the doctrines of Priestly' (ibid., p. 482); July 1802, 'neither
do I conceive Christianity to be tenable on the Priestleyan Hypothesis' (CL,
II, p. 821). Priestley's 'impious and pernicious tenets' are denounced in
Biographia (BL, I, p. 291), and a public attack is made on Unitarianism in the
Lay Sermon (1816), SM, p. 176.
22
T h e claim to h a v e 'conjured over' B o e h m e a t school is m a d e , CL, IV, p . 7 5 1 .
It is t e m p t i n g to see B o e h m e ' s influence in The Aeolian Harp ( a u t u m n 1795),
a n d in 1795-6 he features in a notebook list of possible projects (CN, I, 174).
I n A u g u s t 1808, Coleridge notes: ' W . L a w ' s Scheme of Religion founded
on J . B o e m e n is that which is most convincing to m y J u d g e m e n t ' (CN, III,
3354).
23
C o n c e r n e d that h e ' b e not charged . . . [with] u n g e n e r o u s concealment, o r
intentional p l a g i a r i s m ' , Coleridge writes, ' I have n o t indeed (eheu res
angusta domi!) been hitherto able to procure m o r e t h a n two of his books (BL,
I, p . 164). O w n e r s h i p is difficult to p r o v e , b u t five would p r o b a b l y b e a n
underestimate.
24
T h e sense in which K a n t m a y be said to have reintroduced the dynamic
52 JONATHAN WORDSWORTH

Platonism of Bruno is defined at the beginning of Chapter 8; see BL, I, p.

129 and n3.
25
J. Robert Barth, S.J., The Symbolic Imagination (Princeton, 1977), p. 11. Pro-
fessor Barth sees Coleridge's symbolic vision as 'profoundly sacramental':
'It is God reaching out to man, man reaching out to God - "through and
in the Temporal" - and encountering each other in the joy of the symbolic
act' (ibid., p. 21). My only reservation would be that such a description takes
no account ofjoy as 'the One Life within us and abroad' (line added to The
Aeolian Harp (1795) before republication in Sybilline Leaves, 1817).
26
A n u m b e r of critics, M c F a r l a n d a n d J . A . A p p l e y a r d (Coleridge 3s Philosophy
of Literature, C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1965) a m o n g t h e m , h a v e seen the Coleridge
oiBiographia as frightened b y p a n t h e i s m . E v e n at the t i m e of the 1818 Friend,
however, he seems to have been very divided on the issue, first referring (in
Essay XI) to 'the intellectual re-union of the all in one, in that eternal reason
whose fulness hath no opacity, whose transparency hath no vacuum' (Friend,
I, p. 522), and then claiming to his correspondents that a paragraph had
been 'unfortunately omitted - it's object being to preclude all suspicion of
any leaning towards Pantheism, in any of it's forms'. T adore the living and
personal God . . .' he continues uneasily (CL, IV, p. 894).
27
The tertium aliquid itself is anticipated in the account of the water-insect in
Chapter 7, which is an emblem of the mind's active and passive faculties be-
ing reconciled by the intermediate imagination. 'In common language', he
writes, 'and especially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the name
[ imagination] to a superior degree of the faculty, joined to a superior volun-
tary control over it' (BL, I, p. 125). The references to poetry and voluntary
control establish that Coleridge has the secondary in mind (it is 'superior'
merely 'in common language'). In its reconciling power, it is not different
in kind from the tertium aliquid.
28
Paul Hamilton in Coleridge's Poetics (Oxford, 1983) has argued that
Biographia, 'the most famous self-professed attempt in English literature to
exhibit the relation of philosophy to poetry', disintegrates because 'in Col-
eridge's own admission' the central definitions are 'not conclusions drawn
from a preceding line of reasoning' (p. 8). Much of what he has to say is ad-
mirable and to the point, but he wants Coleridge to be a common-sense
philosopher, and has no truck with 'the sacred power of self-intuition'. The
unity of Biographia lies not in sustained argument, but in Coleridge's ap-
prehension of man in his relationship to God.
 Struggling with the contingent: self-conscious
imagination in Coleridge's notebooks

K. DUGAS

Coleridge was an explorer of self-consciousness, but an explorer bogged

down in a morass of his own making. His loneliness, his prodigious
curiosity, and his voracious reading led him to keep journals as a virtual
necessity. Beyond offering a means of probing his experience, his
notebooks gave him the chance tofixa habit of speculative thinking whose
momentum might fuel itself, to sustain him over stretches of creative
frustration. They fulfilled in part his need for companionship, and for self-
analysis. Accommodating the insights of the moment, journal-keeping
became his way to make connections otherwise unavailable, and to pro-
duce what he hoped might deliver him from lethargy and self-doubt.
But if Coleridge's works record a mind fascinated by both the
generalizing power of science and the sensuous minutiae of lived ex-
perience, they also record the strains inherent in these means of ap-
proaching experience. They testify to the conflicts of a mind driven at
times to moralize, yet painfully conscious of private dissipations. If he
strove for the ideal, he was tortured by the real. He benefited by
crossbreeding his ideas, by adapting concepts from widely varying
sources, yet the magnitude of conceptual possibilities, sources of
metaphor, and disciplines of knowledge often paralyzed his ability to
shape ideas into literary forms. The record (some might say wreckage)
of his plans, his literary schemes, his publications, marginalia, and
notebooks show that writing was for him endlessly speculative. He could
not carry enough of his ideas to completion; he was always beginning
some new production. It was as if thinking or writing - about anything
- was an end in itself. If individual ideas were no more than temporary
fixatives of relations yet to be fully determined, they were also im-
aginatively seductive as ends in themselves. Although a determination
of its fuller relations could save an idea from the oblivion facing an isolated
thought, it also required a rigorous selectivity, the imposition of limits
which Coleridge's polymathic reading seemed designed to circumvent.

53
54 KRISTINE DUGAS
Coleridge did not find this situation easily resolvable. Despite his pro-
digious curiosity, he voiced doubts about the dispersion of his powers.
Could he make anything of his separate formulations? Could he
generalize his insights into some pattern or plan? His experience was one
of frustration and doubt, of proliferation more lateral than he had hoped,
expressed in literary forms - the conversation poems, the essays, even
the notebooks themselves - which he did not wholly respect, his work
littered throughout by marks of incompleteness. Thus Coleridge's work
inhabits, perhaps more than that of any other writer, the intermediary
zone between thought 'merely' articulated in words and formalized
literary production. From essays and notebooks and marginalia, from
published papers and poems to manuscript drafts of articles, economic
and philosophical analyses, literary criticism and plays, Coleridge lived,
thought, and wrote in a margin, inhabiting the space between experience
and literature, and between literature and ideas - a space which each
of these things borders on, intermingles with, and shares.
In this essay I will investigate some of the reasons for that marginali-
ty as they are revealed in notebook entries written at the time when Col-
eridge first began to analyze his dispersion of imaginative power. In the
notebooks I hope to discover the way Coleridge thought - in the moment
of composition and as he faced his own inner struggles and intellectual
perplexities. My method thus parallels the practical methodology for Col-
eridge studies that Lawrence Lockridge has recently set forth. By turn-
ing to the early notebooks, I hope to reveal, as Lockridge has put it, 'the
continuities of an internal dialogue' rather than any 'total consistency
in doctrine or steady development toward some settled point of view'.1

II

It is 1803, in October - some nine years after Coleridge first began

journal-keeping, but these nine years (and one more) fit into a single
volume in the Coburn series. It was at this time that Coleridge began
treating his writing in the notebooks as an activity for sustained, self-
conscious reflection, and as a place to work through ideas drawn from
the range of his readings. In a few simple lines, he writes what is not just
a statement of intention, but rather more, a portent of his later fate:

Seem to have made up my mind to write my metaphysical works, as my Life, &

in my Life - intermixed with all the other events/or history of the mind & for-
tunes of S. T. Coleridge. (CN, I, 1515)
 Self-conscious imagination 55
Though this articulation is often cited as early evidence of his inten-
tion to write what would become the Biographia Literaria, we would be
wrong to think it fulfilled in that work. Why would Coleridge need to state
in his conclusion to the Biographia that he still felt he needed to write 'my
history'? Why would he need to apologize in the first chapter, to explain
that what narrative there was was less an instrinsic part of his conception
than a structure which existed 'chiefly for the purpose of giving a con-
tinuity to the work, in part for the sake of miscellaneous reflections . . .
but still more as introductory to the statement of my principles in Politics,
Religion, and Philosophy' (BL, i, p. 5)? Even less synthetically, the nar-
rative was an introduction to 'the application of the rules, deduced from
philosophical principles, to poetry and criticism' (BL, I, p. 5). Whatever
his original intention, in its published form the Biographia Literaria, a work
of literary criticism and critical metaphysics, did not successfully 'inter-
mix' events and history with metaphysics and mind. Nor do formal
statements of principles reflect the evolutionary development we would
expect from the words 'as my Life, & in my Life'. The more ambitious
claim made in the notebook has no formal equivalent; it is, rather, a
description of the way Coleridge came to write his notebooks.
But the central problem for a writer trying to achieve the systematic
completeness Coleridge desired and yet finding himself so attuned to
possibilities observed in the moment, possibilities which could frustrate
and challenge that completeness, arose from the experience which
resulted: that of being pulled in opposing intellectual and emotional
directions. On the one hand, philosophical completeness produced a
closed form, implied an end to speculation and an arrogation of finality,
with which Coleridge, as perhaps the most systematic English Romantic
articulator of the idea of process, would have nothing to do: the idea of
an end or limit to knowledge embodied in closed forms was the target of
Coleridge's attacks on controversies in scriptural interpretation and the
sciences, and contradicted what in Coleridge's terms we know as 'polar
logic'. On the other hand, the infinite possibilities of the moment were
threatening because they stood in the way of completing anything. The
same threat attended Coleridge's practice of giving himself over to the
moment in search of the lucid impression. I want to suggest that the lat-
ter was a problem for Coleridge not so much because of what he claimed
(that he had no pleasure in temporal impressions) but rather, because he
was so good at articulating momentary impressions, and because it was
this very sensitivity that he felt he had to suppress rather than
acknowledge.
We might expect the notebooks to be ultimately revealing of the ten-
sions in Coleridge - and they are. If at one moment he writes, 'Of all
56 KRISTINEDUGAS
men I ever knew, Wordsworth himself not excepted, I have the faintest
pleasure in things contingent & transitory . . . to a disease in me' (CN,
II, 2026), at another he will claim 'I feel too intensely the omnipresence
of all in each, . . . tho' [my brain] perceives the difference of things, yet
[it] is eternally pursuing the likenesses' (CN, n, 2372). We will have to
consider in what way Coleridge's antipathy for the individual and the
transitory, along with its corollary desire for unifying 'affinit [ies]' or
'likenesses', suggests tension. Is it this antipathy, or some confusion bet-
ween the critical distinction of what it is to feel versus what it is to see, that
poses a problem? It may be that Coleridge's marginality is only explicable
by understanding the interrelation between his susceptibility to the tran-
sitory and the feelings (as opposed to the knowledge) arising from the
practice of self-analysis itself.
Answers can be found in the notebook entries around this time. I have
observed that it was around October 1803 that Coleridge begins journal-
writing in earnest. The writing begins to modulate away from singly
entered aphorisms, foreign quotations, and lists - of daily purchases,
German or botanical vocabularies, literary schemes (to be read and to
be written), outlines for poems, intricate distinctions among meters. It
shifts towards longer entries spanning a wider range of interests:
metaphysical and moral speculations, usually arising out of personal
events; observations of the behavior of children, particularly of the ways
in which they try to understand their experience of the world; a wide
variety of visual illusions and trompes-l'oeil, in which the pleasures of the
mind in such illusions figure strongly. Before this time, the longer
notebook entries are almost exclusively descriptions of natural
phenomena, usually mountain landscapes. While Coleridge continues
to write this kind of entry, their relative frequency as extended subjects
decreases. Many more of the later natural observations concern animal
behaviour, and they typically read as if they were themselves originally
gleaned from popular scientific journals; most often Coleridge uses them
as the basis for an analogy about human behavior or an abstraction from
animal behavior to natural law or aesthetic principle. What replaces these
descriptions are Coleridge's increasingly self-conscious analyses of his
own behavior, sometimes generalized as human experience, sometimes
pertaining specifically to his own psychology.
Between October 1803 and December 1804, and following what Col-
eridge had called a 'freezing' of his poetic powers, is a fitfully extended
examination of the apparent contradiction between multiplicity and
singularity in nature. This contradiction arises from the coexistence of
difference with sameness and form with resistance to form. The same
contradiction can be found in Coleridge's dialectically opposed categories
 Self-conscious imagination 57
of thought, which also include temporal and eternal, material and
spiritual, particular and general. Coleridge would eventually call his
practice of dialectical thinking 'the universal Law of Polarity', the pro-
cess by which 'EVERY POWER IN NATURE AND IN SPIRIT . . .
evolve[s] an opposite, as the sole means and condition of its manifestation' (Friend,
I, p. 94n). The 'essence of polarity' is, as Owen Barfield has described
it, the 'dynamic conflict between coinciding opposites';2 it is 'no proper
opposition but between the two polar forces of one and the same power'
(Friend, i, p. 94). Coleridge was to study well-developed articulations of
dialectical thinking in his readings of Schelling, Goethe, Oken, and Kant
(among others), as Thomas McFarland has recently so well
documented.3 But if Coleridge wrote in April 1820:
In all subjects of deep and lasting Interest you will detect a struggle between two
opposites, two polar Forces, both of which are alike necessary to our human Well-
being, & necessary each to the continued existence of the other,4
in December 1803, Coleridge merely identifies the process as 'EX-
TREMES MEET' (CN, I, 1725). So definitive a statement as the one in
1820 seems incontrovertible as a declaration of method, but we might
wonder how rigorously Coleridge carried this method out. For Coleridge
persistently privileged one polar opposite over the other, giving his dialec-
tical practice a hierarchical, and often a moralistic, charge - which was
usually self-condemnatory and which complicated, rather than con-
tributed to, his 'Well-being'. In this way his failure to carry out his dialec-
tical method lay beneath his despair. For what we find in the notebooks
is a peculiar set of contradictory relations: one, between his oppressive
dissatisfaction with himself and his speculative, inward vigor; another,
between his desire for unity and the experience of self-division which
arose out of his practice of self-conscious reflection. For Coleridge, the
combination seems to have resulted in an informal literary production
which strangely belied much of its subject. It forms a set of opposing ef-
fects which are themselves ironically expressive of the problems that
plagued their author.
One of the first instances of tensL A appears in October 1803. It sur-
faces in the context of a desire to write a poem on 'Spirit, - or on
Spinoza', an early practitioner of the dialectic. Could he understand
how the one can be many!... It seems as if it were impossible; yet it is - & it is every
where! - It is indeed a contradiction in Terms: and only in Terms! - It is the co
presence of Feeling & Life, limitless by their very essence, with Form, by its very
essence limited - determinate - definite. (CN,I, 1561)
To readers of Coleridge, this is familiar enough. It is the 'irreducible con-
tradiction . . . at once the most unacceptable and the most important truth
58 KRISTINEDUGAS
he had to deliver'. 5 For the two 'conflicting principles of FREE LIFE,
and of the confining F O R M ' 6 are 'the primary forces from which the
conditions of all possible directions are derivative' (BL, i, p. 197). The
co presence of formlessness (of feeling and life) with form (with definitive
ideas) is exactly the condition of Romantic process. If the problem is one
of the inadequacy of human understanding and human language to en-
compass a 'given' which is assumed to exist beyond both, what blocks
Coleridge's recognition of it? We will find the answer both in the conflict
of his feelings and in his habits of thinking - particularly of organizing
the terms of his experience into hierarchies of time and sometimes of
language. In these hierarchies, the categories of eternal and spiritual are
valued over those of temporal and material. Later, Coleridge will base
the very foundations of imagination and reason on a related hierarchy
- that of a unity which encompasses division while still remaining a uni-
ty. The very direction of his dialectic will always be towards 'restoring,
or rather renewing, the original unity, from which it springs' J For now,
of his feelings Coleridge writes some entries later:
Nothing affects me much at the moment it happens - it either stupifies me, and
I perhaps look at a merry-make & dance the hay of Flies, or listen entirely to the
loud Click of the great Clock/or I am simply indifferent, not without some sense
of philosophic Self-complacency. - For a Thing at the moment is but a Thing
of the moment/it must be taken up into the mind, diffuse itself thro' the whole
multitude of Shapes & Thoughts, not one of which it leaves untinged - between
w/ch & it some new Thought is not engendered/this a work of Time/but the Body
feels it quicken with me - . (CN, I, 1597)
The claim is that new thoughts, rather than being capable of arising
immediately out of the moment, must instead be the result of the gradual
(for Coleridge, the endlessly deferable) work of time, and yet such a claim
must be at least in part a falsification, as the fact that his body 'feels it
quicken' within him suggests. Compare this entry with one written in
December:

. . . but overpowered with the [ ? ] Phaenomena I arose, lit my Candle, & wrote
- offigures,even with open eyes/of squares, & & of various colours, & I know
not what/
How in a few minutes I forgot such an Assemblage of distinct Impressions, ebulli-
tions & piles of golden colour & thence to think of the Nature of Memory. So
intense/& yet in one Minute forgotten! the same is in Dreams/Think of'this/'if, per-
chance, thou livest - ALAS!
Of the necessity of writing & indeed of all other m [otion] IN LARGE, whenever.
(CAT, I, 1750)
If such an entry (I could have chosen others) shows that Coleridge,
powerfully motivated by immediate sensations, was capable of a response
 Self-conscious imagination 59
other than stupefaction or indifference, his directives to ' Think of this/if,
perchance, thou lives f suggest self-condemnation, disgust turned toward
himself, for certain inevitable moments of failure in the writing process.
He could be stupified by the sensual, and transfixedly look or listen
without the slightest impulse towards self-expression, feeling self-
complacently indifferent to any significance the moment might possess;
he could simply be unable to remember the shape of an inspiration or
make good the rush of emotion which comes with it. Any one of these
responses is characteristic of the experience of writing, where fallowness,
indulgent play, stupefaction, and inspiration are matters of course affec-
ting the mood of their author. Thus when Coleridge describes the diffu-
sion of things of the moment into the multitude of preexisting thoughts,
he produces a slanted and emotionally colored description of the ex-
perience of writing. For his claim that stupefaction was consummately
characteristic of his practice is not corroborated by the evidence of the
notebooks, which show his amazing facility for articulating ideas in the
moment just as much as they show his habit of endlessly deferring the use
of those very ideas. It seems clear that in these passages he is undertak-
ing something other than merely understanding his experience. There
is an excess of emotion here, and it seems directed against some part of
himself which apparently he feels he must control - by denigrating it.
This excess, with its exhortations, can only put his analysis in a different,
and a shiftier, light.
But shifty in what way? First, the phrase 'is but a Thing of the moment'
suggests that Coleridge here prefers the eternal to the transitory, a
privileging which introduces a hierarchical distinction between these
terms rather than values both as functional parts of a working dialectic.
But because to arrive at 'the eternal' requires many transitory moments,
any eternal formulation is always only a transition towards another for-
mulation. It is in this sense that the transitory is necessary to that dialectic:
as old forms are continually being superseded by new ones, the evolu-
tion of new ideas makes for a succession of such eternally transitory
moments of thought. Second, the absolutism in Coleridge's proclaim-
ing both his own stupefaction and his need to diffuse the singular moment
into all other moments (and thus by extension, into all other ideas) for
'thought' to be engendered suggests that he is attempting here to hide his
habit of endlessly deferring closure even as he tries to expose it - or
perhaps, to break it. For neither the claim to be stupefied nor the need
to diffuse is borne out in his notebooks. What this lack of corroboration
suggests is that Coleridge here silences the voices within him which cor-
respond to a set of alternate realities in order to support apparently more
important claims. That is, Coleridge 'adjusts' his experience of writing
60 KRISTINEDUGAS
in calling upon it to support convictions that he has clearly some stake
in, when the same experience, interpreted differently, could as easily
have subverted those very convictions.
Given Coleridge's stated reasons for his stalled productivity, his in-
terpretation of the experience of writing cannot be taken innocently. In-
stead, it seems to represent a destructively exaggerated concentration of
emotional energy upon himself. Coleridge's recurrent perception,
despite the variety and fertility of ideas in his Malta journals, was that
'I have done nothing; not even layed up any material, any inward stores.'
Other entries show that he did not always consider such imaginative in-
dolence to be self-representative, for at times he felt his mind - 'so
populous, so active, so full of noble schemes, so capable of realizing them'
- to be a 'deep reservoir into which all these streams & currents of lovely
forms flow' (CN, i, 1577). But such moments are rare, and most often
work out of negation in that they, too, arise out of despair, in this case,
despair because of the absence 'for years . . . [of] one pure & sincere
pleasure! one full Joy!' That is, positive assertions of being capable of
mental activity are elaborate sighs made in response to the pervasive feel-
ing that pleasures were invariably 'cracked', found 'dull with base Alloy'
(CN, i, 1577).
But it is here that we need to ask certain questions. What is the relation
between Coleridge's professed need to experience single emotions and his
disgust for the momentary, which seems so allied to his disgust for him-
self? What is the reason for the disparity between his interpretation of his
experience of writing and his apparent practice? What is it that may be
blocking not so much the action of his creative powers as his perception of
those powers, especially his ability to formalize related ideas into larger if
inevitably incomplete wholes? Coleridge would come to attribute his
dwindling capacity to a 'lack of will', but it is less simple than that. To rest
with such an explanation would be to accept the writer's own most piti-
lessly (de-)moralizing self-negation. What is clear is that for Coleridge,
the possibility for understanding the root of his own despair seems para-
doxically to recede under the lens of the increasingly powerful activity of
self-conscious reflection which he so rigorously practiced after 1803.

Ill

To begin to appreciate the complexity of this problem, we have first

to turn to the earliest form of Dejection: an Ode, the Letter toAsra.* In it Col-
eridge claims that the loss of his capacity tofeeljoy 'Suspends what Nature
 Self-conscious imagination 61
gave me at my Birth,/My shaping Spirit of Imagination'. Since the
capacity to shape ideas is a form of the ability to formalize perceptions,
the claim is that feeling is necessary for imaginative shaping or formative
closure. His 'sole Resource' against its suspension is 'not to think of what
I needs must feel' but patiently 'by abstruse Research to steal/From my
own Nature all the Natural Man'. As this stealing became habitual, his
original (and he would say, natural) 'birthright' seemed more and more
unavailable, and the solution he had chosen came to be to him not a solu-
tion but a disease, spreading with the power of an infection.
Here comparison with Wordsworth is fruitful. Where Wordsworth
steals, he appears to steal from nature, as he does in the second book of
The Prelude. Although nature derives its power from his own projections,
this fact is veiled in the action and the metaphor of the poem. The actual
coming to terms with this reality is reserved for the final book, for the as-
cent of Snowdon. It is the very veiling of the theft that makes the Prelude
possible, for this unveiling is the poem, is the discovery of unmediated
power, and guarantees the celebratory final vision. The veiling and the
deferral of the unveiling thus work, structurally and emotionally, for
Wordsworth. Because he only approaches self-consciousness in his nar-
rative rather than takes self-consciousness as his point of departure, he
does not directly experience it as a threat.
But in the Letter to Asra Coleridge expresses the same theft without
mediation. He steals from himself, in the workings of self-consciousness,
and knows it, by the workings of self-consciousness. This is one element
of the 'abstruse research', his only other 'plan'. In addition to self-
consciousness, this 'research' encompassed his readings in a range of
scientific, psychological, and philosophical disciplines which he pursued
far more voraciously ( and more desperately) than Wordsworth. The at-
tempt to use self-consciousness and scientific rigor to regain the 'natural
man', here synecdochical for the desired experience of sincerity and joy,
boomeranged. The failure is experienced both as a deadening or blank
void and as an internal storm, a Wordsworthian formulation of a mind
'vexed by its own creation'. This dual choice of metaphors reflects the
complex situation in which powers felt to be frozen or suspended exist
simultaneously with a vital creativity which persists but which has no
outlet except to rage destructively about itself. These metaphors and the
metaphor of infection emerge out of the experience of self-consciousness.
They can be found in other writers, Romantic and post-Romantic, who
employ similar self-reflective techniques. Such writers typically share as
well a particular sense of regret and loss, depression and despair; they ar-
ticulate correspondent desires which are versions of a longing for a
wholeness now unavailable.
62 KRISTINE DUGAS
If Coleridge's 'natural man' could somehow exist a priori and were not
just a human construct, then Coleridge could indeed have 'lost' his birth-
right. But what can this edenic formulation of the 'natural man' mean
to a poet committed to self-consciousness? And what kind ofjoy is this,
that only the pure can partake of it? In structuring the poem, Coleridge
places Sara Hutchinson in the same position relative to himself as that
in which William Wordsworth placed his sister years before in Tintern Ab-
bey. Each woman stands for some quality of wholeness lost and impossi-
ble to regain, but each poet is made a poet by the very fact that he can-
not regain what is lost. Moreover, each poet is made a poet by his implicit
realization that what was said to be lost was in fact never there. The emo-
tion of which each poet speaks is thus not merely unavailable to the
speaker in the moment of speaking; it is a chimera which never was, an
indulgentfictionwhich the speaker himself gave up long ago, even though
it is only in the poem that he records the sacrifice. The loss of joy ex-
perienced is the 'disease' of consciousness, indicative of the alienating
power of the knowledge which comes from self-analysis itself, which
destroys faith in beliefs one would like to hold on to even as it liberates
the mind to pursue ever subsequent ones.
I want to relate, then, Coleridge's involvement with self-conscious
analysis and dialectical thinking to the principal feature of his experience
of creative despair: the necessity he felt for feeling pleasure 'pure' and
'unalloyed', or in a related formulation, for experiencing a 'unity of feel-
ing'. This need is a primary focus of the notebooks after October 1803,
during the period after Coleridge completed the Letter toAsra. His explora-
tions in the notebooks represent refinements of what he expressed in that
poem, as well as further probings into his responses, as if he were un-
satisfied with that earlier understanding of the reasons for his continued
despair. While the loss of an ability 'to feel' still plays a large part, the
notebook entries themselves testify to a more complicated struggle, in-
volving the tensions I have been positing throughout this essay. His claim
that he took no pleasure in things transitory - to the point of devaluing,
even almost refusing to recognize, the conceptions the individual moment
inspired - conflicted both with the reality of his practice and with his
baffled appreciation for 'the co presence' of form with formlessness, of
unity with diversity. Despite his recognition of co presence, he could not
free himself from thinking in the hierarchies which led him at various
times to privilege permanent over transitory, form over formlessness,
unity over diversity. Nor could he resist buttressing those hierarchies by
resorting to absolutes on which he could ground his whole mode of think-
ing. The conflicts which resulted, rather than actually causing the freez-
ing up of his poetic powers, instead reveal to us the considerable prac-
 Self-conscious imagination 63
tical and theoretical problems which a commitment to self-analytical and
dialectical processes poses for the action of fixing and limiting ideas, an
action which makes possible the finishing of any formal literary, critical,
or philosophical work. Thus I want to suggest that, despite his claims to
the contrary, thefeeling (rather than the actuality) that his creative powers
were frozen arose from the conflict between the philosophical skepticism
generated by the action of his self-conscious reflections and his longing for
the absolutes lost by these very advances - a conflict which operated at
two levels, one formal and theoretical, the other personal and
experiential.

IV

In the journals, we find some contradictory responses to transitory

phenomena, as if Coleridge were indeed being pulled in more than one
direction. These responses represent a fault-line or fracture within his
thinking and his psyche. In the entry which follows, both pleasure and
unmitigated delight are salient characteristics of Coleridge's extended
description, and this is true despite his typical disavowals of being able
to experience either.
Delightful weather, motion, relation of the convoy to each other, all exquisite/
- and I particularly watched the beautiful Surface of the Sea in this gentle Breeze!
every form so transitory, so for the instant, & yet for that instant so substantial
in all its sharp lines, steep surfaces, & hair-deep indentures, just as if it were cut
glass, glass cut into ten thousand varieties/& then the network of the wavelets,
& the rude circle hole network of the Foam/
And on the gliding Vessel Heaven & Ocean smil'd! (CN, II, 1999)
Here Coleridge has given himself over to the sense of forward motion
in the gliding vessel; to his perception of individual interrelation to the
whole in the 'relation of [each single member of] the convoy' to the
others, and in the networks of wavelets and foam; and finally, to his
acknowledgement of elemental accord in the context of an infinite diver-
sity of form, signified by the approbation in the very last phrase. The
observed totality is exquisite for the very reason that a transitory fecun-
dity is the main part of that essential forward motion, that definition and
accord. The passage reflects his admission that the transitory was both
substantial and imaginatively provocative, and appeared to share endur-
ing qualities of permanence and form. Unity of feeling has been achiev-
ed, though the implied surprise of that achievement is only part of the
pleasure. But almost predictably, the entry immediately following this
one is filled with longing:
64 KRISTINEDUGAS
Why an't you here? This for ever/I have no rooted thorough thro' feeling - &
never exist wholly present to any Sight, to any Sound, to any Emotion, to any
series of Thoughts received or produced/always a feeling of yearning, that at times
passes into Sickness of Heart. (CN, II, 2000)
The achieved/eeling of unity cannot be sustained, but it is not the idea
of being able to sustain such a unity that is questioned, but the transitory
itself which is deemed the source of his failure, regardless of the original
potency of the perception and despite the fact that what Coleridge is deal-
ing with here is feeling, not ratiocination. It is this sliding of categories
which insures that his idea of a unity of feeling as a desirable outcome re-
mains unchallenged. Further, in the entries above, it is the momentary
success of transitory phenomena in creating a unity of feeling which ac-
tually provokes Coleridge to articulate the contrary feeling - desire,
hence (for him) the lack of such unity. This was perhaps in part because
to attain the valued absolute, he had to exclude, conceptually and ex-
perientially, what was undesirable, and this contrived absence of the
thing which would break the desired wholeness functioned instead as a
potently disruptive presence. Paradoxically, then, unity of feeling as
generated by temporal phenomena is made a passing experience, giving
rise to an irony which, since Coleridge did not consciously articulate it,
must have entered the substratum of contradiction and conflict within
his writing. Needless to say, this current of opposing internal energy com-
plicated Coleridge's very perception of the feelings which here served as
sole judge and jury too.
What makes the exploration ofjoylessness in these journal entries dif-
ferent from that in Dejection: an Ode, with its explanation for the freezing
of the fountains within? In the poem, unspecified 'afflictions' rob Col-
eridge ofjoy which, with or without the pun on 'genial', is identified with
his shaping power. But the loss ofjoy is itself an affliction, hence the viper
imagery as the thing turns back on itself, to be both an effect and a cause
of the dead, emotionless center. In the first version of the poem, the Let-
ter to Asm, these connections are more oblique. The afflictions include his
unsuccessful marriage, his mixed feelings for his children, the awareness
that he continually causes Sara pain, his frustration at not being able to
comfort her, his overwhelming sense of ultimately not belonging to the
Wordsworths' circle. But the last three afflictions stem from something
deeper - an inner 'change' which troubles him 'with pangs untold' and
with a deadening feeling of estrangement from nature.
It is when Coleridge begins to probe further into the reasons for his in-
ability to feel unity that permanence and transience really enter the pic-
ture. But instead of questioning the idea of this unity itself - its purposes,
its value, its unreality - he assumes first that it is and second that it is
 Self-conscious imagination 65
good. And yet how can anyone, once he has discovered the practice of
self-conscious reflection, ever hope to experience the feeling of unity?
And, on a symbolic level, how can anyone committed to the notion of pro-
cess devalue the perpetual dissatisfaction which guarantees forward
movement? Yet this is exactly what Coleridge does. Self-consciousness
makes unity of feeling impossible; process requires dissatisfaction -
these two experiences are inevitable, although Coleridge wishes them not
to be. In the notebook entries above, he first sees and describes the ap-
parently unified and harmonized world; then, he self-consciously thinks
of himself, and perceives his division, his yearning. He attributes this
yearning in part to the lack of an other - a Sara, who synecdochically
embodies wholeness and joy. But he does not seem to carry through with
the implications of his distinction between feeling and seeing; and
because he does not, he cannot question the possibility that seeing is
potentially suspect as well. The state in which he finds himself is one he
views as aberrant, not as inevitable. And so some reason for it must be
found elsewhere than in the practice of meditation itself which, unlike its
pre-enlightenment religious precursors, does not promise ever greater
wholeness and vision. Thus the mere sight of the transitory functions as
a sign for his incompleteness and loss; it bears the full weight of the blame,
taking responsibility for the feeling of lost unity which it shares with what
endures - and what endures is his desire.
One could thus say that Coleridge's fixing on the transitory as the thing
which disrupts unity resulted in a displacement of his desire. Un-
consciously, this displacement is designed to preserve those values and
a priori categories which were undermined by the corrosive power of
dialectical and self-conscious analysis (as well as the utter subjectivity of
the mind which seemed their corollary). For although the problems of
despair, of lack of unity and joy, of persistent yearning, of his antipathy
for transitory phenomena and for things of the moment, recur - in-
variably in close proximity to each other - and although parts of the
analysis belonging to any particular one of these problems keep turning
up in the analyses of any combination of its counterparts, Coleridge does
not ever confront the problem of the permanency of his desire with his
professed devaluing of the transitory - even when the two lie side by side.
It is only years later, in a handful of poems - What is life?, To Nature, Frag-
ment: the Body, Limbo, and Ne Plus Ultra - that some of these interrela-
tions are examined. Even though the idea of transitory phenomena is im-
plicit in the experience of permanent yearning, since rootlessness of feel-
ing conceptually and experientially is a thing of flux, Coleridge continues
to prefer the permanent to the transitory. The consequences affected not
just his perception of his lack of will, but confidence in his shaping power
66 KRISTINE DUGAS
of imagination. And they affected his attitude toward his experience of
self-conscious reflection - causing him to blame himself when that ex-
perience seemed to twist and darken, vex and undercut.

If Coleridge muted his multiplicity of voices, and moreover, could not

sustain an inner philosophical composure, the evolution of the Dejection:
an Ode through its various versions (the Letter to Asra written in April 1802,
the short form published in the Morning Post in October 1802, the Ode pro-
per published in Sibylline Leaves in 1817) shows his increasingly clear con-
sciousness of the need to separate external or local afflictions from a de-
jection born out of formal and epistemological tensions. Yet such realiza-
tions were cripplingly incomplete: Coleridge too readily, too humorlessly
attributed to himself the feeling of a lack of unity and the inability to resist
despair which were generated by difficult philosophical problems and
uneasily resolvable dilemmas of process, with its appropriately dynamic
form. Coleridge's desire for unity was as much an attempt to preserve
hierarchies of his own constructing as it was an attempt to heal Cartesian
dualisms and to develop a counter to the associationist universe of death.
Although his attempt to devalue the transitory impressions of the moment
was an attempt to spur himself to finalize his thoughts, this devaluation
allows him to shift the blame for his experience of a lack of another uni-
ty - a unity of feeling - onto the transitory at the same time that it allows
him to indulge in self-flagellation for his deferrals of closure. Ultimate-
ly, such self-flagellation was unproductive because it confirmed his
hierarchy of values rather than overthrowing it, and without restoring
his poetic self-confidence. If such an overthrow would have offered less
of a reconciling or transforming vision, it could not have tormented him
with Utopian hopes he could never attain. As it was, the purpose of Col-
eridge's dialectic was to achieve 'the true Atonement - /i.e. to reconcile
the struggles of the infinitely various Finite within the Permanent' (CN, n,
2208). His loaded language suggests that he desires both spiritual
regeneration (the atoning for past sins) and the unification of subject with
object, many with one. Here we see how intimately Coleridge's way of
thinking, with its formal problems, interpenetrates his way of being, with
its psychological ones. For Coleridge, 'intelligence and being are
reciprocally each other's Substrate' (BL, I, p. 143). It is indeed true that
'in the Coleridgean world everything is connected to everything else' .9
Thus Coleridge's feeling of lost wholeness, aggravated by his self-
 Self-conscious imagination 67
conscious practice, joined with his self-denigrations, even though his feel-
ings of indolence were partly generated by the overabundance of thoughts
in his restless mind. He came to believe he simply lacked the will to finish
projects, even though inherent in his commitment to Romantic process
was a program of delayed foreclosure. Add to this his fear of subjectivi-
ty itself, and it becomes clear that these potentially revealing aspects of
his ways of thinking contributed to his despair because he remained
oblivious to their inevitability. It is this very obliviousness which made
it difficult for him to realize that what he felt as the freezing of his poetic
powers was instead complexly multivalent, that in fact those powers
themselves remained vital - even when those feelings which were
grounded in his beliefs changed. And change they had to: as the under-
pinnings of the epistemology of a period or culture gradually shift beneath
one, so must the feelings which arise from them. Yet feeling almost always
lags behind new conceptions; the experience of revolutions in thought
is never accomplished overnight. If every cultural moment is an interim,
the feelings that belong to it look back towards the past of which they are
no longer a part, even as they belong to the present and the future.
Coleridge's expectation that the practice of self-conscious reflection
could only work toward his good made it difficult for him to question his
most paralyzing feelings and his most debilitating self-denigrations. The
experiences which were partially the result of his hierarchically loaded
thinking were more divisive than he realized, the problems they created
more enduring. Ultimately, Coleridge was undercut by this very sen-
sitivity, which allowed him to intuit the substance of these inconsisten-
cies even if he had not the analytical means (or emotional disinvestment)
to see them for all their persistently divisive complexity. If it was this
aspect of Coleridge, this sharp and restless sensitivity, which made up,
as Coburn has put it, his 'inquiring spirit', it was also what made him,
in Shelley's words, 'a hooded eagle among blinking owls'.

Notes

1
Lawrence S. Lockridge, 'Explaining Coleridge's Explanation: Toward a
Practical Methodology for Coleridge Studies', in Reading Coleridge: Approaches
and Applications, ed. Walter B. Crawford (Ithaca, Cornell University Press,
1979), p. 48 (cited hereafter as Crawford).
2
Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan
University Press, 1971), p. 187 (cited hereafter as Barfield).
3
Thomas McFarland, 'A Complex Dialogue: Coleridge's Doctrine of
Polarity and Its European Contexts', in Crawford.
4
Ibid., p. 56, citing CL, V, p. 35.
68 KRISTINEDUGAS
5
Barfield, p. 106.
6
On the Principles of Genial Criticism, in BLS, II, p. 235.
7
Barfield, p. 53.
8
In Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson and theAsra Poems, George Whalley (Toron-
to, University of Toronto Press, 1955), pp. 155-68.
9
L. C. Knights, The New York Review of Books, XVI (22 April 1971), p. 55.
 Coleridge's rejection of nature
and the natural man

NORMAN FRUMAN

The subject of Coleridge and the ' natural' seems to divide itself naturally
into two parts: Coleridge and the inner world of human nature, and Col-
eridge on the external world, physical nature. His views on both subjects,
which are deeply connected, developed and changed dramatically, and
his final thoughts are sometimes startlingly at odds with the Coleridge
familiar in anthology selections.
'Nature' and 'natural' are words too common in familiar usage to
expect that Coleridge, or anybody else, would always employ them
in a precise or consistent way .Just as our spontaneous oaths and damn-
ations are usually bare of theological implication, despite the actual
meaning of the words we use, so Coleridge had no theory of human
nature in mind when, in an early Preface, he announced that 'By a
law of our Nature, he who labors under strong feeling, is impelled
to seek for sympathy' (PW, n, p. 1144), or when in a late newspaper
essay he marvelled at 'those prudent youths, in whom money is an
innate idea, and the dull shrewdness by which it is amassed, an instinct
of nature' (EOT, n, p. 469), or when he later said that 'instead of
human nature', materialistic philosophy was giving us 'a French nature'
(PLects, p. 349).
At twenty-five he recalled that as a young child his 'memory and
understanding [had been] forced into an almost unnatural ripeness',
and he remarked of Wordsworth, 'It is his practice and almost his nature
to convey all the truth he knows without any attack on what he supposes
falsehood' (CL, I, pp. 347-8, 410). Coleridge never wholly abandoned
this familiar sense of 'natural' and its cognates either in letters,
notebooks, or essays, and it is important not to confuse these essentially
casual uses from those where he is specifically focusing on the concept.
The first category shelters a vast number of such references. We should
understand that Coleridge was not on philosophical oath when he wrote
casually of'the common instincts of human nature' {EOT, I, p. 51), 'our
imperfect nature' (EOT, I, p. 87), 'natural emotions' (CL, i, p. 333),
'natural vanity' (EOT, n, p. 422), or 'the light of natural conscience'
69
70 NORMAN FRUMAN

(CL, II, p. 1192), and he expected to be understood without learned

gloss when he drew the following comparison for his quick-tempered
wife, 'Permit me, my dear Sara! without offence to you [to say] that in
sex, acquirements, and in the quantity and quality of natural en-
dowments whether of Feeling, or of Intellect, you are the Inferior' {CL,
II, p. 888), and it was only natural that she was not pleased.
What educated people toward the close of the eighteenth century
understood by the term 'human nature' cannot be safely summarized in
a page, or a book, any more than contemporary views can. Nevertheless,
it is on the whole true to say that man was thought to come into the world
with few if any instincts and with free will. The contents of the mind,
originally a tabula rasa, were built up from the 'notices derived from the
senses', and the extent to which the mind was an active participant in this
process - that is to say, how much of what we perceived was the conse-
quence of the way our minds worked - was a central problem of
philosophy. We see this in Young's Night Thoughts:

And half create the wondrous world they see.

Our senses, as our reason, are divine (VI, 11. 424-5)
- lines which Wordsworth cited in connection with his own
mighty world
Of eye, and ear, - both what they half create,
And what perceive . . . {Tintern Abbey, 11. 105-7)
The young Coleridge, so far as I know, never identified what he
thought natural in human nature, 1 but his many passing comments
reveal opinions common among his contemporaries and familiar enough
now. Man's nature was imperfect, or fallen, and embraced a broad range
of impulses, tendencies, or imperatives that were innate, not learned. The
Prelude was 'a sweet continuous lay, / Not learned, but native, her own
natural notes!' {To William Wordsworth, 11. 59-60). Somewhat surprising-
ly, the word 'natural' seems not to appear in his poetry until the play
Osorio (1797): 'Men think it natural to hate their rivals' (n, 266). 'Fears
in Solitude', a year later, speaks of 'All bonds of natural love' (1. 180).
Now none of this tells us much of compelling interest. In Dejection: an
Ode, however, both 'nature' and 'natural' function in a context of cen-
tral importance, and because the meanings are uncertain, an enduring
interpretive problem has resulted. We read that 'in our life alone does
Nature live: / Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!' (11. 48-9),
lines which memorably capture one momentous resting place in the
unsteady arc of Coleridge's feelings about nature. The speaker in this
poem is bowed down with afflictions, his grief 'finds no natural outlet,
no relief, / In words, or sigh, or tear', and he turns to 'abstruse research
 Coleridge }s rejection of nature 71
to steal / From my own nature all the natural man'. But what is the
natural man? Here he would appear to be the man who weeps when
he suffers, and pays a heavy price to banish thoughts of a beloved
but tabooed woman from his mind. Suppression of so powerful an im-
pulse, in fact, can 'infect' and desensitize the entire range of natural
sensibilities.
At twenty-three, Coleridge condemned Erasmus Darwin for deciding
too quickly whether we are 'the outcasts of a blind idiot called Nature, or
the children of an all-wise and infinitely good God' (CL, i, p. 177). Next
year, just four months after the joyous celebration of the visual and spiri-
tual glories of the no-longer-blind idiot in This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,
Coleridge wrote John Thelwall, 'I can at times feel strongly the beauties,
you describe. . . in themselves, and for themselves - but more frequently
all things appear little . . . the universe itself - what but an immense heap
oflittle things? . . . My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know some-
thing great - something one and individual - and it is only in the faith of
this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns give me the sense of
sublimity or majesty!' (CL, I, p. 349). This is essentially the detachment
that informs the Lines Written in the Album at Elbingerode and Dejection: an
Ode. It is notable that at the very zenith of his poetical powers, possibly
only a few days after he had written Kubla Khan, Coleridge could declare
that only in the faith of 'something one and indivisible' could nature give
him a sense of sublimity and majesty.
And yet Fears in Solitude describes him as 'All adoration of the God in
Nature' (1. 182), the characteristic stance of almost all the poetry of the
annus mirabilis. In his letters he wrote of the 'divine Prospects' outside his
window, which distracted him while shaving, so that 'I offer up soap and
blood daily, as an Eye-servant of the Goddess Nature' (CL, n, p. 658),
and the rather humble mountains around his home in Nether Stowey
were perceived as 'that visible God Almighty that looks in at all my win-
dows' (CL, II, p. 714).
This ambivalence is probably far more representative of the generality
of thinking mankind than Wordsworth's extraordinary standpoint. It is
well to remember that Coleridge could regard nature with fitful scep-
ticism between the awed, pantheistic reverences of This Lime-Tree Bower
and Frost at Midnight. And barely a year after seeing and hearing in nature

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters . . .

he could in a 'low and languid mood' (while travelling in Germany) look

upon even the loftiest of 'outward forms' and find them only 'fair
72 NORMAN FRUMAN
cyphers', 'of import vague', unless they took their significance from the
'Life within' (Elbingerode, 11. 16-19).
Although the young Coleridge usually speaks of human nature, as I
have said, in a way characteristic of his age, he would not be Coleridge
if there were not powerful cross currents:
. . . I believe most steadfastly in original Sin [he wrote in 1798]; that from our
mothers' wombs our understandings are darkened; and even where our
understandings are in the Light, that our organization is depraved, and our voli-
tions imperfect; and we sometimes see the good without wishing to attain it, and
oftener wish it without the energy that wills and performs - And for this inherent
depravity [my emphasis], I believe, that the Spirit of the Gospel is the sole Cure - .
(CL, I, p. 396)
Coleridge was here writing to his parson brother, George, but that this
represents a deep conviction is underscored by his much later Confessio
Fidei: 'I am a fallen creature . . . capable of moral evil, but not of myself
capable of moral good [ and only by the grace of God can I be ] restored
from my natural inheritance of Sin and Condemnation' (CN, in, 4005).
The 'inherent depravity' of human nature reveals a deepening gloom,
and in the last decade of his life he would pounce upon Sir Walter Scott's
innocuous reference to 'feelings of natural humanity' and tear it to
shreds, declaring the phrase ' natural humanity . . . almost as inconsistent
as a round square' (Misc C, p. 326). Yet in a notebook passage of 1803
(CN, I, 1710) dealing with Kant, Coleridge focussed on 'Man's double
nature . . . as Man and God', and henceforth that portion of man's nature
and consciousness which derives from the senses is uniformly the 'lower'
or 'brutal' part. 'Man must not be, man cannot be, on a level with the
beast . . . either above them beyond all measure, or deplorably below
them. . . ' (PLects,p. 212).2
Now Coleridge had always been uneasy about the body, and its fleshy
appetites and urgencies were to be kept under taut reins. 'Sensual' is
typically a damning word: 'sensual France, a natural slave' (Ode to Tran-
quillity, app. crit.); 'The sensual and dark rebel in vain' (France: An Ode,
1. 85); 'I do consider Mr. Godwin's book as a Pander to Sensuality' (CL,
i, p. 199), and so forth. Among the many 'moral uses of Marriage', Col-
eridge identified the confining of the 'appetites to one object', so that they
are 'swallowed up in affection' (CL, i, pp. 213-14). In his often-quoted
letter to Sou they dealing with his languid appetite for the woman he had
engaged himself to, he wrote, 'Love makes all things pure and heaven-
ly like itself - but to marry a woman I do not love - to degrade her,
whom I call my Wife, by making her the Instrument of low Desire - '
(CL, I, p. 145). The thought sickens him.
His debilitating struggle with le diable au corps intensified during his long
 Coleridge's rejection of nature 73
torment over Sara Hutchinson. A notebook entry of 1802 captures, I
think, one of the last moments during which his intellect and instinctive
life were in reasonably healthy equipoise. 'The great business of real
unostentatious Virtue', he wrote, 'is not to eradicate any genuine instinct
or appetite of human nature; but to establish a concord and unity bet-
wixt all parts of our nature, to give a Feeling and a Passion to our purer
Intellect, and to intellectualize our feelings and passions. ' 3 The 'concord
and unity betwixt all parts of our nature', here cherished in such lovely
phrases, clashes sharply with his austere later conviction that 'all that is
fully human must come from within' (PLects, p. 226).4 What was not
'fully human' was sensual experience, which fallen man ignominiously
shares with the swarming generations of animal life.
A deepening distrust of all the pleasures that derive from the senses
contributes, of course, to the erosion of his spontaneous joy in the natural
world. In the privacy of an 1803 journal he had admonished Wordsworth
that 'always to look at the superficies of Objects for the purpose of tak-
ing Delight in their Beauty, and sympathy with their real or imagined
Life, is . . . deleterious to the Health and manhood of Intellect' (C7V, I,
1616). A month later he cited strong affections between people as 'a
glorious fact of human Nature', and discerned other 'Excellencies, dor-
mant in human Nature', but in this very entry he is striving to idealize
human feelings, to dematerialize them, as it were, otherwise they would
be 'brutal', like the brutes (CN, i, 1637).5
The abrasive conflict between the imperious claims of his own more
than usual organic sensibility and the idealizing pressures of his spiritual
yearnings was to be long. Response to natural beauty, and mystical
response at that, was not easily suppressed:
In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-
glimmering thro' the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were
asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever
exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still
I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phaenomenon were the dim
Awakening of a forgotten or hidden Truth of my inner Nature. (CN, II, 2546)
Yet another part of Coleridge could not accept meanings in nature which
were not projections from within. In the years ahead the once lovely face
of nature was to turn demonic. As late as The Statesman }s Manual (1816)
he could still extol 'the correspondencies and symbols of the spiritual
world' to be found in nature, which is yet 'another book, likewise a revela-
tion of God - the great book of his servant Nature'. But Coleridge subse-
quently set down next to this passage: 'At the time, I wrote this work, my
views of Nature were very imperfect and confused' (SM, pp. 70, 71, n. 6).
Of the supposed dependence of the soul on nature he declared that this
74 NORMAN FRUMAN
'confusion of God with the World and the accompanying Nature-worship
. . . is the Trait in Wordsworth's poetic Works that I most dislike, as
unhealthful, and denounce as contagious' (CL, v, p. 59). Julius Hare
reports Coleridge saying, 'No! Nature is not God; she is a devil in a strait
waistcoat' (SM, p. 71, n. 6).6
Pantheism became 'a handsome Mask that does not alter a single
feature of the ugly Face it hides' (P Lects, p. 433, n. 17). Once in his
hopeful youth, he had been 'All adoration of the God in Nature' (Fears
in Solitude, 1. 182), a God who, in Frost at Midnight, 'from eternity doth
teach / Himself in all, and all things in himself (11. 61-2). Yet he would
come to scold Scotus Erigena for not having seen 'that his "Deus omnia
et omnia Deus" was incompatible with moral responsibility [ for] Pan-
theism is but a painted Atheism' J
Understanding the intensity and pervasiveness of Coleridge's convic-
tions on this bedrock matter much clarifies his final views of human
nature. In 1818 he wrote of The Friend: 'The aim, the method throughout
was, in the first place, to awaken, to cultivate, and to mature the truly
human in human nature, in and through itself, or as independently as
possible of the notices derived from sense, and of the motives that had
references to the sensations' {Friend, I, p. 500).
Thus what is truly human is irrevocably divorced from the demands and
delights of the body, which is by now a bemired clog on the etherial
aspirations of the soul. In the later Coleridge the natural man is
characteristically 'degraded' (CN, in, 3281), or 'depraved' (P Lects, p.
421). 'The age is so fully attached to the unnatural in taste, the preter-
natural in life, and the contra-natural in philosophy as to have left little
room for the super-natural', he complained inimitably in Blackwood's (xi
(Jan. 1822) p. 6), and in his notebooks he explained, 'My great aim and
object is to assert the Superhuman in order to diffuse more & more widely
the faith in the Supernatural.' In one of his last published works, On the Con-
stitution of the Church and State, he wrote that 'in all ages, individuals who
have directed their meditations and their studies to the nobler characters
of our nature, to the cultivation of those powers and instincts that con-
stitute the man, at least separate him from the animal, and distinguish
the nobler from the animal part of his own being, will be led by the super-
natural in themselves to the contemplation of a power which is likewise
super-human . . . ' (C &S, p. 44, and n. 2).8
In such a scheme, the teeming, protean, variegated world of nature,
which we know through our senses, is a temptation and delusion, a
painted whore, disguising satanic inner pollution. Thus far had Col-
eridge's long voyage on the mirage-shrouded seas of Idealism borne him
away from the brilliant sunlight of Wordsworth's
 Coleridge's rejection of nature 75

language of the sense,

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, the soul
Of all my moral being. (Tintern Abbey, 11. 108-11)
The later Coleridge presents a poignant image of severely diminish-
ed emotional range and response. Suppressing the 'natural man' in
himself, he willingly embraced the role of sedentary semi-invalid over the
last eighteen years of his life. He left his wife when he was just thirty-four
years old - never having been an ardent husband - and for the next
twenty-eight years he was celibate, and struggled mightily to banish sex-
ual images from his mind. He spent the long Highgate years more or less
in the garb and stance of a priest, clad from head to toe in black, and
declaiming against the evils of the age and the animal in us all. He was
still a young man when he ceased to be a husband, father, brother, or
lover to anyone. He did not ever see his daughter, Sara, between her
tenth and twentieth years. He bade farewell forever to the 'dear gutter
of Stowey' and the Quantocks when he was thirty-five, and never look-
ed back on Grasmere, Keswick, or the Lake District after he was forty.
He, once a worshipper of Nature, 'was well content to be a dweller in the
"depths of the huge city" or its outskirts', in his astute grandson's
words.9 It is worth pondering that Coleridge's later writings were
achieved in the teeth of these emotional constraints.
It is a mistake, of course, to paint an unrelievedly bleak picture.
Counter impulses of feeling and belief were always present. But for Col-
eridge the philosopher, only the mind was involved in truly human life;
all else flirted with the bestial.
At an early point in his long struggle with opium, and his frustrated
love for Sara Hutchinson, which wracked him with guilt, Coleridge felt
despairingly that

our moral nature is a power of itself; and not a mere modification of our common
intellect / so that a man may have wit, prudence, sense &c &c, & yet be utterly
destitute of a true moral sense. And when I observe the impotence of this moral
sense, however highly possessed, unassisted by something still higher, and if I
may so express myself, still more extra-natural, I own, it seems to me, as if the
goodness of God had occasionally added it to our nature, as an intermediate or con-
necting Link between that nature and a state of Grace. (CL, II, p. 1203)
The quest for grace, for 'something still higher . . . still more extra-
natural', and the flight from the natural man, this was the great,
anguished, and erratic odyssey of Coleridge's later life. These beliefs con-
tribute to the conceptual obscurities of the critical and aesthetic writings
of 1811 -18. Many passages in the Shakespearean criticism are scarcely
comprehensible without an awareness of Coleridge's need to project his
76 NORMAN FRUMAN
deepest philosophical concerns upon Shakespeare's dramatic purposes.
Thus he says that in Hamlet, Shakespeare 'meant to portray a person in
whose view the external world, and all its incidents and objects, were
comparatively dim and of no interest in themselves, and which began to
interest him only when they were reflected in the mirror of his mind', and
that in The Tempest 'all that belongs to Ariel is all that belongs to the delight
the mind can receive from external appearances abstracted from any in-
born or individual purpose'. 10 These remarks describe not Hamlet's
mind, or Ariel's, but what Coleridge supposed was true of his own. 'The
mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by things', he asserted in
Biographia Literaria, 'and only then feels the requisite interest even of the
most important events and accidents when by means of meditation they
have passed into thoughts.' 'The man of genius lives most in the ideal
world', he continued, and declared of himself, 'even before my fifteenth
year, I had bewildered myself in metaphysicks . . . History, and par-
ticular facts, lost all interest in my mind' (BLS, i, pp. 20, 30, 39).
'We are conscious of faculties far superior to the highest impressions
of sense', we are told in 'The Principles of Genial Criticism', and 'that
which is naturally agreeable and consonant in human nature . . . excludes
the mere objects of taste, smell, and feeling' (BLS, n, pp. 234, 237).
Statements which are in themselves baffling, or might be taken for merely
rhetorical celebrations of the divine power of art, acquire much clearer
and richer meanings against the developments we have been tracing.
Thus, 'On Poetry or Art' hails poetry as 'purely human; for all its
materials are from the mind, and all its products are for the mind.
[ Poetry] elevates the mind by making its feelings the object of its reflec-
tion . . . . But please to observe that I have laid particular stress on the
words ' 'human mind,'' - meaning to exclude thereby all results com-
mon to man and all other sentient creatures' (BLS, n, p. 254). This
would seem to be a far cry from Milton's definition of poetry as 'simple,
sensuous, and passionate', but very close to Kant's analysis of poetry as
the greatest of the arts because 'it strengthens the mind by making it feel
its faculty - free, spontaneous, and independent of natural determina-
tion - of considering and judging nature as a phenomenon in accordance
with aspects which it does not present in experience either for sense or
understanding, and therefore of using it on behalf of, and as a sort of
schema for, the supersensible'.11
For Coleridge, truly human life 'begins in its detachment from Nature
and is to end in union with God' (SM, p. 114 n. 3).12 The parallel
journey of the natural man's relations with his own body is traced in the
final chilling sentence of 'On Poesy or Art': 'remark the seeming iden-
tity of body and mind in infants, and thence the loveliness of the former;
 Coleridge 3s rejection of nature 77

the commencing separation in boyhood, and the struggle of equilibrium

in youth: then onward the body is first simply indifferent; then deman-
ding the translucency of the mind not to be worse than indifferent; and
finally all that presents the body as body becoming almost of an ex-
cremental nature' (BLS, n, p. 263).
The body had become at last, * almost of an excremental nature'. It is
part of the wonder and tragedy of this tormented genius that decades
before, in the great stanzas that carried the accursed Mariner toward
redemption, he had symbolized the cleansing of a corrupt soul in the
blessing of once slimy water snakes, and had foreshadowed that sublime
climax by turning the Mariner's fevered and pulsating eyeballs upon the
corpses strewn about the rotting deck. The 'many men' he saw there were
not loathsome, not excremental, but, startlingly, 'so beautiful'.
Coleridge was referring to his early rage for philosophy when he said
in Biographia Literaria: 'Well were it for me, perhaps, had I never relapsed
into the same mental disease: if I had continued to pluck the flower and
reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the un-
wholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic depths' (BLS, I, p. 10). In
view of his final, frozen recoil from the warm and vivid world of nature
and the natural man, the same might more justly have been said on many
of his somber post-Kantian meditations.

Notes
1
On learning of his brother Francis's early death, Coleridge wrote to his
brother George, 'Poor Francis! I have shed the tear of natural affection over
him', a passage so strained and frigid that one can surmise that there was
little natural affection there, as indeed there wasn't. Significantly, the
twenty-two-year-old Coleridge went on to explain why in fact he felt little
for his other brothers except indifference. 'Fraternal affection is the offspring
of long Habit, and of Reflection' (CL, I, p. 53), he concluded, thereby
asserting that fraternal affection is not natural, only customary. We see here
'natural' employed as a loose term, immediately followed by hard analysis
wrung from his own bitter experience in the world.
2
The whole passage is a variation on Franz Baader's 'unfortunately man
can only stand above or beneath animals', quoted in Schelling's OfHuman
Freedom. See my Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel (1971), p . 133.
3
Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century, ed. R. L. Brinkley (Durham, N . C . , Duke
University Press, 1929), p. 444.
4
This conception, in various forms, is to be found everywhere in the
aesthetic writings of Kant and Schiller, but without the emphasis on sen-
sual experience as inherently beneath the dignity of man. 'The highest aim
of art is to represent the supersensuous', wrote Schiller, and to represent
'the moral man independently of the laws of nature' ('On the Pathetic', in
Literary Criticism: Pope to Croce, eds. G. W . Allen and H . H . Clark (New
78 NORMAN FRUMAN

York, 1941), p. 150). But such views in Schiller are balanced by his
awareness of the 'nefarious influence exerted upon our knowledge and upon
conduct by a preponderance of rationality . . . [and] of the damage caused
when the functions of thought and will encroach upon those of intuition and
feeling' (On the Aesthetic Education ofMan, Letter 15).
5
The struggle of the secondary imagination to 'idealize' as well as to 'unify'
has yet to be awarded its full significance.
6
This is oddly similar to what Henry Crabb Robinson tells us Blake said of
the supposed 'atheism' in Wordsworth's poems: 'whosoever believes in
Nature disbelieves in God. For Nature is the work of the Devil' (Blake, Col-
eridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, etc., ed. E. J. Morley (Manchester University
Press, 1932), p. 23.
7
PLects, p. 433, n. 7. Cf. 'For Pantheism - trick it up as you will - is but a
painted Atheism' (The Complete Works ofSamuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. W . G. T .
Shedd(7 vols., New York, 1853), V, p. 417). 'I adore the living and per-
sonal God', he wrote in a letter at about this time, 'but who may not without
fearful error be identified with the universe, or the universe be considered
as an attribute of his Deity' (CL, IV, p. 894).
8
This emphasis on the supernatural in man seems far removed from the
creative impulses behind The Ancient Mariner or Christabel; in an undated but
late comment on Browne's ReligioMedici, Coleridge wrote: 'he is the man
of genius . . . who perceiving the riddle and mystery of all things even the
commonest, needs no strange and out-of-the-way tales or images to
stimulate him into wonder and a deep interest' (Misc C, p. 254).
9
Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Boston, 1895), I, pp.
404-5, n. 2. Coleridge' s amazing capacity to absorb influences and models
may extend even to his acutely sensitive response to nature during his great
poetic period - a response one would ordinarily think of as the direct result
of more than usual organic sensibility rather than something learned. 'In
looking through the early poems', George Whalley has observed, 'I am
struck by the general absence of vivid sensory images until the annus mirabilis
and the conversation poems . . . . Very little of an exceptional sensibility
breaks the opaque surface of a multifarious but received poetic manner until
' 'This Lime-Tree Bower'' ' ('Coleridge's Poetic Sensibility', in Coleridge}s
Variety, ed. John Beer (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975), p. 3). In this
respect Coleridge presents a startling contrast to Wordsworth and Keats,
among many others one might name, poets whose characteristic sensual
structure, like a gift for melody among composers, is present in their earliest
compositions, however conventional the overall manner of their appren-
tice work.
10
Coleridge on Shakespeare: The Textof the Lectures of 1811-12, ed. R. A. Foakes
(London, 1971), pp. 124, 111-12.
11
Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (2nd edn, rev. 1931), § 53 (Hafner
Publishing Co., New York, 1966), p. 171.
12
In his late 'Death and the Grounds of Belief in a Future State', he was able
to say, 'I feel myself not the slave of nature . . . / a m praeternatural, i.e.
supersensuous' (CN, III, 4060).
The imagination of Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
unknown inspiration of an unknown tongue

MOLLY LEFEBURE

'If you ever have an owl dressed for dinner, you had better have it boil-
ed, and smothered in onions, for it is not good roasted': Robert Sou they
in a letter of 14 September 1821, to his lifelong friend, Grosvenor Charles
Bedford. Southey had been given an owl shot by his young neighbour
Raisley Calvert (who explained that he had not known what kind of bird
it was when hefiredat it). As the Wordsworths were to be dining at Greta
Hall, Southey decided that roast stuffed owl was a dish well suited to the
author of The Excursion and so: 'I ordered it to be dressed and brought in,
in the place of game that day at dinner. It was served up without the head,
and a squat-looking fellow it was, about the size of a wood-pigeon, but
broader in proportion to its length. The meat was more like bad mutton
than anything else. Wordsworth was not valiant enough to taste it. Mrs
W. did, and we agreed that there could be no pretext for making owls
game and killing them as delicacies.n
Southey's sense of humour was distinctly of the schoolboyish sort. He
had a keen perception of the comical and the appearance of an owl on the
Greta Hall dinner table when Wordsworth was the guest of honour must
have struck him as altogether delightful, and even more delightful to see
the Bard refuse the dish. This was the kind of thing that kept Southey
laughing, and when Southey laughed all his household laughed with him;
merriment is infectious. 'Sleeping, eating, drinking, talking & laughing
in the dwelling house of Robert Southey Esqur Poet Laureat', to quote
Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge, writing to Thomas Poole and describing
the pleasures of family life with her brother-in-law at Greta Hall2 and
thereby conveying a happy impression of what was still a jolly menage
even when the laughter concealed sore sorrows and increasing anxieties.
Southey was a lifelong devotee of Tristram Shandy, a book that may best
be described, in the words of Quennell, as 'a study of the part that Chance
plays in the evolution of the individual. . . and a tragicomedy of domestic
disillusionment'.3 Sterne saw the family as an organism apparently
straightforward enough when viewed superficially; 'a simple machine'
consisting of'a few wheels', but in actuality strange, complex, fluctuating
in mood and fortunes; the
79
80 MOLLY LEFEBURE

wheels set in motion by so many different springs, and acted one upon the other
from such a variety of strange principles and impulses, - that though it was a
simple machine, it had all the honour and advantages of a complex one, - and
a number of as odd movements within it, as ever were beheld in the inside of a
Dutch silk-mill.

These observations applied to the family in general, and the Shandy Hall
family in particular.
Southey detected a close resemblance between Greta Hall and Shan-
dy Hall and furthermore he recognised in himself a Tristramish figure
whose evolution as an individual had been strongly shaped by Chance
in the guise of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had talked Southey into
moving to Greta Hall in the first instance and there planted upon him an
abandoned wife and three children, under circumstances which made it
virtually morally impossible for the decent Southey ever to remove from
Greta Hall elsewhere, or to rid himself of the encumbrance of an extra
family to care for as his own. There was only one way in which to con-
front such an impossible situation and that was with laughter. Southey
accordingly laughed and joked at the exhausting vicissitudes of his
menage ('the Aunt Hill': the widowed Mrs Mary Lovell, another Fricker
sister, being a third resident and penniless aunt): nonetheless we can
perceive his merriment calcify as his predicament became less and less
risible with the passage of time.
In order to support his many dependents Southey became a byword
for his literary industry. From 1814 or thereabouts he, as a form of relax-
ation, began working on a book which he at first was tentatively calling
'Dr Dove' and ultimately was to publish as The Doctor, a tome of seven
volumes, comprising collections of mottoes, anecdotes, fairy tales,
nursery tales, social history, gossip, folklore and ballads, punning and
play with words, attempts at serious etymology, and essays on every sub-
ject under the sun, ranging from the Greta Hall cats, and why Southey
could not bear Sarah to be called Sally, to a famous example of
Westmorland dialect, 'The terrible knitters o' Dent'. The book strikes
today's reader as painfully discursive and all too often facetious; taken
in small doses it makes an excellent bedside book and the more tedious
passages guarantee an irresistible impulse to sleep. The length of the book
was part of the joke of the thing (basically The Doctor was intended as an
anonymous joke); the framework was loosely hung on the tale of Dr
Daniel Dove (a doctor of divinity) and his horse Nobs, which tale might
correctly be described as a shaggy horse story, for the humour lay 'in
making it as long winded as possible' (we are not surprised to learn that
in the first place it was Coleridge's story). The tale was never twice the
same in its rendering, except as to names and leading features. Finally
 The imagination of Mrs Coleridge 81
Sou they decided to turn it into a book with 'much of Tristram Shandy
about it' 4 and much of Greta Hall embedded in it.
One chapter of The Doctor is hinged upon the old chorus,' Hay ley gayly
gamborayly, higgledy piggledy, galloping draggle-tail dreary dun':
Sou they ruminates that though this is not in 'any known tongue' it may
possibly be in an unknown tongue, and he continues,
There is a mystery in an unknown tongue; and they who speak it... may be in-
spired for the nonce - though they may be as little conscious of their inspiration
as they are of their meaning. There may be an unknown inspiration as well as
an unknown tongue. If so what mighty revelations may lie unrevealed.5
In writing this chapter Southey undoubtedly had in mind Mrs Col-
eridge's Lingo Grande (as her family called it) which she was creating and
Greta Hall living with predominantly between 1807 and 1826: the
'language' being at its zenith in the last decade or so of this period. The
origins of nursery rhymes and popular nonsense rhymes had not been
researched in Southey's day; indeed Haliwell did not collect and print
'Mother Goose's Nursery Rhymes' until 1846. Southey amused himself
with half playful, half serious speculation upon the origin of 'nonsensical'
verse, accepting it as 'nonsense' per se; but, as Graves was to point out
over a hundred years later' sometimes what appears to be nonsense is no
more than long out-of-date topical satire; sometimes the nonsense ele-
ment has been added later, either because the original words were garbled
or forgotten, or because their meaning had to be suppressed for political
or moral reasons'. Furthermore, adds Graves, two or three hundred
years of oral tradition in the nursery had played havoc with the 'nursery
rhyme' texts before Haliwell collected and printed them. To continue to
quote Graves upon this fascinating subject, 'Deliberately nonsensical
rhymes for children first appeared in the eighteenth century, as a reac-
tion against the over-sane verse of the over-sane Augustan Age, and even
these were a . . . restrained sort of nonsense, based on puns and manifest
self-contradiction' (for instance,
The man of the wilderness asked of me:
'How many strawberries grow in the sea?'
I answered him as I thought good:
'As many red herrings as grow in the wood').
It was not, says Graves, until Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll that
'nonsense of brilliant inconsequence studded with newly invented words
came to be composed'.6
It may be urged that Lear and Carroll were in some degree anticipated
by Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The traditional nonsense of punning,
riddle-me-reeing and manifest self-contradiction was the sort
82 MOLLY LEFEBURE
of nonsense that appealed to Robert Southey and he kept Greta Hall
merry with it. He played with words and punned and composed nonsense
with huge gusto in this traditional vein; he was also a great man for prac-
tical jokes of the apple pie bed sort (and, as we have seen, roasted stuffed
owl for Wordsworth). Southey's favourite sister-in-law, Mrs Coleridge,
nee Sarah Fricker, who had laughed with him and teased him ever since
he had been a small boy, continued to partner him in his adult joking and
quizzing and name inventing and 'funny things' in general: we find
Southey writing to Hartley Coleridge, in June 1807 (when Mrs Coleridge
was visiting the West Country with her children and their father) and
observing (jokingly) that time makes everyone grow graver; 'This . . .
has made me the serious man I am. I hope it will have the same effect
upon you and your mother, and that when she returns, she will have left
off that evil habit of quizzing me, and calling me names; it is not decorous
in a woman of her years. ' 7 But time did not sober Mrs Coleridge; she
continued to quizz and call names and invent 'funny things', including
a language of her own, and indeed became more, rather than less, ex-
uberant with the passage of time, so that wefindSouthey in 1819 playfully
threatening to quell her by importing 'an <zi^-eater from Brazil' .8
It is clear that Southey was far from fully understanding Mrs Col-
eridge's vein of nonsense; particularly he failed to understand her
'language'. The fullest surviving account which we have of this language
occurs in a letter from Southey to Grosvenor Bedford, dated 14
September 1821:
Dear Stumparumper,
Don't rub your eyes at that word, Bedford, as if you were slopy. The purport
of this letter . . . is to give you some account (though but an imperfect one) of the
language spoken in this house by Mrs Coleridge, and invented by her. I have
carefully composed a vocabulary of it by the help of her daughter and mine, having
my ivory tablets always ready when she is red-raggifying in full confabulumpatus.
True it is that she has called us persecutorums, and great improprietors for per-
forming this meritorious task, and has often told me not to be such a stuposity;
threatening us sometimes that she will never say anything that ends in lumpatus
again; and sometimes that she will play the very dunder; and sometimes bidding
us get away with our toadymidjerings. And she asks me, how I can be such a Tom-
noddy cum (though my name, as she knows, is Robert), and calls me detesty, a
maffrum, a goffrum, a chatterpye, a silly cum, and a great mawkinfort.
But when she speaks of you it is with a kinder meaning. You are not a vulgarum,
not a great owe rum govverum. The appellations which she has in store for you
are either words of direct endearment, or of that sort of objurgation which is the
playfullest mood of kindness. Thus you are a stumparumper, because you are
a shorty cum; and you are a wattlykin, a tendrum, a detestabumpus, and a
figurumpus. These are the words which come from her chapset when she speaks
of you, and you need not be told what they signifump.
I dare say you have set up a whickerandus at this, and I hope you will not be
 The imagination of Mrs Coleridge 83
dollatory in expressing the satisfaction which you derive from knowing you are
thus decidedly in her good graces. Perhaps you may attempt an answer in the same
strain, and show yourself none of the little blunderums who deserve to be
bungated, but an apt pupolion, which if you do, you will deserve to be called as
clever as De Diggle.
. . . It is much to be regretted that Mrs Coleridge's new language is not. . . in-
vestigated by some profound philologist. Coleridge, perhaps, by the application
of Kant's philosophy, might analyze and discover the principles of its construc-
tion. I, though a diligent and faithful observer, must confess that I have but lit-
tle insight into it. I can indeed partly guess why donkeys are in the language called
jacks, and why peck is a nose; why some part of an elephant's trunk is a griper,
but not why it is a snipe; why nog is a lump, bungay a bundle, and why trottlykins
should stand for children's feet; but not why my feet and yours should be op-
probriously termed hocksen and hormangorgs. So, too, when I hear needles called
nowgurs, ladies laduls, whispering twistering, vinegar wiganar, and a mist
fogogrum, or fogrogrum, I have some glimpse, though but a glimpse, of the prin-
ciple upon which these mologisms are fabricated . . . But I should in vain seek
to discover the rationale of other parts of this speech. . . And when I get at the mean-
ing by asking an explanation, still no clue to the derivation is afforded. Thus, for
instance, when it was said, 'Don't roakin there,' and I desired to know what was
intended by this prohibition, the answer was 'Everybody says roakin;' and when
I pressed for further information, I was informed that roaking was digging and
grumping in a work-box. So, too, on the way from Mrs Calvert's one evening,
I was desired to stop while she had gathered up her doddens, and that word was
interpreted to mean a plaid, a pair of pattens, and an umbrella. If my foot hap-
pens to touch her chair, I am told that anything whidgetting the chair makes her
miseraboble. If the children - the childeroapusses I should say - arebangram-
pating about the house, they are said to be rudderish and roughcumtatherick.
Cuthbert's mouth is sometimes called ajabberumpeter, sometimes a towsalowset.
When the word comfortabuttle is used, I suppose it may be designed to mean that
there is comfort in a bottle. But by what imaginable process of language and
association snoutarumpeter can be, as she declares it to be, a short way of call-
ing mother, I am altogether unable to comprehend.
On one occasion, however, I was fortunate enough to see this extraordinary
language in the mint, if I may so express myself, and in the very act of its coinage.
Speaking of a labourer, she said, 'the thumper, the what-d'ye-callder - theun-
doer, - I can't hit upon it, - the cutter-up.' These were the very words, received
and noted as they came from the die; and they meant a man who was chopping
wood.
I must now bring this letter to a conclusion. The account indeed is very in-
complete, but you may rely upon itsfidelity;and though of necessity I have spelt
the words according to their pronunciation, I hope that this has not occasioned
any disvugurment, and that none of them in reading will stick in your thrapple.
The subject cannot be so important to you as it is to me who live in a house where
this language is spoken, and therefore have been obliged to pay attention to it.
Yet it will not appear altogether incurious, connected as it is with the science of
philology; and perhaps your regard for the inventor may give it a more than or-
dinary interest in your eyes . . .
P.S. I forgot to say that apple-dumple-dogs are apple dumplings, and that
Dogroggarum is a word of reproach for a dog.9
84 MOLLY LEFEBURE
(It is interesting to note that Southey made a subtle mispelling with
'snoutarumpeter'; Hartley, who in his letters to Derwent frequently
refers to his mother by this name, spells it 'Snouterumpater', which sug-
gests the mater pater theme and, one surmises, is an ironical comment on
her part upon the equality of the sexes within the framework of the family:
not an altogether farfetched suggestion inasmuch as there isfirmevidence
that Mrs Coleridge in her youth had been a keen disciple of
Wollstonecraft and was afirmbeliever in sexual equality. The snout part
of the name may possibly be connected with the fact that Mrs Coleridge
had a somewhat more pronounced nose than had her husband. In-
disputably, of course, after he had virtually abandoned his family Mrs
Coleridge had assumed the chief role in the upbringing and guidance of
her children.)
Further smatterings of the language are to be found here and there
peppering the more intimate correspondence and lighthearted writings
of Southey and that of the Coleridge progeny. Odd words, soubriquets
and expressions survived Coleridge generations. We meet with won-
drous words such as 'circumnambagious' and 'horse-mangander-
ing'; sometimes in The Doctor Southey steals in 'a scurvy clogdogdo'
or a 'side-ling toward an object crab-like' and though he may quote
some strangely vague nursery rhyme source or merely use quotes and
give no source at all we may well suspect that the true source is
Snouterumpater.
The identifiable etymology of the lingo is immensely subtle, the sources
far ranging and varied; old West Country speech, eighteenth-century
drawing room refinements and witticisms, Cumbrian dialect, Cockney
slang, echoes of Esteesian puns and conundrums, echoes from Hartley's
ejuxrian fantasies, other echoes from the timeless currency of cottage
firesides, from nursery rhymes and baby talk, schoolboy jokes and
schoolroom howlers; fragmentary impressions of acquaintances and
visitors over the years, pompous officials and dignitaries, excited radicals,
enthusing Romantics.
Some of the words in her language were well established in everyday
speech; the reason that they were evidently unknown to Southey (though
known to Mrs Coleridge) was doubtless because she had the advantage
of being a woman and a housewife, making daily contact with servants
and shopkeepers, street vendors and mendicants; people from a stratum
of society with which Southey, a man of letters chained to his desk, seldom
had contact. The word 'roaking', which apparently so puzzled him, is
the south western equivalent of the north country 'ratching' and means
exactly what Mrs Coleridge said it did: 'digging and grumping'. As for
'doddens', that is a Cumbrian (viz. of Scandinavian origin = Norse,
 The imagination of Mrs Coleridge 85
dudra, to quaver) variation on 'tots' or 'tottens', meaning rags, old
clothes, worn and battered bits and pieces: a 'totter' in London street
market parlance is a dealer in rags and old clothes (hence tottery and dod-
dery, on your last legs, raggy and taggy and coming apart). 'Rudderish'
Mrs Coleridge drew from 'rudding' or 'redding' (red smitting), the tradi-
tional practice of redding tups at rutting time, a season of wayward
behaviour. 'Roughcumtatherick' is an ancient Cumbrian expression for
one who has broken loose or is running wild, possibly deriving from a
breaking away from the 'tedder styak' (the tether stake) for a grazing
animal and, when traced far enough back into the mists of time like so
many Cumbrian words ends up with the Old Norse: tjdthr, in this case.
These instances are merely given to indicate Mrs Coleridge's
remarkable interest in words, the extent and Catholicism of her
vocabulary, the keen subtlety of her ear. Without these gifts, possessed
in quite extraordinary degree, she could not have created a new
'language'. She revelled in human beings and their idiosyncracies of
speech and behaviour. Though she relished drawing room society her
vocabulary is proof of her enjoyment of the common world and common
speech, so much more richly diversified in her day than in ours. We are
left in no doubt of the acute perception which she brought to bear upon
the world around her, providing source material for the mimicry with
which she entertained her family and friends, and for her 'language';
more correctly experimental work in kaleidoscopic compression of ver-
bal impressions and fancies; a dazzling expertise in the invention of port-
manteau words and an exploitation of the subconscious pre-dating Lewis
Carroll by a good half century and more.
Sou they confessed to Bedford that he could discover no rationale of this
language (expecting thereby tofindthe key to some system of derivation).
To seek the rationale of a language, or code, which is largely a product
of the subconscious can only be self defeating; but, of course, the sub-
conscious was unrecognised in Southey's day (except by Coleridge who,
as usual, was immeasurably ahead of contemporary thinking and in his
notebooks probed and explored it, well aware of its existence if not hav-
ing entirely decided how to define it). Southey, for his part, groped as in
a glass darkly: 'There may be an unknown inspiration as well as an
unknown tongue. If so what mighty revelations may lie unrevealed.'
These revelations have been made, or at least are in the process of be-
ing made, in the twentieth century, and for this reason we are able to
understand much of Mrs Coleridge's language and to appreciate its
significance. She had deep seated needs for inventing a private language,
needs never analysed by her but only felt: release from the tensions of con-
stant suppressed anxiety; the necessity to have something of her very own
86 MOLLY LEFEBURE
that could not be taken from her as everything else was taken; the need
for privacy in a world which gossiped freely about her as the deserted wife
of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Fundamentally her language was a cypher
affording her a species of cover (it is significant that one of the aliases which
she bestowed upon herself was 'Mrs Codian'). Equally fundamentally
it was her safety valve, permitting her, as it were, to let off steam. The
language reveals that she was of an ironical turn of mind - a dangerous
thing to be at the best of times. By using a private language Mrs Coleridge
was able to give vent in safety to her irony; to pass comments on men and
manners; to express herself without inhibition. By using a method of ver-
bal shorthand she could reach to the private heart of things in a flash. For
instance, to describe a man chopping wood as a 'thumper', an 'undoer'
and a 'cutter-up' is to express, in a mere four words, a myriad of
associated ideas and comments ranging from the sexual to the social. The
result sounds, superficially, like nonsense; but it is really a garbling which
makes possible a statement about the man and what he is doing and what
he represents which could not be achieved by using a traditional speech
method. Not that we should fall into Southey's error of supposing that
she was working on this conscious level; her inspired garbling was a
product of the imagination, she was swimming freely in that sub-
conscious stream which, for lack of better definition we gropingly term
inspiration.
It was both her good fortune and misfortune to live in the company of
famous writers. Doubtless they stimulated her interest in words, but at
the same time Mrs Coleridge became convinced that she herself was no
good as a writer. She was, of course, chiefly evaluating her literary powers
within the context of Dorothy Wordsworth's journals. We find Mrs Col-
eridge, in June 1823, writing to Poole,
I wish my dear friend, I could give you only a faint idea of a radiant sunset which
we witnessed a few evenings ago! Skiddaw was converted to a mass of bright Amber
and a vivid double rainbow was arching the other side of the vale, which was all
over of a pale green light, such as you see through one of the compartments of
aClaude-LorrainGlass: Sara [her daughter] has given a very glowing descrip-
tion of this scene in some of her letters, but I am not 'good at these numbers' and
shall only spoil the thing by meddling with it.10
Had she not been thus intimidated she might well have tried her hand
at authorship; her letters reveal that she enjoyed writing and possessed
a real gift for portraying everyday life, especially in its more comical
aspects. People and incidents spring vividly from her pen. However in-
stead of attempting literature she devoted her talents to the creation of
a language of her own. A later age might well have encouraged her to
commit this language to paper. But Mrs Coleridge was born before her
 The imagination of Mrs Coleridge 87

time: her private language remained a private language, known only to

the few, who wondered at it and laughed, seeing it simply as one of her
' funny things'.

Notes
1
Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. C. C. Southey (6 vols., 1849—50)
V, pp.98-9.
2
Minnow Among Tritons: the letters ofMrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Thomas Poole,
ed. S. Potter (London, 1934), p. 105. Cited hereafter as Minnow.
3
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, in-
troduction by Peter Quennell (London, 1948), p. viii.
4
New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. K. Curry (2 vols., 1965) II, p. 130.
5
Robert Southey, The Doctor, ed. J. W. Warter (London, 1848), pp.
378-88.
6
Robert Graves, The Crowning Privilege (Penguin, 1959), p. 161.
7
Derwent Coleridge, Memoir of the Life of Hartley Coleridge (London, 1851),
pp. xliii—xlvi.
8
Selectionsfrom the Letters of Robert Southey, ed. J. W. Warter (4 vols., 1856) III,
p. 108.
9
Ibid., m, pp. 270-3.
10
Minnow, p. 106.
 'As much diversity as the heart that trembles':
Coleridge's notes on the lakeland fells

WILLIAM RUDDICK

You ask for the mystery

Of my emotions
To be revealed . . .
But the bitter wind
Or the mist that falls,
The single raven
Or the broken bough
Are felt as much, and give
As much diversity
As the heart that trembles
Or the voice that, longing
Or in gladness, calls.
Peter Laver's poem 'Placing Sensitivities' neatly sidesteps a demand for
self-revelation by asserting that the sights, sounds and bodily sensations
experienced by anyone who lives in the Lake District are (or should be)
as powerful and varied as any possible human contacts. The poem does
not deny the vividness of personal feelings, but seems to externalise them
into a natural vitality which absorbs them, while conversely also absor-
bing the poet's vivid perceptions of his surroundings into the poignant-
ly suggested intensity of his heart's emotions.
Such a reciprocity of perceived and externalised inner sensations, of
joys received from the beauty of the landscape and landscape features
discovered to be objective correlatives for the poet's own emotions, can
be sensed in the notebooks and occasional letters in which Coleridge
records his discovery of the Lakeland landscape and (in particular) his
solitary experiences of the infinitely varied terrain of the high fells. Col-
eridge's moods might vary: cries of joy and thankful ejaculations to
nature could modulate into the gloomy thought that 'into a discoverer I
have sunk from an inventor', for, as Kathleen Coburn remarks, one can-
not but notice 'his association of observed natural phenomena with his
own bodily and emotional states'; but on the whole the tone of his fell-
walking prose between 1799 and 1802 is exultant. Discovering the fells
offered Coleridge a whole new area of sense impressions and emotional
88
 Notes on the lakelandfells 89
stimuli, and though the prose works and poetry which he hoped to base
upon his experiences were not to be written, the actual notebook prose
in which he recorded his immediate sensations and impressions forms a
body of topographical writing and personal recording of a wholly new and
very remarkable kind.
The early tourists, who visited the Lake District with Fr. Thomas
West's Guide or the tour journals of Pennant, Gilpin or Thomas Gray to
tell them where to find the proper 'stations' and the correctly pictur-
esque reactions to experience when looking at the views from them, did
not walk about to any great extent. They travelled the usual tourist route
from Keswick to Windermere in a carriage, were rowed round Derwent-
water and Lake Windermere, and, if they felt brave enough to venture
on the ascent of Skiddaw or (a little later) Helvellyn on foot rather than
on the back of a pony, they were accompanied by a guide, who could
point out the chief features of the landscape and revive the visitor's in-
trepidity with timely offers of a tot of brandy when they reached the
heights. The walking tour as such only enters literature in the decade of
Coleridge's first visit to the Lakes with the publication of Joseph Bud-
worth ' s A Fortnight's Ramble to the Lakes in 1792. Budworth was a military
man, active and hardy, and he made a succession of ascents which were
not part of the regular tourist programme of the day. But he thought of
mountains rather than fells, and even with the help of local guides he was
clearly nervous on the steep slopes and kept well away from the scree. Like
almost all the late eighteenth-century writers on the area he was a
sightseer, not a resident. For deep knowledge and a close understanding
of the Lakeland landscape we must wait till the Wordsworths and Col-
eridge are settled in the area. Late eighteenth-century tourists continued
to swallow the tall stories about the terrible inaccessibility and awful
hazards of the fells and high passes which Thomas Gray and other early
visitors had half heard from the natives and half dreamed up for
themselves, and they kept well away from the high ground.
Of course, as Molly Lefebure points out in Cumberland Heritage, the
fells, mountains and high passes had always been traversed by the
shepherds, miners and packhorse carriers of the region. But the tourists
found the bare screes and fells frightening. The cult of the sublime and
of Salvator Rosa made a few timid encounters with apparent danger
(such as a ride along the road into the lower part of Borrowdale) quite
popular. But high, empty, remote rockscapes were foreign to the aesthetic
canons of the time, and the tourists felt no desire to experience them.
Coleridge first saw the Lake District in November 1799. In the
previous two years he had doubtless heard a great deal about their native
region from William and Dorothy Wordsworth and it was clearly a great
90 WILLIAM RUDDICK
joy to him that he was able to explore the area with William and (for part
of the time) John Wordsworth as his guides. They gave him a comprehen-
sive tour of the valleys and passes, lasting about three weeks. But in
following their itinerary one must remember that the formation of Word-
sworth's aesthetic sense had been powerfully affected by the publications
of late eighteenth-century picturesque-topographical writers. He shared
their pictorially orientated preference for a lowish viewpoint, from which
the proportions of a landscape could be appreciated as if in a painting by
Claude Lorrain or Richard Wilson. Although Wordsworth's response
to landscape was enriched by time and travel, and although mountain
experiences came to occupy a key significance in certain areas of his think-
ing (as witness the ascent of Snowdon passage in Prelude, 13) he remained
basically faithful to the general tenets of the picturesque-topographical
school, as his continued approval for West's Guide as late as the publica-
tion of his own Guide to the Lakes makes clear. So the three weeks' tour with
Coleridge mostly kept clear of the higher ground.
In her chapter 'The First of the Fellwalkers' in Cumberland Heritage,
Molly Lefebure maintains that 'Coleridge's notes for this introductory
tour are rather subdued and his comments reveal him as deeply under
the influence of Wordsworth.' My own reading of this section of the
notebooks (CN, I, 494-563) rather suggests that on the early part of the
tour, when Coleridge was new to the area and relying heavily on Word-
sworth for information, the signs of Wordsworth's opinions are, in-
evitably, clear. But so too is the influence of picturesque-tourist literature,
which Coleridge may have re-read in preparation for the trip. In a
description of Hawes Water, written on Friday 1 November, early in the
tour, Coleridge attempts to distinguish the various views from Wallow
Crag by making a list of what are in effect 'stations' in the manner of West
and describing the beautiful features of the landscape to be seen from
each. Scattered references to Gilpin, West, Claude and Salvator Rosa
are, indeed, to be found throughout Coleridge's Lakeland notes, but they
soon represent nothing more than a kind of shorthand notation for sug-
gesting particular kinds of effects. Coleridge's eye refuses to be tyrannised
by the conventions of seeing which they stand for.
By the time the party reached Grasmere in the first week of November
Coleridge had found his bearings. They embarked on an ascent of
Helvellyn (the only high ascent of their tour) and Coleridge's brief notes
written on the summit show what was to be his characteristic mode of
recording the features of a high Lakeland view. The notes impart a sense
of movement as he turns about; first due south, then clockwise round to
the north east, and finally westwards, with a quick glance back again to
the direction where he started. Viewing also involves a degree of
 Notes on the lakelandjells 91
movement along the high plateau to discover features that were hidden
at first:
On the top of Helvellin
First the Lake of Grasmere like a sullen Tarn/ then the black ridge of mountain
- then as upborne among the other mountains the luminous Cunneston Lake
- & far away in the Distance & far to the Lake the glooming Shadow,
Wynandermere with its Island - Pass on - theTairn - & view of the gloomy
Ulswater & mountains behind, one black, one blue, & the last one dun/
Greisdale Halse - GowdrellCrag - Tarn Crag - that smoother Eminence on
the right is called Fairfield - (CN, 1,515)
At one stroke Coleridge breaks free from the conventions of
picturesque-tourist descriptive writing. He makes no attempt to compose
landscape features into a Claudian picture with a foreground, middle and
far distances, or to create a Salvator Rosa-influenced mood piece of
sublimity and horror. He breaks the rules by offering a moving panorama
in which the spectator's head is free to move this way and that, and his
body to turn about as he advances into a landscape. Coleridge draws on
eighteenth-century descriptive terminology ('luminous' and 'glooming')
but incorporates colours such as black and dun which formed no part of
the word painter's conventional vocabulary.
The description of the view from Helvellyn conveys no great sense
of Coleridge's emotions being involved with what he sees (the walk
uphill had been a long one and the day was dull: the party seems
to have been a little subdued), but from the early stages of the tour
there are plentiful indications that his imagination was being stimulated
beyond the customary bounds of topographical prose expression
by the newly discovered landscapes of the Lakes. That 'despotism
of the eye' which Coleridge was always to resist was even then in
no danger of overwhelming his other senses or his creative fancy
as he sought for meaningful analogies which might express the vital
power of the scenery and its capacity to stimulate the poet's mind.
On Wallow Crag Coleridge notes how one of the ridges is 'steep
as a nose running behind the embracing Giant's arms' (the ridges on
either side of it) as it runs down towards the lake (CN, I, 510). The
lower part of Aira Force seems to spread 'into a muslin apron, &
the whole water fall looks like a long-waisted Lady Giantess slipping
down on her back . . . ' (CN, I, 549). From Place Fell Coleridge looks
down on Ullswater to find
a large Slice of calm silver - above that a bright ruffledness, or atomic spor-
tiveness - motes in the sun? - Vortices of flies? (CN,l, 549)
Coleridge's eye moves onward, sharply responsive to the clear details
of a sunlit landscape, to find yet more signs of vitality in brilliant light ef-
92 WILLIAM RUDDICK
fects and the apparent energies suggested by the contours of the nearer
hills:
How shall I express the Banks waters all fused silver, that House too its slates
rainwet silver in the sun, & its shadows running down in the water like a column
- the Woods on the right shadowy with Sunshine, and in front of me the slop-
ing hollow of sunpatched Fields, sloping up into Hills so playful, the playful Hills
so going away in snow-streaked Savage black mountains. (CN, I, 549)
All around him Coleridge was sensing 'the one life within us and abroad',
the 'informing and unitive energy that plays throughout nature' 1 which
can surprise the eye into thinking 'Saddleback white and streaked' a
cloud because of the lightness and texture of its colours at a distance and
draw the poet's heart into a confession of his loss of self-awareness (akin in
its simpler fashion to the Mariner's loss of the dead weight of self as he
loses his identity in the spontaneous act of sympathy as he blesses the
water snakes) when the seeming spirit and personality of a mountain take
command of his imagination:
Ghost of a mountain - the forms seizing my Body as I passed & became realities
- I, a Ghost, till I had reconquered my substance (CN, I, 523)
The notebook entries of November 1799 show Coleridge advancing
rapidly towards the full discovery of his characteristic manner of
recording the forms and the imaginative impact of Lakeland scenery.
One such entry, for instance, is a memorable attempt at capturing
the varied aspects and energies revealed by travelling over a piece of high
ground:
I climb up the woody Hill & here have gained the Crummock Water - but have
lost the violet Crag. We pass thro' the wood, road ascending - now I am bet-
ween the Woody Hill/ & a stone wall with trees growing over it & see nothing else
- & now the whole violet Crag rises and fronts me - Then the waters near the
upper end of Crummock . . . (CN, I, 537)
William Gilpin had specialised in a staid and melodious prose describ-
ing the picturesque effects which modulate into one another as the spec-
tator (usually in a boat, and therefore at lake level) advances steadily for-
wards into and through a landscape. But Coleridge's rapid notation of
changing effects on rising ground, so precisely visual in regard to both
distant features and close details as to seem an authentic record of the pro-
cess of discovery actually being experienced, is without precedent in
eighteenth-century tourist literature. Only Dorothy Wordsworth, among
Coleridge's contemporaries, shares his gift for dynamic notation, but she
shows nothing of his constant and highly characteristic desire to ascend
in search of fresh revelations.2
In a letter to Tom Wedgwood of January 14 1803 Coleridge states his
 Notes on the lakeland fells 93
matured attitude to fell walking and his marked fondness for high ascents
and viewpoints:
In simple earnest, I neverfindmyself alone within the embracement of rocks and
hills, a traveller upon an Alpine road, but my spirit courses, drives and eddies,
like a leaf in Autumn. A wild activity, of thoughts, imaginations, feelings and im-
pulses of motion, rises up from within me . . . . The farther I ascend. . . the greater
becomes in me the feeling of Life. (CL, II, p. 916)
The poetry of his Somerset years had already associated the joy of walk-
ing on high ground with the experience of finding a superior degree of
spiritual and imaginative enlightenment. This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison
offers a characteristic instance of this procedure.
Although the damp, misty weather of November 1799 might reduce
the pleasure of mounting Helvellyn, it offered Coleridge stimulating
glimpses of natural or (occasionally) man-made forms which seemed to
cross the borderline between ideals and realities in a very exciting way.
Lyulph's Tower
rises emerging out of the mist, two-thirds wholly hidden, the turrets quite clear
- & in a moment all is snatched away - Realities and Shadows (CN, I, 553)
A clear morning by Ullswater as the tour neared its close offered the
amusing realisation that 'that round fat backside of a Hill* opposite form-
ed, with its reflection in the water, 'one absolutely undistinguishable form'
of comically Platonic completeness (CN, I, 555). But most of all these
magical discoveries of the one life and the relatedness of real objects with
ideal concepts came to him when he was able to walk uphill.
The Wordsworths were strong walkers, but not fell walkers. The ma-
jority of the walks recorded in Dorothy'sJournals were made on the then-
empty roads, or on shepherds' paths such as the one up Easedale,
relatively close to home. And walking was, for them, a shared experience
which allowed them to respond together to the beauties of nature which
Dorothy might afterwards record in her Journal. When Coleridge took
his family to live at Greta Hall in July 1800 he was able to experience a
new degree of self-immersion in the phenomena of the Lakeland land-
scape, but he soon discovered that he preferred a higher terrain than the
Wordsworths did, and that he preferred to experience it alone. 'I mustbe
alone', he wrote, 'if either my Imagination or Heart are to be enriched.'
Yet he seems to have needed a degree of self-expression beyond that of-
fered by purely internal self-communion quite frequently, and his
notebooks became a steadily developing medium for expressing and
recording his impressions while a walk, with all the emotional and
aesthetic discoveries which attended it, was actually taking place.
Greta Hall offered Coleridge a magnificent panorama of lakes and
94 WILLIAM RUDDICK
mountains, and his initial burst of notebook and letter writing shows how
exciting he found the chance to study a landscape in the endless diversi-
ty of light and colour effects which varying weather conditions and times
of day brought into being. At this time he became fully engaged on what
Kathleen Coburn rightly calls 'heroic attempts to find new words to
describe these apperceptions, with results that sometimes suggest a much
later development in the history of painting and poetry' (CN, I, p.
xxxii). The comparisons with the work of certain of the French Impres-
sionists which some critics have made are not overstrained: Monet pain-
ting his haystack at different times of day is engaged in an activity com-
parable to Coleridge noting down the aspects of his view from the upstairs
study at Greta Hall at all manner of times and seasons. The domestic ar-
rangements even gave him a readymade equivalent of a Claude glass, and
he recorded the consequences of this with wry amusement:
My glass being opposite the window, I seldom shave without cutting myself. Some
Mountain or Peak is rising out of the Mist, or some Slanting Column of misty
sunlight is sailing across me - so that I offer up soap and blood daily, as an Eye-
servant of the Goddess Nature. (CL, I, p. 658)
As well as taking preliminary walks in order to master the topography
of the area, Coleridge talked to local people. He soon realised (in Molly
Lefebure's words) 'the ridiculous discrepancy between the exaggerated
awe with which the picturesque tourists treated the fells and the confident
manner in which the dalesfolk lived and worked in these reputedly hair-
raising regions'. 3 He began, therefore, to plan more ambitious ex-
ploratory fell walks. At the same time he wasfindingthe landscape round
Keswick inspiring and was feeling his self-confidence as a poet and
thinker revive. On the evening of Sunday 24 August he walked on Latrigg
with his wife and child. He noted a remarkable cloud and light effect,
characteristically discovered in the act of turning to go home:
As we turned round on our return, we see a moving pillar of clouds, flame &
smoke, rising, bending, arching, and in swift motion - from what God's chimney
doth it issue? - I scarcely ever saw in the sky such variety of shapes, & colors,
& colors floating over colors. - Solemnly now lie the black masses on the blue
firmament of - not quite night - for still at the foot of Bassenthwaite there is
a smoky russet Light. - Tis 9 o'clock. - (CN, I, 781)
Perhaps to Coleridge's Sabbath evening mind that pillar of clouds
seemed like the one that led the Israelites across the desert to safety. He
had found his Promised Land at Greta Hall: a child was about to be born
to him, he was near the Wordsworths, and with returning inspiration he
felt able to participate fully in the work of preparing a new edition of
Lyrical Ballads and to imagine the possibility of completing Christabel as
his major new contribution to the work. The notebook entries of August
 Notes on the lakeland Jells 95
1800 seem to record an experiment which he afterwards claimed to have
made; by subjecting himself to the impact of powerful natural forces in
the expectation that a comparable stimulation of his own creative im-
agination would ensue. At first, he claimed, the experiment had not
answered:
The wind from Skiddaw & Borrodale was often as loud as wind need be
- & many a walk in the clouds on the mountains did I take; but all would
not do.
(CL, I, p. 643)
Eventually a chance over-indulgence in drinking released his mental
powers, he claimed, 'and I proceeded successfully'. The notebook
entries of this time, however, suggest that Coleridge was indulging in
self-dramatisation after the event. The only reference to drinking
is of a relaxed and jocular kind (CN, I, 791) and it comes in the midst of
a succession of vivid, rapidly composed verbal sketches of the new land-
scape which he was mastering. By the time he had been at Greta Hall for
five weeks, Coleridge had finished a sizeable draft of new material for
Christabel, and he seems to have celebrated his success with a few days'
strenuous exploration of the fells. The climax of this short holiday from
composition came on Sunday 31 August, when he made thefirstrecorded
walk from Keswick to Grasmere along the tops (Calfhow Pike, Great
Dod, Stybarrow Dod, Raise and Helvellyn).
In the course of this great walk Coleridge paused to make notes. The
way in which his prose could now incorporate a rapid succession of ex-
citing discoveries and powerful experiences while matching them with
the exultant elasticity of his own mind and feelings is at once apparent:
When I had wound round so as to come at the very head of the Gill I determined
to wind up to the very top, tho' it led at least 3 furlong back toward Threlkeld -
I went, my face still towards Wasdale, Ennerdale, Buttermere, &c till I reached
the very top, then, & not till then turned my face, and beheld (O Joy for me!) Pat-
terdale & Ulswater . . . (CN, I, 798)
As Kathleen Coburn notes, 'the use of the word "Joy" gives a very
special sense of Coleridge's exuberance and creative mood'. He could
match Nature's creativity by that of the manuscript poem in his pocket.
He could choose when to see, and could control the timing of natural pro-
spects and even natural surprises for himself. Nature even seemed will-
ing to play a subservient role in the elation of the moment: 'the evening
now lating', he thought of passing a stretch of high ground by, 'but
Nature twitched me at the heart strings - I ascended it - thanks to her!
Thanks to her - What a scene . . . ' (CN, I, 798, £37).
But on the summit of Helvellyn the strong chiaroscuro effects of the
two great moonlit Edges recalled him again to a sense of the primal
96 WILLIAM RUDDICK
energies of the Creation, where Divine power seemed to have left the
rocks in a state of frozen movement, as though their liquid state had but
lately cooled into solid forms:
travelling along the ridge I came to the other side of those precipices and down
below me on my left - no - no! no words can convey any idea of this prodigious
wildness . . . what a frightful bulgy precipice I stand on and to my right how the
Crag which corresponds to the other, how it plunges down like a waterfall, reaches
a level steepness, and again plunges! (CN, I, 799, f40)
The elated poet had found a Salvator Rosa landscape of sublime terror
to impress his mind, but he saw it from a totally un-Salvatorian view-
point: he witnessed its terrors, like those of the imagined chasms in Kubla
Khan, from above. And no ancestral voices rose from the depths to pro-
phesy woes ahead. Coleridge scrambled down by Nethermost Pike and
Seat Sandal. At eleven o'clock he reached Town End and gathered the
Wordsworth household together for a recitation of the new part of
Christabel.
The great range walk of 31 August 1800 formed a fitting climax to the
'honeymoon' period of Coleridge's initial happiness and creativity at
Greta Hall. The prose account of the walk brings together and fuses in
a style of remarkable economy, speed and specificity the deeper
knowledge of the region which residence at Keswick had enabled Col-
eridge to amass so quickly. He and Dorothy Wordsworth are the first
writers to preserve those sights and sounds of Lakeland which immediate-
ly recreate its physical reality for later generations. Each must have had
gifts of observation and response which interested the other, but, as John
Beer suggests, one can see Dorothy at times 'touched by his feelings for
magical lights and mysterious energies actually manifesting themselves
in nature' 4 while it is very difficult to see any very specific influence be-
ing exerted over Coleridge's prose by Dorothy in return. They shared,
and perhaps helped each other to perfect, a gift for memorably fixing the
actual: 'raspberry and milk coloured crags' . . . 'fine columns of misty
sunshine sailing slowly over the crags' are characteristic examples from
the entry describing Coleridge's ridge walk up Helvellyn. A few days
earlier, on Saddleback, he had noticed 'no noise but that of the loose
stones rolling away from the feet of the Sheep, that move slowly among
these perilous ledges' (CN, I, 784).
But Coleridge's better-informed mind ranged, as Dorothy Word-
sworth's could not do, from the infinitesimal to the vast in search of
evidence for the working of natural energies towards form in ways which
seemed akin to the operation of the human imagination, channelled and
directed by the human will. Water, and forms analagous to those of
water, particularly fascinated him. At the beginning of his great ridge
 Notes on the lakelandJells 97
walk to Helvellyn he noted how his own hills 'are the last surge of that
enormous ocean formed by the mountains of Ennerdale, Butterdale,
Wasdale & Borrodale' (CN, i, 798, £26). The analogy seemed
strengthened a moment later when he caught a distant glimpse of the real
sea. The 'forces' or waterfalls of the region always interested him, and
nothing could be less like the explorations (or the prose) of the pictur-
esque tourists than Coleridge's spatial explorations of the rocks, views,
water courses and vegetation of the forces which he recorded from
November 1799 onwards. Characteristic, but particularly delightful, is
an account of Moss Force on Newlands Hause which the contemporary
Cumbrian poet and topographical writer Norman Nicholson has more
than once anthologised and selected for particular praise:5

The mad water rushed thro' its sinuous bed, or rather prison of Rock with such
rapid curves . . . that in twilight one might have feelingly compared them to a vast
crowd of huge white bears, rushing, one over the other, against the wind - their
long white hair scattering abroad in the wind.
After this animated picture of hairy white bears playing leap frog in the
dusk, Coleridge modulates into his more serious, speculative manner:
What a sight it is to look down on such a Cataract! The wheels, that circumvolve
it, the leaping up and plunging forward of that infinity of Pearls and Glass Bulbs,
the continual change of the Matter, the perpetual Sameness of the Form - it is an awful
Image and Shadow of God and the World.
When engaging in strenuous fell walking in the hope of stimulating his
creative powers so as to finish Christabel, Coleridge was acting upon a
theory which attracted him for a time, that strong irritation of the nervous
system through violent sense stimuli might awaken comparable energies
in the central organic powers. Unfortunately irritations of a less philo-
sophic sort were to assail him in October 1800 and for some time after-
wards. First the new baby, Derwent, fell ill, then Wordsworth decided
that Christabelwas going to be out of tune with the new Lyrical Ballads col-
lection as he envisaged it and persuaded Coleridge not to include it. This
produced a bad crisis of confidence for Coleridge and he probably step-
ped up his intake of laudanum to steady himself, with the inevitable ex-
acerbation of its side effects. Finally the damp lakeland winter worsened
his tendency to rheumatism. Fell walking and the prose in which he
described it could only be a summer pursuit for Coleridge, and in 1801
he was in such deep financial straits that when he eventually rose from
his sick bed he had to prepare for a season of hack journalism in London.
So little walking was done. He returned north in the spring of 1802, but
his poor health, his despondency and the domestic turmoil which his
friendship with the Wordsworths and his feelings for Sara Hutchinson
98 WILLIAM RUDDICK
only worsened boded ill for a recovery of vitality or better spirits. Yet
recover he did.
The events which led up to the composition of Coleridge's Dejection
have been much studied. But less attention has been given to the degree
of recovery which he experienced in the summer which followed, and to
the possibility that the record of his week's strenuous walking at the begin-
ning of August 1802 constitutes a semi-private but definite affirmation
of an alternative state of being to that chronicled within the poem.
Dejection is a poem in which the failure of the poet's 'genial spirits' is
confessed in the context of a wild scene of disordered nature which acts
as an externalisation and independent confirmation of the poet's anguish-
ed state of mind. The poem was originally addressed to Sara Hutchin-
son, and to her Coleridge makes his much discussed complaint that

We receive but what we give,

And in our life alone does Nature live.
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud.
But writing (perhaps also completing) the poem clearly served as a tonic
to Coleridge. The letters show him delighting in this new proof of his own
creativity: the poem is adapted, paraphrased, offered to a variety of cor-
respondents. Domestic tensions at Greta Hall lessened for a while after
a tremendous row late in May, and when the Wordsworths departed for
Calais on 9 July, Coleridge was under less emotional pressure than he
had been for a considerable time. Probably he took less opium as a result,
which would speed his return to health. He planned a week' s walking of
the remoter fells with the help of Hutchinson's History of the County of
Cumberland early in June. On Sunday 1 August he finally set off.
The tremendous week of fell walking (which included thefirstrecorded
ascent of Scafell by anyone other than a native of the region) is a testimony
to the essential strength and recuperative energy of Coleridge's body and
mind. He made notebook entries for all but the final (least arduous and
already known) part of his tour, and in addition to this private record he
also began a letter to Sara Hutchinson on the Wednesday. In this he
transcribed considerable sections of the notebook account, with
amplifications of detail and stretches of fresh narration in which he sup-
plied incidents from memory which he had not had time to note down in
the immediate circumstances (and excitement) of the walk.
Although neither notebook nor letter account is complete, it is possi-
ble to see in the latter a process akin to that which happened with Dejec-
tion: A Letter occurring once more (and, incidentally, at a time when De-
jection's transformation into a public document had not yet been com-
pleted by its publication in the Morning Post). Just as the private confes-
 Notes on the lakelandfells 99
sional poem to Sara Hutchinson was transformed in gradual stages in-
to a general statement, so the private tour material in Coleridge's
notebook could be written up for Sara, as a demonstration of recovered
physical vitality and imaginative power. From the letter form to that of
a picturesque tour book of a new and striking kind would not be too
remote or difficult a transition, and the idea of a book on the Lakes had
been in Coleridge's mind since the time of his first visit to the area with
the Wordsworths. Together the notebook entries and their expansion in
letter form bear witness to an astonishing recovery of resilience and a
rebirth of self-confidence which is further suggested by other ideas for
topographical writings which Coleridge noted down during the most ar-
duous and exciting parts of his week's walking.
The notebook prose of Coleridge's Scafell tour with its almost
simultaneous incorporation and amplification in the letters to Sara Hut-
chinson stands in a different relationship to public form and utterance
from any of the other, essentially private notebook material relating to
the Lakeland landscape and the fells. The letters occasionally indulge in
a self-glorifying touch of the histrionic, as when the bald account of his
difficult drop into Eskdale:
Good Heavens! what a climb! dropping from Precipices and at last should have
been crag fast but for the chasm - (CN, I, 1218, fl7)
is written up into a very sublime (rather Mrs Radcliffian) passage on the
terrors of almost getting crag fast and eventually tottering to the bottom,
shaking legs, heat bumps and all (CL, I, p. 451). But in the main they are
precisely based on the notebook prose account. That account shows Col-
eridge not only able to 'receive . . . what we give' to Nature, but exultantly
feeling that her wedding garment (of the richest tones and hues) has been
thrown over him, and himself most comfortably attired and, indeed, lord
of the feast. After months of depression and ill health he rejoiced in the
exercise, the contacts with local people (with whom he always got on
well), the bright weather, the contrasts between the beauty of the lower
dales and the bare sublimity of the great high fells and the rich, strong
colours everywhere.
The notebook entries of this week express Coleridge's elation. Obser-
vations flow from him in a torrent of exact, vivifying phrases (modern
fell walkers have agreed on the precision of his scenic definitions and
descriptions) and no one has ever caught better the contrast between the
bareness of the great fells and the valley scenery below. Looking into
Eskdale Coleridge notes
how then the Hill-ridge intermits and the vales become one/but never sure was
lovelyer human Dwellings than these nestled in Trees at the foot of the Fells, &
in among the intervening Hills. (CN, I, 1222, f22)
100 WILLIAM RUDDICK
His mind ranges everywhere, from the fact that on a steep slope up Scafell
he sees himself

Ascend, stooping, & looking at my shadow, stooping down to my shadow, a lit-

tle shorter than myself (CN, 1,1216)
to an amusing fancy for a future book:

The plan for one book the Genius of some place appearing in a Dream & up-
braiding me for omitting him. (CN, 1, 1214)
But running through everything is Coleridge's joy at the recovery of full
physical and mental vigour. No fears assail him that he may lose his in-
dividual power of imagination under a mass of strong external sensations.
To respond, to register and to record are now enough to satisfy his mind.
Speculation and theorising are in abeyance as (to adopt Gerard Manley
Hopkins's useful term) he catches the successive 'inscapes' of the high
terrain. Briefly but exultantly he has become master of the great spaces
he traverses and surveys.
Such an elation could hardly have lasted, and the complications of Col-
eridge's existence soon brought it to an end. In later tours, with Sou they
or (in Scotland now) with the Wordsworths, circumstances or his worsen-
ing psychological problems cause a noticeable mutedness of tone in his
prose notes. But in the notes made during Coleridge's two most active
periods of fell walking, in the summers of 1800 and 1802, he fulfilled the
promise of his first series of notes in November 1799. He developed a
highly distinctive prose which moves further away from the aesthetic and
formal procedures of picturesque-tourist writing than anyone else was
to do until Ruskin and Hopkins began to make notes on the area much
later in the nineteenth century. Coleridge brings into his prose the
physical realities of the Lake District, as only Dorothy Wordsworth was
capable of doing at that same time, and he writes of fell walking as no one
had ever done before ('As I bounded down, noticed the moving stones
under the soft moss, hurting my feet'). He appreciates the vitality and
the connectedness of rocks, streams and growing things, and finds it
possible not just to respond to them in the hope of stimulating his own
creative powers, but ultimately (if briefly) to open himself to myriad
revelations of the energies of nature as infinite correlatives to the energies
of the human mind, without fear of being overwhelmed by nature's pro-
fuseness. Indeed through joy Coleridge becomes master of revealed
energy, exulting in his ability to embrace it through the vigour of his own
body and mind. The double irony lies in the fact that the great recoveries
of the capacity for physical and mental adventure, and for joy, which
followed the composition of the second part of Christabel and Dejection
 Notes on the lakeland fells 101
could not be sustained, and that the evidence of this transitory joy and
the new manner of topographical prose writing which it generated should
have lain hidden till our own time and the eventual publication of Col-
eridge's early notebooks.

Notes
1
John Beer, Coleridge's Poetic Intelligence (Cambridge, 1977), p. 127.
2
For an instance of Coleridge ascending in order to discover recorded by
Dorothy herself, see DWJunder 23 April 1802.
3
Molly Lefebure, Cumberland Heritage (London, 1970), p. 134.
4
Coleridge's Poetic Intelligence, p. 272.
5
See Norman Nicholson, The Lake District (Harmondsworth, 1977), pp.
100-1 and comments in The Lake Poets (London, 1955), p. 129. Nicholson
there concludes that 'if only Coleridge could have written like this more often
there would have been no need for another guide to the Lakes'.
'Leaping and Lingering': Coleridge's lyrical ballads

STEPHEN PARRISH

One of the most colourful volumes of literary scholarship ever given to

the world is a study of the working of Coleridge's imagination, 'an ab-
sorbing adventure along the ways which the imagination follows in deal-
ing with its multifarious materials - an adventure like a passage through
the mazes of a labyrinth, to come out at last upon a wide and open sky'.
Now more than half a century old, The Road to Xanadu was composed in
a style that has rather fallen out of fashion. Hardly any smart critics to-
day write even like G. Wilson Knight, and post-structuralism has
cultivated its own arcane splendours of language to overshadow the
rococo magnificence of Xanadu1 s mesmerizing rhetoric. Celebrated for
a generation at Harvard with a Gilbertian tribute -
My name is John Livingston Lowes;
I'm a dealer in magical prose -
Lowes offered accounts of the poet's imagination of such spellbinding
authority that we listen like a three-year's child while the critic has his will:
The 'deep well of unconscious cerebration' underlies your consciousness and
mine, but in the case of genius its waters are possessed of a peculiar potency. Im-
ages and impressions converge and blend even in the sleepy drench of our forgetful
pools. But the inscrutable energy of genius which we call creative owes its secret
virtue at least in part to the enhanced and almost incredible facility with which
in the wonder-working depths of the unconscious the fragments which sink in-
cessantly below the surface fuse and assimilate and coalesce.1
This image of the well serves throughout the book to emblemize the mind
of the poet, sometimes as 'a reservoir of memory', sometimes as the lodg-
ing place of denizens of the unconscious who stir about in its murky
depths. I cannot refuse myself the gratification (as Wordsworth said when
he took aim at The Ancient Mariner) of presenting one more fluent specimen
(page 278) of Lowes's sparkling water-imagery:
the poem is not the confluence of unconsciously merging images, as a pool of water
forms from the coalescence of scattered drops; nor is the poet a somnambulist in
a subliminal world. Neither the conscious impressions nor their unconscious in-
102
 Coleridge }s lyrical ballads 103
terpenetrations constitute the poem. They are inseparable from it, but it is an en-
tity which they do not create. On the contrary, every impression, every new
creature rising from the potent waters of the Well, is what it now is through its
participation in a whole, foreseen as a whole in each integral part - a whole which
is the working out of a controlling imaginative design. . . .
If metaphor is the key to understanding an abstraction like the con-
scious or subconscious mind, or the imagination, this metaphor of the
well unlocks Lowes's understanding of Coleridge and remains available
to us as an implement. We might be more tempted to make use of it if
Lowes had used it with more control. It is a little startling to learn (on page
189) that when Coleridge seems to associate the iridescent colours of
water snakes (in his poem) with the glistening colours of hoar-frost on
snow in the sunlight (in his notebooks), 'the Spirit of the Well is once more
dealing the cards for the shaping Spirit, with unerring art, to play'. This
soggy underwater game has no place for players from a bewildering series
of incompatible metaphors, both organic and mechanical, to which
Lowes (understandably and forgiveably) has intermittent recourse. In
his effort to portray what is in the end unportrayable, he speaks of Col-
eridge's mind as a loom with 'flying shuttles', as a stream with tributary
rivulets, as a 'womb of creative energy', as the shaping spirit that moulds
potter's clay, as a place where 'hooked atoms' work in tension, or where
iron filings are drawn to a magnet, where 'tentacles of association' reach
and cling, where a sort of 'alchemy' can blend and fuse and transmute.
It would be well to remind ourselves that these are Lowes's metaphors,
not Coleridge's, and that they inevitably project Lowes's understandings
of the working of his own imagination. The other great contemporary in-
terpreter of Coleridge's mind, L A . Richards (uncelebrated in song or
ballad, I think, at least in his Harvard years), more prudent, more
laconic, resorted sparingly to metaphor, and his knotted prose is, likewise
no doubt, a reflection of his own complex, ingenious imagination.2 Col-
eridge's imagination remains elusive and shadowy in The Road to Xanadu,
lying perhaps just beyond the reach of metaphor, for another reason:
Lowes never really believed that he was talking about the imagination
as Coleridge discriminatingly defined it. His study of Coleridge, he con-
fessed early on (page 95), convinced him 'that Fancy and Imagination
are not two powers at all, but one. The valid distinction which exists bet-
ween them lies, not in the materials with which they operate, but in the
degree of intensity of the operant power itself.'
We had better turn away at this point from distracting visions of high-
energy pumps, roiling the water in the well of memory, to seek for Col-
eridge's own metaphors of mind. A writer's metaphors of mind can, we
have to suppose, betray unconscious as well as conscious notions. It is not
104 STEPHEN PARRISH
clear whether Freud ever recognized at the conscious level of his think-
ing that the two persistent images of mind that run through his writings
- the one of a landscape, with marshland and dry ground, the other of
a structure like a house - were both, by his own classification, female
symbols. Nor is it clear how serious Coleridge consciously intended to
be in his occasional evocations of the mind (containing the memory and
the faculties of Fancy and Imagination) in metaphor. Wordsworth offers
us abundant images of the mind, both the mind of man and the great
universal mind, throughout his poem on the growth of his own mind.
Coleridge could fashion summary definitions that still hold us transfixed:

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. . . . (BL, I, p. 304)
And he could toy with metaphor, as in a chapter of 'Philosophical defini-
tions' in the Biographia (n, p. 18):

GOOD SENSE is the BODY of poetic genius, FANCY its DRAPERY, MO-
TION its LIFE, and IMAGINATION the SOUL that is every where, and in
each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.
To finish off his catalogue of the 'Beauties' of Wordsworth's poetry in
the Biographia he drew on a rich nature description from one of his
favourite travel books:

in reading Bartram's Travels I could not help transcribing the following lines as
a sort of allegory, or connected simile and metaphor of Wordsworth's intellect
and genius. - 'The soil is a deep, rich, dark mould, on a deep stratum of tenacious
clay; and that on a foundation of rocks, which often break through both strata,
lifting their back above the surface. The trees which chiefly grow here are the
gigantic, black oak; magnolia magniflora; fraxinus excelsior; platane; and a few
stately tulip trees.' {BL, II, p. 155)
In representing his own imagination Coleridge was less playful. As
Stephen Prickett has pointed out,3 he deploys such symbols as the
spring, the cloud-covered mountain, and the Brocken-spectre, and even
seems to validate, in 'a long and bitterly self-analytical note' of 1805,
Lowes's master image, as he unhappily thinks back, while in Malta, to
'the beautiful Fountain or natural Well at Upper Stowey':
The images of the weeds which hung down from its sides, appeared as plants grow-
ing up, straight and upright, among the water weeds that really grew from the
bottom/ & so vivid was the Image, that for some moments & not until after I had
disturbed the waters, did I perceive that their roots were not neighbours, & they
side-by-side companions. So - even then I said - so are the happy man's
Thoughts and Things -
 Coleridge }s lyrical ballads 105
But perhaps the most explicit, and certainly the most poignant, im-
age of his own imagination to be found in Coleridge's writing records his
melancholy awareness that its shaping spirit has been suspended by af-
fliction. Writing to Godwin in March, 1801 , to announce that as a result
of Wordsworth's having * descended' on him as from Heaven, 'the poet
is dead in me', he explains:
My imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been imaginative) lies, like
a cold Snuff on the circular rim of a Brass Candle-stick, without even a stink of
Tallow to remind you that it was once cloathed & mitred with flame.
(CL, ii, p. 714)
Exactly three years had passed since the marvellous winter in which
The Ancient Mariner had been composed - or forged, or fused, or coalesc-
ed - from what Lowes called'the raw stuff of poetry', ladled up, we sup-
pose, from the potent waters of the well. Whatever metaphor we favour
- dried up, emptied, burnt out - we are faced with a startling
discrepancy between Lowes's persuasive, rhapsodic account of the work-
ing of creative genius (in 1797 and 1798) and Coleridge's own sombre
announcement of his imaginative extinction in 1801.

II

As we look back over these three years, it is hard to set aside suspicion
that Wordsworth's descent upon Coleridge may actually date from the
earliest days of their friendship. Wordsworth was the older, the more
worldly, the stronger-minded, the dominant partner. 'I feel myself a little
man by his side', Coleridge testified (CL, I, p. 325) with the enthusiasm
of a convert. Wordsworth was nourished and fortified by just the sort of
adulation that Coleridge lavished on his gifted friends (Humphry Davy
was another such), and there is genuinely nostalgic warmth in the affec-
tionate recall in the 1805 Prelude (xm, 1. 407) of those happy days when
the friends first 'Together wanton'd in wild Poesy'. What Wordsworth
did for Coleridge is less clear. Critics have observed that images of nature
can be found in Coleridge's verse only after 1797, but the superb blank-
verse conversation poems, written in what W. J. Bate has called 'a late
Augustan reflective mode', date from 1795, and Bate goes on to declare
that by the end of the annus mirabilis Coleridge came to realize that 'he
could do nothing with this particular kind of poetry that the "Giant
Wordsworth," as he called him, could not do better' .4
This leaves the supernatural poetry, the genre that flared with such
brilliance in a single year, then sputtered out in the exinction of the poet
106 STEPHEN PARRISH
in Coleridge. Whatever its long-run effects, the intimacy with Word-
sworth somehow brought into being two or three of the most original, and
most distinguished, pieces of verse in what we now recognize as the
Romantic revolution. Yet events of the annus mirabilis and after show that
this verse rose not so much out of harmonious collaboration as out of deep
and unresolved conflicts of critical opinion. It is, in fact, important to
recognize a central irony in the English Romantic revolution in poetry:
the partners in the revolution held, from the beginning, fundamentally
differing notions of the genre under which their revolutionary poems,
along with their manifestos, were gathered.
Wordsworth's notions of the ballad can be pieced together with some
confidence from his specimens of the form and from his extended critical
remarks. I have tried elsewhere to sum this notion up: 5 the ballad, for
Wordsworth, was a version of pastoral, and a 'lyrical' ballad was lyrical
in two respects - its passion ('all poetry is passion', Wordsworth
declared) arose, as in any lyric, from the mind of the speaker or the
dramatic narrator of a ballad tale, and it was heightened by the employ-
ment of 'lyrical' or rapid metre so as to convey this passion to readers
unaccustomed to responding to the common language of men in com-
mon life.
Coleridge's theoretical notions of the ballad never got fully elaborated.
When he spoke in Biographia Literaria (n, pp. 5-7) of 'the two cardinal
points of poetry' that he and Wordsworth had talked about in 1797, he
named one as 'the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modify-
ing colours of imagination', and described his share in Lyrical Ballads in
the eloquent language that gives special radiance to his best critical
pronouncements:
it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters
supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature
a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows
of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which con-
stitutes poetic faith.
But as he implied, the Preface of 1800 - 'half a child of my own Brain'
he had once claimed (CL, n, p. 830) - spoke only of Wordsworth's kind
of poetry. Since Coleridge never produced the essay he promised Byron
in 1815 (CL, iv, p. 561), 'a Particular Preface to the Ancient Mariner
and the Ballads, on the employment of the Supernatural in Poetry and
the Laws which regulate it', we frequently have to piece together his prin-
ciples by inference - by noting the unstated but implied positions that
Wordsworth intermittently seems at pains to controvert. Coleridge's
most extended analyses of Wordsworth's ballads (in late chapters of the
Biographia) take the form of refutation, as do his lengthy remarks, in
 Coleridge }s lyrical ballads 107
earlier chapters, on the subject of metre and diction with reference not
to the ballad but to 'Poetry' or 'a Poem'. As for other central elements
of Wordsworth's theory of the ballad, Coleridge pointed to 'the choice of
his characters' as the ' great point of controversy' between Wordsworth and
his detractors, dismissed Wordsworth's dramatic technique as 'ventrilo-
quism', and left us to suppose, without saying much, that he shared
Johnsonian opinions of pastoral.
Yet, inexplicably, the partnership commenced in a shared enthusiasm
for the ballad, a genre which certainly attracted the two poets for different
reasons (Coleridge would have been excited by the music, the magic, the
marvellous, and possibilities of allegory; Wordsworth by the common
language, the dramatic frames, the closeness to simple life). Stimulated
by their discovery of Burger, whose ballads (in William Taylor's transla-
tion and in Scott's) appeared in 1796, and by their reading in Percy's Reli-
ques of Ancient English Poetry, Wordsworth and Coleridge embarked in 1797
on a curious sort of collaboration. They appear to have followed a pat-
tern that Coleridge had established in partnership with Southey and
Robert Lovell. Cain, Coleridge later testified,6 was to have been started
by Wordsworth, and Coleridge was to add a second canto; the third canto
was to be written by 'which ever had done first'. This pattern almost cer-
tainly accounts for the segments we have of The Three Graves: Wordsworth
wrote the first two parts and handed them over to Coleridge, who added
Parts in and iv; the last two parts remained unwritten.
The Three Graves, made up as it is of extended pieces of writing by both
partners, ought to be more revealing of their differences than it has pro-
ven to be. A few comparative observations can be made. When he pre-
sented his portion of the poem in The Friendin 1809, Coleridge described
it as a psychological study, a study of the working of the imagination. He
had been drawn to the story, he explained, 'from finding in it a striking
proof of the possible effect on the imagination, from an idea suddenly and
violently impressed on it'; having been reading about witchcraft, he
wanted to show 'the mode in which the mind is affected in these cases'.
(Friend, n, p. 89). By this time Coleridge would have been acutely aware
of Wordsworth's comparable claim for certain of his own ballads, as set
down in the Preface of 1800 and elsewhere: they were psychological
studies, studies of the way the imagination works, tracings of the fluxes
and refluxes of the mind. But a central difference is evident at once: the
imagination whose behaviour is studied in Coleridge's poem belongs to
a person in the story; the imagination whose workings Wordsworth trac-
ed belongs, characteristically, to the narrator of the story. In his portion
of The Three Graves Coleridge did preserve the fiction of a narrator, but
his poem never approaches the dramatic monologue form in which
108 STEPHEN PARRISH
Wordsworth's most experimental ballads (like the parallel poem of The
Thorn) were cast.
But the problem with using the separate portions of The Three Graves
to discriminate the poets' respective practises is, simply, that Coleridge
here tried to bend his practise to correspond to Wordsworth's. If we were
to follow the track of John Livingston Lowes, we would endeavour to
make something of an image or two that might be traced, say, to the
Gutch notebook. Could
The Sun-shine lies on the cottage-wall
Ashining thro' the snow -
perhaps have flowered into the opening lines of The Three Graves (Part
in)?
The Grapes upon the Vicar's wall
Were ripe as ripe could be;
And yellow leaves in Sun and Wind
Were falling from the tree.
But searching out possible transmutations of this order only evades the
plain fact that this portion of The Three Graves is couched in a diction so
plain, so simple, so Wordsworthian, as to seem, in Coleridge's voice,
elaborately mannered, even a species of ventriloquism. How else could
Coleridge have composed such a stanza as the following (from Part n)
except by straining to force his language into the cadences of (Wordswor-
thian) common speech:
He reach'd his home, and by his looks
They saw his inward strife:
And they clung round him with their arms,
Both Ellen and his wife.
Or this stanza from Part iv:
One evening he took up a book,
And nothing in it read;
Thenflungit down, and groaning cried,
Oh! Heaven! that I were dead.
With specimens like this at hand, we might irreverently wonder why
Wordsworth should have had to turn, in the 1800 Preface, to Dr Johnson
for an example of 'contemptible' matter:
I put my hat upon my head
And walk'd into the Strand . . . .
Coleridge's contempt for his own strained efforts to bend to his part-
ner's notion of poetic diction grew over the years. When he reprinted his
portion of The Three Graves in Sibylline Leaves (1817) he prefixed to it a most
 Coleridge's lyrical ballads 109
extraordinary disclaimer that touched on two central points in Word-
sworth's manifesto of 1800, and signalled Coleridge's total dissent:
the language [of 'the following humble fragment' ] was intended to be dramatic;
that is, suited to the narrator; and the metre corresponds to the homeliness of the
diction. It is therefore presented as the fragment, not of a Poem, but of a com-
mon Ballad-tale. Whether this is sufficient to justify the adoption of such a style,
in any metrical composition not professedly ludicrous, the Author is in some
doubt. At all events, it is not presented as Poetry, and it is in no way connected
with the Author's judgement concerning Poetic diction.
No readers appear to have taken up this astonishingly open invitation to
look upon the ballad as ludicrous, though the piece has not drawn much
praise, either. Swinburne, to be sure, thought it magnificent, though his
lyrical tribute reads almost like parody. Comparing Coleridge's common
Ballad-tale to Wordsworth's dramatic (that is, 'lyrical') ballad, The
Thorn, Swinburne proclaimed that
Coleridge, in his otherwise Wordsworthian poem of The Three Graves, has shown
how a subject of homely horror, a tale of humble and simple wickedness, of sim-
ple and humble suffering, may be treated with poetic propriety and with tragic
exactitude.7
Wordsworth, in his later years, had taken precisely the opposite view.
Recognizing in Coleridge the sort of'personal and domestic discontent'
that made it difficult for him to portray suffering with sympathy, Word-
sworth charged that Coleridge made The Three Graves 'too shocking and
painful, and not sufficiently sweetened by any healing views'. He then
went on, speaking to Barron Field after Coleridge's death, to utter a
casual, trenchant, almost certainly wrong-headed remark that takes us
back to the annus mirabilis and invites thoughtful examination: 'Not be-
ing able to dwell on or sanctify natural woes, he took to the supernatural,
and hence his Ancient Mariner and Christabel. ' 8

III

As a matter of chronological fact, Coleridge took to the supernatural

before his 'personal and domestic discontent' had risen to uncomfortable
levels. He was attracted to Burger's poems as early as 1796, and we can
tell what he liked in Burger from the Biirgeresque features he incor-
porated in The Ancient Mariner. These included not only the magical haun-
ting air of miracle and terror that supernatural events evoke, as in the
'ghostlie crew' that whirled and danced in air, but what the Monthly
110 STEPHEN PARRISH
Magazine (in March 1796) called the 'hurrying vigour' of Burger's 'im-
petuous diction', as in such lines as these:
To and fro they are hurried about;
And to and fro, and in and out
The stars dance on between.
John Beer has observed9 that these features can be found in Scott's
translation, as well as William Taylor's, and quotes two sufficiently sug-
gestive stanzas:
Tramp! tramp! along the land they rode;
Splash! splash! along the sea;
The steed is wight, the spur is bright,
Theflashingpebbles flee.
The furious Barb snorts fire and foam;
And with a fearful bound
Dissolves at once in empty air,
And leaves him on the ground.
Although Wordsworth paid Burger the tribute of parody in The Idiot Boy,
he hung back short of admiration, as an exchange of letters with Col-
eridge in 1799 reveals. Pronouncing Burger to be a 'poet of the animal
spirits', he complained stiffly that Burger communicated 'no delicate or
minute feelings', and more pointedly, that he failed to create character,
other than his own. 'It seems to me, that in poems descriptive of human
nature, however short they be, character is absolutely necessary . . . in-
cidents are among the lowest allurements of poetry. '10 Coleridge seems
to have defended Burger against these charges, ineffectually, and he had
to report good-humouredly to Taylor that the argument broke up in
'metaphysical disquisitions on the nature of character', fortunately now
lost.
But it is important to note that Wordsworth himself, by his own ac-
count, contributed two particularly striking supernatural incidents to The
Ancient Mariner (besides suggesting the apparition of the skeleton ship with
figures on it). These were the navigation of the mariner's vessel by his
dead crew-mates, and the vengeance enacted for the albatross's death by
tutelary spirits of the polar region (WPW, I, p. 361). It is not known
when Wordsworth made these suggestions, but one fact of the poem's
history may offer a clue. On 18 February 1798, Coleridge announced to
Cottle that he had 'finished' his ballad in 340 lines (CL, i, p. 387). It was
again (or still) 'finished' on 23 March, as Dorothy recorded in her jour-
nal. But by the time it went to the printer it had swollen out to 658 lines.
It is teasing to speculate what sort of poem the earlier finished version was,
though speculation might be fruitless were it not for Wordsworth's ac-
count of his contributions. As it stood in the 1798 volume the poem had
seven parts as follows:
 Coleridge }s lyrical ballads 111

Parti 80 lines
Part II 58 lines
Part III 77 lines
Part IV 68 lines
PartV 131 lines
Part VI 132 lines
Part VII 112 lines
At the close of Part iv, 284 lines into the ballad, the Mariner feels a
' spring of love' gush from his heart, as he leans over the rail looking down
into the shadow of the ship, and he blesses the water snakes 'unaware',
with no more conscious premeditation than he had brought to the
shooting of the albatross at the close of Part i. After this point the ballad
seems to loop and wallow a bit, as though it were being stretched out, and
it is not hard to imagine an original closing section of, perhaps, 56 lines
(340 minus 284) which brought the mariner expeditiously home and
completed his punishment, or his expiation. Could Wordsworth, we
might wonder, having seen the first 'finished' version of 340 lines, have
made his suggestions at this stage and prompted Coleridge to make in-
sertions? The navigation of the vessel by the dead men falls in Part v of
the 1798 text, and the vengeance exacted by tutelary spirits falls in Parts
v and vi. (Readers may decide for themselves whether, if this specula-
tion seem plausible, Wordsworth would have made The Ancient Mariner
a better poem than he found it.)
Whatever the case, Wordsworth could hardly at any of these stages
have disapproved openly of the supernatural, or attributed Coleridge's
adoption of it to any sort of discontent. What is more likely is that he
looked upon it as having nothing to do with the revolution in poetic
taste he was committed to bringing about. The earliest manifesto of
the revolution was not the 1800 Preface, but the 1798 Advertisement,
and there Wordsworth had nothing to say about the supernatural, or
indeed about two kinds of poetry: he speaks only of 'the language of
conversation in the middle and lower classes of society' and the 'natural
delineation of human passions, human characters, and human in-
cidents'. These remarks made necessary some sort of apology for the
odd, archaic language of The Ancient Mariner, and Wordsworth explain-
ed that the poem 'was professedly written in imitation of the style,
as well as the spirit of the elder poets; but with a few exceptions, the
Author believes that the language adopted in it has been equally in-
telligible for these last three centuries'.
For Wordsworth's indifference to the supernatural in 1798 there is
another explanation: he had simply outgrown it. If we look back over
what is now available of his juvenilia - his school-boy and Cambridge
112 STEPHEN PARRISH
verse - we find much of it luridly Gothic, peopled with ghastly skeletal
forms, spectres in 'clanking chains', the 'druid sons' of Superstition,
moving or shrieking in a landscape of ruined castles and sable mountains
'array'd/ In gloomy blank impervious shade'.11 Wordsworth is not like-
ly to have been pleased to recognize, as he might well have done, echoes
of this juvenile verse in The Ancient Mariner. Norman Fruman has pointed
to one possible example.12 Lines 330, 337-9 of the de Selincourt text of
The Vale ofEsthwaite -
His bones look'd sable through his skin . . .
But from his trembling shadow broke
Faint murmuring - sad and hollow moans
As if the wind sigh'd through his bones -
may perhaps glimmer through lines 181, 195-6 of The Ancient Mariner:
His bones were black with many a crack . . .
A gust of wind starte up behind
And whistled thro' his bones.
It is tempting to generalize a little from these particulars, and to think
of Coleridge's supernatural as equivalent to, perhaps a development
from, Wordsworth's Gothic. The supernatural and the Gothic did not
serve the same poetic function, but they could have arisen from the same
psychological origins - a fascination with terror, with the marvellous,
with a realm of sensibility beyond the real. The fact that Coleridge came
to his realm with an explorer's fresh delight just as Wordsworth, wearied,
turned away from it, may help to account for some of the differences that
divided the partners in Lyrical Ballads almost from the start.

IV

Soon after his return from Germany in the spring of 1799 Wordsworth
began to voice uneasiness about the possible 'injury' The Ancient Mariner
had done to Lyrical Ballads. Fearful that 'the old words and the strangeness
of it have deterred readers from going on', he proposed to his publisher
to 'put in its place some little things which would be more likely to suit
the common taste' (EY, p. 264). This uneasiness would have hung like
a cloud over the conversations that accompanied renewed work on Lyrical
Ballads. On 6 April 1800, Coleridge arrived in Grasmere, and upon his
arrival Wordsworth made known his intention of putting together a se-
cond edition, as Coleridge reported to Southey on 10 April. When he left
on 4 May Coleridge took some of the new poems with him to deliver to
 Coleridge's lyrical ballads 113
Davy in Bristol (who was to read proofs), but steady partnership did not
resume until the end ofJune, when Coleridge returned to the North to
settle in with his family. About two weeks after their arrival, in mid-July,
the first of the series of folio sheets copied out by Coleridge with some help
from Dorothy (but little from William) went off to the printer, and
dispatch of these sheets, containing new poems and revisions of old
poems, ran on at intervals up into December.
During this period of shared labour and ongoing disputation Words-
worth composed the Preface, which like the Advertisement of 1798 concen-
trated on his own poems and developed his own theoretical position on
the issues that divided him from Coleridge. The omission of any men-
tion of the supernatural was what must have prompted Coleridge to pro-
ject, rather wistfully a few months later, the writing of one or two essays
of his own - on the 'Marvellous' in poetry, and on the 'Preternatural'
(CL, II, pp. 707, 716). In between sessions of copying out Wordsworth's
poems for the printer Coleridge undertook some spotty revisions of The
Ancient Mariner, which was dislodged from the opening of Volume I and
buried in the next-to-last position, just ahead of Tintern Abbey. There was
not much he could do to meet Wordsworth's complaint, shortly to be
spelled out, that the mariner had 'no distinct character', but he did
remove some of the 'strangeness' that Wordsworth had worried about.
A good deal of archaic language was modernized, and some of the most
vivid stanzas in the poem were simply dropped. These look like
reasonably good specimens of Words worthian Gothic, but with a clinical
intensity that makes them seem rather like the naturalized supernatural:

The moonlight bay was white all o'er,

Till rising from the same,
Full many shapes, that shadows were,
Like as of torches came.
A little distance from the prow
Those dark-red shadows were;
But soon I saw that my own flesh
Was red as in a glare.
I turn'd my head in fear and dread,
And by the holy rood,
The bodies had advanc'd, and now
Before the mast they stood.
They lifted up their stiff right arms,
They held them strait and tight;
And each right-arm burnt like a torch,
A torch that's borne upright.
Their stony eye-balls glitter'd on
114 STEPHEN PARRISH

In the red and smoky light.

I pray'd and turn'd my head away

Forth looking as before.
There was no breeze upon the bay,
No wave against the shore.
Whether Coleridge made these excisions and revisions at his partner's
direction cannot be known, nor can we know (though we can guess) who
decided on the reductive sub-title 'A Poet's Reverie'. (Lamb found the
sub-title as comical as 'Bottom the Weaver's declaration that he is not
a Lion, but only the scenical representation of a Lion'.) 13 But the revi-
sions are less revealing of the critical dialogues going on in Grasmere and
Keswick than the extraordinary note to the poem which Wordsworth
composed and sent off on 2 October (after Coleridge had gone, briefly,
to visit his family). It is hard to think of a comparable gesture - a con-
temptuous apology for the 'defects' in a poem which is supposedly be-
ing printed against the desire of its author! Even the tone and the man-
ner of the note betray the strength of feeling that must have animated the
two poets' dialogues:
I cannot refuse myself the gratification [ it begins ] of informing such Readers as
may have been pleased with this Poem, or with any part of it, that they owe their
pleasure in some sort to me; as the Author was himself very desirous that it should
be suppressed. The wish had arisen from a consciousness of the defects of the Poem
and from a knowledge that many persons had been much displeased with it.
As he went on to spell out the defects in the 'Poem of my friend', Words-
worth focussed, as he did in a paired note to The Thorn, on the central
issues that discriminated his understanding of a lyrical ballad from his
partner's: the issues of the choice of a speaking character, of dramatic pro-
priety, and of poetic language.14
However stung he may have been, Coleridge deferred his response un-
til 1817, when he was able in his turn to itemize some defects in Word-
sworth's poetry. In 1800 and 1801 he spoke nothing but admiration,
singling out in letters to friends Michael, Ruth, and The Brothers as the finest
new poems in the collection. Only Ruth can be thought of as a ballad, and
the centre of the controversy between the partners is once again revealed
by Coleridge's puzzled complaint, two years later, to Southey about
Wordsworth's alterations in Ruth for the edition of 1802 (which put into
a speaker's mouth observations that were earlier heard in the poet's).
These, together with some of Wordsworth's recent ballad poems, forced
Coleridge at long last to recognize 'a radical Difference in our theoretical
opinions respecting Poetry' (CL, n, p. 830).
Christabelraised other problems between the partners. The history of
 Coleridge }s lyrical ballads 115
Coleridge's struggle to finish it is too well known to need rehearsal. His
failure doubtless sharpened Wordsworth's exasperation, for it obliged
him first to cancel a portion of the Preface (which he later restored) then
to compose a long poem to fill up the gap in the volume (to Coleridge's
failure we owe Michael). The old theoretical issues appear to have arisen
exactly as they had with The Ancient Mariner, covering his failure Coleridge
explained gracefully to Davy in October that Christabelwas 'so much ad-
mired by Wordsworth, that he thought it indelicate to print two Volumes
with his name in which so much of another man's was included - & which
was of more consequence - the poem was in direct opposition to the very
purpose for which the Lyrical Ballads were published' (CL, I, p. 631). It
is not hard to judge which of these conflicting explanations was the true
one.
More important, however, than theoretical disagreements were the
humiliation and the sense of defeat which Coleridge had to endure, and
which, joined with his other multiple afflictions, brought him to an end
as a poet. His letter to Godwin of 25 March 1801, in which appears the
terrible image of his own imagination as a burnt-out candle, looked back
over a period of nine months - April to December 1800 - and it is possi-
ble to think of these nine months as the critical turning-point in Col-
eridge's life. They cover his move to the north of England, the birth of
his third child, his realization that his marriage was finally hopeless, pro-
longed illness, and his irrevocable commitment to life-long dependen-
cy on laudanum - a sufficient catalogue of 'personal and domestic
distress'. Heightening the distress was his persistent veneration for 'the
giant Wordsworth', whose industry and genius seemed more and more
to mock Coleridge's numb incapacities. Pathetic tokens of these in-
capacities lie scattered through Coleridge's letters and notebooks, some
agonizingly candid, some muted. Towards the end of the nine-month
period of gathering despair (30 October 1800), Coleridge jotted down a
little dramatic meditation which we can now perceive to be one of the sad-
dest entries in the whole range of his marvellous notebooks: 'He knew
not what to do - something, he felt, must be done - he rose, drew his
writing-desk before him - sate down, took the pen - & found that he
knew not what to do' (CN, I, 834).

While the main outlines of Coleridge's theoretical notion of the ballad

emerge from the story of the controversies that stretched over the years
116 STEPHEN PARRISH
of his partnership with Wordsworth, our final understanding of it has to
rest upon our interpretation of the brilliant ballads he wrote. It should be
clear to any reader of The Ancient Mariner that what principally separates
Coleridge from Wordsworth is not his theory of diction, or metre, or the
management of narrative, but the allegorical bent of his imagination. It
was the sort of imagination that could transmute the mist and snow, the
sun the moon and the stars, into symbol clusters, and could lift a 'com-
mon Faery Tale' (his own phrase for Christabel) to the level of myth (BL,
II, p. 238). The working of such an imagination remains a mystery,
obliging us to grope for metaphors to render it comprehensible, and for
that reason we should in the end be grateful to John Livingston Lowes for
providing us such opulent variety to choose from. As a gesture of grati-
tude, it seems appropriate to let Lowes have the final word (page 67):
Well, the subliminal ego doubtless deals the cards, as the throng of sleeping im-
ages, at this call or that, move toward the light. But the fall of the cards accepted,
the shaping spirit of imagination conceives and masterfully carries out the strategy
of the game. Grant all you will to the involuntary and automatic operations of the
Well - its blendings and fusings, each into each, of animalcules, and rainbows,
and luminous tracks across the sea, and all the other elements of chaos. There still
remains the architectonic imagination, moving, sua sponte, among the scattered
fragments, and discerning, latent in their confusion, the pattern of a whole. And
the shadow of a sail in an old travel-book and the rude parallelism of a pair of sket-
ches of porpoises and dolphins - themselves among the recollections tumbling
over one another in the dark - may through an act of imaginative vision gather
up the whole chaos into consciousness as a poised and symmetrical shape of light.
There is little need of further c o m m e n t . . . .

NOTES
1
I cite the revised edition of 1930, reprinted Boston: page 55.
2
I refer to Coleridge on Imagination (New York 1950).
3
Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth (Cambridge 1970), pp. 84-85.
4
Coleridge (New York and London, 1968), pp. 47-8.
5
In The Art ofthe Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge, Mass., 1973).
6
In his 'Prefatory Note' in the edition of 1828.
7
Miscellanies (London 1886), p. 140.
8
Field's 'Memoirs' were quoted by Ernest de Selincourt in The Early Word-
sworth (n.p. The English Association 1936), p. 28n.
9
Coleridge the Visionary (London, 1959), p. 147.
10
Coleridge sums up and quotes Wordsworth's letters in writing to William
Taylor (CL, I, pp. 564-6).
11
Quotations are from The Vale ofEsthwaite, the de Selincourt text in Volume
I of The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth.
12
Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel (New York 1971), p. 320.
13
As he wrote to Wordsworth on January 30, 1801: The Letters of Charles and
Mary Lamb, ed. Edwin Marrs (3 vols. 1975- ) I 266.
14
The two notes appeared at the back of Volume I of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads.
'Radical Difference': Wordsworth and Coleridge,
1802

LUCYNEWLYN

Coleridge's growing sense of distance from Wordsworth was accen-

tuated, not caused, by his 'own peculiar lot' in 1802; and it did not always
produce the envy and exclusion so clearly present in the Letter to Sara Hut-
chinson. The two men were in fact moving, intellectually and creatively,
in opposite directions. Wordsworth at times seemed oblivious of change,
and wrote as though the closeness of their earlier relationship still existed.
But Coleridge became increasingly aware of ways in which they differed.
In a series ofjustly famous letters, written during this year, one sees him
not merely acknowledging divergence, but also (with a sort of dog-
gedness) tracking down its causes. 'I rather suspect', he writes to Robert
Sou they, in July,
that some where or other there is a radical Difference in our theoretical opinions
respecting Poetry - / this I shall endeavour to go to the Bottom of - and acting
the arbitrator between the old School & the New School hope to lay down some
plain, & perspicuous, tho' not superficial, Canons of Criticism respecting Poetry.
(CL, II, p. 830)
This is the germ of Biographia Literaria. 'Radical Difference' is something
Coleridge believes to have grown from his increasing dissatisfaction with
the 1800 Preface. Wordsworth's claim there, that the language of ordinary
life is appropriate for poetry, seems questionable to him, though he can-
not yet say why. Two weeks earlier, he had written to Sotheby:
In my opinion, Poetry justifies, as Poetry independent of any other Passion, some
new combinations of Language, & commands the omission of many others
allowable in other compositions. Now Wordsworth, me saltern judice, has in his
system not sufficiently admitted the former, & in his practice has too frequently
sinned against the latter. (CL, II, p. 812)
This seems clear enough: poetry must be granted a degree of autonomy,
and should in some cases have an obligation to be selective in what it takes
from ordinary life. Wordsworth, by implication, is too wholesale in his
use of everyday language, and follows too rigidly the theory of the 1800
117
118 LUGYNEWLYN
Preface. In October, however, writing to Thomas Wedgwood, Coleridge
seems less sure: 'in point of poetic Diction I am not so well s [atisf] ied
that you do not require a certain A loofness from [the la] nguage of real
Life, which I think deadly to Poetry' (CL, n, p. 877). George Watson,
misinterpreting the comment, writes that Coleridge 'has moved so far
from the Preface that he feels poetic diction to "require a certain aloofness
from [the la] nguage of real life," V In fact, he means precisely the
reverse. The 'you' of 'you do not require' does not mean 'one'; it refers
directly to Thomas Wedgwood, who has just criticised some of Col-
eridge's poems for their 'feeble expressions & unpolished Lines' (CL, n,
p. 876). 'I sometimes suspect', he goes on to explain,
that my foul Copy would often appear to general Readers more polished, than
my fair Copy - many of the feeble & colloquial Expressions have been in-
dustriously substituted for others, which struck me as artificial, & not standing
the test - as being neither the language of passion nor distinct Conceptions.
(CL, II, p. 877)
Here, then, one sees Coleridge returning to the values of the 1800 Preface.
He is expressing his own preference for a colloquial 'language of passion',
as opposed to the 'polished' and 'artificial' diction admired by his readers.
And he is doing so in terms that seem entirely to contradict his statement
of three months before. It is important, first, that he makes these com-
ments about his own poetic practice, and is not likely, therefore, to be
bluffing; second, that he is seriously implying criticism of a man he would
normally flatter.2 One can hardly doubt that he is expressing a genuine
opinion, yet the change of mind, within three months, seems perverse.
An explanation for the discrepancy is needed.
Coleridge's statement to Sotheby in July, 'Poetryjustifies, as Poetry in-
dependent of any other Passion, some new combinations of Language',
does not deny the connection between poetry and passion; it requires that
the language of real life should be refined to give poetry its intenseness.
There is nothing inconsistent here with the thinking that lies behind the
1800 Preface - 'the Reader cannot be too often reminded that Poetry is
passion: it is the history or science of feelings'3 - and it is important that
Coleridge remains faithful to this belief right through the period of his
re-thinking, and on into Biographia itself.4 Taking 'passion' as a central
criterion, hefirststates carefully in Chapter Seventeen that 'the property
of passion is not to create, but to set in increased activity' (BLS, n, p. 42),
then makes a distinction between the poetic and undiscriminating use of
ordinary language:

It is indeed very possible to adopt in a poem the unmeaning repetitions, habitual

phrases, and other blank counters, which an unfurnished or confused understan-
 'Radical Difference' 119

ding interposes at short intervals, in order to keep hold of his subject, which is
still slipping from him, and to give him time for recollection. . . . But what
assistance to the poet, or ornament to the poem, these can supply, I am at a loss
to conjecture.
'Nothing', he continues, making clear his distinctions,
assuredly can differ either in origin or in mode more widely from the apparent
tautologies of intense and turbulent feeling, in which the passion is of greater and
of longer endurance than to be exhausted or satisfied by a single representation
of the image or incident exciting it. (BL, II, p. 57)
Reading between the lines, one suspects that Coleridge sees in Word-
sworth an inability to distinguish between these two kinds of language.
It is not clear, however, whether he thinks of the lack of discrimination
as a feature of Wordsworth's theory, or merely an occasional failure in
his poetry. In the letter to Sotheby he puts forward both possibilities, but
conducts his argument on a largely theoretical basis. In Biographia (where
his main aim is to prove a disparity between the claims of the 1800 Preface
and the poetry itself) he argues, again, in terms of the theory. But what,
in both cases, is the real source of his unease?
To return to the letter Coleridge writes to Sou they in July:

altho' Wordsworth's Preface is half a child of my own Brain / & so arose out of
Conversations, so frequent, that with few exceptions we could scarcely either of
us perhaps positively say, whichfirststarted any particular Thought. . . yet I am
far from going all lengths with Wordsworth / He has written lately a number of
Poems (32 in all) some of them of considerable Length (the longest 160 Lines) the
greater number of these to my feelings very excellent Compositions / but here &
there a daring Humbleness of Language & Versification, and a strict adherence
to matter of fact, even to prolixity, that startled me / his alterations likewise in
Ruth perplexed me / and I have thought & thought & thought again / & have not
had my doubts solved by Wordsworth (CL, II, p. 830)
The criticisms seem to be levelled at individual poems, but it is not easy
to say which. If one takes it that Coleridge has the language of real life
in mind, only a small group out of the 32 lyrics is eligible. The Leechgatherer
in its early form is presumably the poem estimated a t ' 160 lines'; there
is a scattering of 'lyrical ballads' like The Sailor's Mother, Alice Fell, Beg-
gars (and possibly, The Affliction of Margaret)', and Coleridge might also in-
clude such playful, garrulous poems as The Tinker, To A Skylark and The
Barberry Tree. In each case, his criticism would have a good deal ofjustice.
The Leechgatherer, before Wordsworth revises it, might easily be condemn-
ed for its 'strict adherence to matter of fact, even to prolixity' - indeed
Sara Hutchinson's comment that it is 'tedious' amounts to the same
thing.5 Equally, the ballads of 1802 are a disappointment after their
earlier counterparts. They slip into banality, and often seem too close to
120 LUCYNEWLYN
the events that inspired them. Of Beggars, for instance, Dorothy writes
in her Journal for 13 March:

After tea I read to William that account of the little Boys belonging to the tall
woman and an unlucky thing it wasfor he could not escapefrom those very words, and so
he could not write the poem. He left it unfinished and went tired to Bed.
(DWJ,l, p. 123, my italics)

As for poems like The Tinker and The Skylark, there cannot be much doubt
as to their 'daring Humbleness of Language & Versification':

Right before the Farmer's door

Down he sits his brows he knits:
Then his hammer he rouzes
Batter, batter, batter
He begins to clatter
And while the work is going on
Right good ale he bouzes. {The Tinker, 11. 9-15)
But even having acknowledged the appropriateness of Coleridge's
remarks (and they are largely, it seems, value-judgements) one has not
arrived at the centre of his critical position. Something in his reaction
against Wordsworth's lyrics goes deeper than his specific objections
might suggest, causing him first to make vague approving comments he
cannot support ('the greater number of these to my feelings very excellent
Compositions'), then to search for labels like 'daring Humbleness' or
'strict adherence to matter of fact' to explain his unease. The labels are
not arbitrary, but they apply to so small a proportion of the lyrics that one
senses deeper underlying reservations which Coleridge is not choosing
to acknowledge.
Other letters, written during 1802, tell us a good deal more. The
famous one to Sotheby, written on 10 September, contains a reaffirm -
ation of values supposedly shared by Wordsworth in 1798:

Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes & feels,
that every Thing has a Life of it's own, & that we are all one Life. A Poet's Heart
& Intellect should be combined, intimately combined & unified, with the great ap-
pearances in Nature - & not merely held in solution & loose mixture with them,
in the shape of formal Similies. I do not mean to exclude these formal Similies -
there are moods of mind, in which they are natural - pleasing moods of mind,
& such as a Poet will often have, & sometimes express; but they are not his highest,
& most appropriate moods. (CL, II, p. 864)

The poet Coleridge has in mind is Bowles, whose 'perpetual trick of

moralizing every thing' goes against his own most basic requirement: that
'every phrase, every metaphor, every personification, should have it's
justifying cause in some passion either of the Poet's mind, or of the
 'Radical Difference' 121

Characters described by the poet' (CL, n, p. 812). Judged by this

criterion, Bowles is bound to fail. His poetry, at one time greatly admired
and imitated by Coleridge, now seems to deny the values of the 'One
Life'.
Coleridge would not have intended it to do so, but his critique of
Bowles applies equally well to the Wordsworth of 1802. When he makes
the concession - 'I do not mean to exclude these formal Similies - there
are moods of mind, in which they are natural - pleasing moods of mind
. . .' - he might very easily be thinking of To A Butterfly, or To A Daisy.
It is interesting, in this connection, to notice that a number of Word-
sworth's lyrics are grouped in 1807 under the heading 'Moods of my own
Mind'. There is an acceptance of limitation in the slightness of the label,
as though Wordsworth were himself conceding that 'they are not his
highest, & most appropriate moods'. If one takes the analogy further,
Coleridge's phrase 'merely held in solution & loose mixture' exactly
describes the quality of Wordsworth's response in spring 1802:

Oft do I sit by thee at ease,

And weave a web of similies,
Loose types of Things through all degrees,
Thoughts of thy raising;
And many a fond and idle name
I give to thee, for praise or blame,
As is the humour of the game,
While I am gazing (To A Daisy, 11. 9—16)
Here, as in many of the 1802 lyrics, Wordsworth is writing about the
workings of fancy, and is intrigued by the possibilities it opens up. Fan-
cy is a sort of loose associationism. It does not bind thoughts and images
tightly together, but allows them to proliferate, as though they had a will
of their own: 'Loose types of Things through all degrees, / Thoughts of thy
raising*. By implication, the process is rapid and aimless. It involves the
thinker, not in a full engagement with the natural object, but in a se-
quence of namings and re-namings, which certainly do not seem to have
their 'justifying cause in some passion . . . of the poet's mind'. Word-
sworth is not making claims for fancy as more than a 'game'; in fact, he
stresses its 'ease', 'fond'-ness, 'idle'-ness and 'humour'. Yet there is
something magical in' weav [ ing] a web of similies' which gives the pro-
cess a creative status. Later, in his Preface to Poems, 1815, Wordsworth
writes, 'Fancy depends upon the rapidity and profusion with which she
scatters her thoughts and images . . . or she prides herself upon the curious
subtilty and the successful elaborations with which she can detect their
lurking affinities' {Prose Works, in, p. 36). This is by no means a limited
claim: fancy is capable of 'insinuating herself into the heart of objects with
122 LUCYNEWLYN
creative activity' (ibid, p. 30). The language Wordsworth uses - 'curious
subtilty', 'detect', 'lurking'and'insinuating' - gives her an unpredic-
table, almost insidious, power. One recalls that in Prelude, Book Eight,
the lwilfulness of fancy and conceit', intruding into human relationships,
gives 'them new importance to the mind' (1805, vm, 520-2). It is in this
context that Wordsworth first defines the relation between fancy and
passion:
My present theme
Is to retrace the way that led me on
Through Nature to the love of human-kind;
Nor could I with such object overlook
The influence of this power which turned itself
Instinctively to human passions . . . (1805, VIII, 586-91)
Fancy may be capricious, but it is redeemed by its connections with
human feelings. They allow it to find its way 'into the heart of objects'
- to merge, in other words, with the creative imagination.
For the Coleridge of 1798, such merging had been a possibility.Frost
at Midnight — in so far as poetry of this kind can offer definitions - had
done so in Wordsworthian terms. Fancy (emblematised in the fluttering
movement of the 'stranger') had seemed atfirstto be a form of entrapment:
evidence of the 'self-watching subtilising mind' (1.27). But through a se-
quence of associations, activated and validated by emotion, it had led to
the memory within a memory of church bells, which were 'most like ar-
ticulate sounds of things to come' (1.38). The 'most believing
superstitious wish' of childhood (1.29) - as opposed, by implication, to
the introversion of the adult - was thus able to guide Coleridge from
pure associationism into imagination. Fancy, in the process, had been
exonerated. All quotations, here, refer to the text of Frost at Midnight
published in the Quarto volume of 1798. When he came to revise the
poem for publication in Sibylline Leaves, Coleridge made alterations that
were in keeping with the disparagement of fancy that one sees in
Biographia. Completely missing from the best known published text are
lines in which he had carefully juxtaposed the seriousness and frivolity
of fancy's workings, seeing creative potential alongside idleness:
But still the living spirit in our frame,
That loves not to behold a lifeless thing,
Transfuses into all it's own delights
Its own volition, sometimes with deep faith,
And sometimes with fantastic playfulness . . . (11.21-5)
In their place one finds the famous and much quoted lines about solip-
sism, in which, with a tone almost of contempt, Coleridge describes the
fluttering 'stranger'
 'Radical Difference' 123

Whose punyflapsand freaks the idling Spirit

By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought. (11.20-3)

Damage is done, in the process of revision, to the logic of the poem: for
how, if the workings of the fancy are so narcissistic, can release from the
self be achieved? But in its own right, the alteration is fascinating, as a
record of the major change that Coleridge's thinking has undergone.
All the evidence suggests that it is already an articulated change by
1802. The merging of fancy and imagination, possible for Wordsworth
not only in the Prelude lines already quoted (which belong to October
1804), but right through into the Preface of 1815, is already by 1802aclos-
ed option for Coleridge. Biographia - implicitly refuting the 1815 Preface
- tells one very briefly what the division between these two faculties is,
but the letter to Sotheby, written fifteen years earlier, gives us a clearer
idea of why it should exist:

It must occur to every Reader that the Greeks in their religious poems address
always the Numina Loci, the Genii, the Dryads, the Naiads, &c &c - All natural
Objects were dead - mere hollow Statues - but there was a Godkin or Goddessl-
ing included in each - In the Hebrew Poetry you find nothing of this poor Stuff
- as poor in genuine Imagination, as it is mean in Intellect - / At best, it is but
Fancy, or the aggregating Faculty of the mind - not Imagination, or the modifying,
and co-adunating Faculty. This the Hebrew Poets appear to me to have possessed
beyond all others - & next to them the English. In the Hebrew Poets each Thing
has a Life of it's own, & yet they are all one Life. (CL, II, pp. 865-6)

The connection between this and Coleridge's criticism of Bowles must

be apparent. Greek poetry deals with natural objects as though they were
'dead' - 'mere hollow Statues'. Any life they might seem to have is con-
ferred on them, or 'included' in them, by an essentially limited faculty
of the mind. This faculty interprets things not as parts or symbols of a
whole, but as separate,fixedentities - each with its own diminutive pro-
perty of conferred life. To put it in the terms applied to Bowles: imagina-
tion causes the 'Heart & Intellect' to be 'combined, intimately combined &
unified, with the great appearances in Nature'; fancy holds the mind and
natural objects 'in solution & loose mixture . . . in the shape of formal
Similies' {CL, n, p. 864). Coleridge makes no allowance, as Word-
sworth does, for the connection between fancy and human emotion.
Godkins and Goddesslings do not have their 'justifying cause in some
passion . . . of the Poet's mind', but are merely a decoration or after
thought. As he puts it, dismissively, in Biographia:
124 LUGYNEWLYN
FANCY . . . 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 that 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 associa-
tion. (BL, I, p. 305)
If Fancy really is no more than 'a mode of Memory emancipated from
the order of time and space', it is both limited and dangerous - limited,
because it can play only with 'fixities and definites' (the ready made
materials of 'the law of association'); dangerous, because it has the
capacity to run riot, destroying true poetry. In this respect it resembles
the 'false diction' referred to by Wordsworth as 'the gaudiness and in-
ane phraseology of many modern writers' in the Advertisement to Lyrical
Ballads, 1798 (Prose Works, I, p. 116), and later defined more fully in the
1800 Preface:

Poets . . . think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art
in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and in-
dulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression in order to furnish food for fickle
tastes and fickle appetites of their own creation.
(Prose Works, I, p. 124; my italics)

There is no obvious connection between fancy and the language of or-

dinary life. But for Coleridge in 1802 they are felt to have an affinity. Just
as fancy can be 'insinuating' in the wrong sense (like false diction, not like
a 'creative activity'), so too can the 'daring Humbleness' of Word-
sworth's language. To return, for a moment, to Biographia, and the end
of Chapter Seventeen:

It is indeed very possible to adopt in a poem the unmeaning repetitions, habitual

phrases, and other blank counters, which an unfurnished or confused understan-
ding interposes at short intervals, in order to keep hold of his subject, which is
still slipping from him, and to give him time for recollection; or in mere aid
of vacancy, as in the scanty companies of a country stage the same player
pops backwards and forwards, in order to prevent the appearance of empty
spaces.. .
The phrase 'blank counters' and the stress on automatic movement -
'the same player pops backwards and forwards' - convey Coleridge's
horror of anything that breaks down the poet's control of his own words,
destroying the connection between language and emotion.6 False dic-
tion, fancy, and 'daring Humbleness' have it in common that they are
anarchic. They threaten the sanctity of poetic language, which should
be (as Milton puts it) 'simple, sensuous, passionate'.
When Coleridge quotes this phrase, in his letter to Sou they ofjuly (CL,
 'Radical Difference' 125
II, p. 830), it is in the context of his dissatisfaction with Wordsworth.
One feels that he turns to Milton in reaction against Wordsworth,
because Milton allows him to think in his customary, symbolic, terms.
Two months later, in the letter to Sotheby, he gives a long and detailed
analysis of the famous passage in Comus about 'Haemony'. It is here that
one sees him most carefully defining his own ideals:
all the puzzle [amongst Milton's commentators] is to find out what Plant
Haemony is - which they discover to be the English Spleenwort - & decked out,
as a mere play & licence of poetic Fancy, with all the strange properties suited to
the purpose of the Drama - They thought little of Milton's platonizing Spirit
- who wrote nothing without an interior meaning. 'Where more is meant, than
meets the ear' is true of himself beyond all writers. He was so great a Man, that
he seems to have consideredfictionas profane, unless where it is consecrated by
being emblematic of some Truth. . . . Do look at the passage - apply it as an
Allegory of Christianity, or to speak more precisely of the Redemption of the Cross
- every syllable is full of Light! (CL, II, pp. 866-7)
Coleridge preserves, here, an implicit distinction between the Bowlesian
'trick of moralizing everything', and the power Milton has to perceive and
create through symbols. His interpretation of the passage from Comus
seems far-fetched, and tells us little about Milton; but it does show how
strongly Coleridge believes that poetry is 'consecrated by being
emblematic of some Truth'. And it reveals, moreover, what sort of
'Truth' he has in mind:
Now what is Haemony? Ai^a-oivoQ - Blood-wine. - And he took the wine &
blessed it, & said - This is my Blood - / the great Symbol of the Death on the
Cross. - There is a general Ridicule cast on all allegorizers of Poets - read
Milton's prose works, & observe whether he was one of those who joined in this
ridicule. (CL, II, p. 867)
Coleridge values symbolic vision, in this sacramental sense, more highly
than any other mode of perception or creation.7 Hebrew poetry comes
nearest to embodying it, because 'In the Hebrew poets each Thing has
a Life of its own, & yet they are all one Life.' Bowles and the Greek poets
are farthest from it, because according to them 'All Natural objects [are]
dead.' Neither words nor things point beyond themselves, or carry
religious implications.
Coleridge is, in fact, with an extraordinary consistency, restating
beliefs which go as far back as 1796. 'Is not Milton a sublimer poet than
Homer or Virgil?' he had asked Thelwall, in a letter written in December
of that year:

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
126 LUCYNEWLYN
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. (CL, I, p. 281)
Measured according to Coleridge's standards, which have remained the
same in kind (if not in degree) since 1796, Wordsworth fails absolutely.
By rights, he should be in the company of the 'Hebrew' poets: that, Col-
eridge feels, is the status he deserves for his earlier writing. But the lyrics
of 1802 are limited, and lacking in symbolic potential. They reveal, by
implication, a new poet: one who is content, like the bad commentators
on Milton, that things should be 'decked out, as a mere play & license
of poetic Fancy' (CL, n, p. 866) - one who has more affinities with
Bowles, the discarded hero, than with the great precursors in a symbolic
tradition.
This lowering of Wordsworth's status is confirmed for Coleridge by
his neglect of The Recluse, which in its original conception had been
designed to celebrate the 'One Life', and which he himself goes on think-
ing of in such terms. 8 Writing to Poole in October 1803, when he brief-
ly assumes Wordsworth has gone back to working on it, Coleridge
stresses the waste that is implied by the shorter lyrics: 'The h a b i t . . . of
writing such a multitude of small Poems was . . . hurtful to him. . . . I real-
ly consider it as a misfortune, that [ he ] ever deserted his former moun-
tain Track to wander in Lanes & allies' (CL, II, p. 1013). In returning to
The Recluse, Wordsworth is re-entering his 'natural Element'. He is con-
firming the values originally given him by Coleridge, in 1798, and writing
a 'great work necessarily comprehending his attention & Feelings within
the circle of great objects & elevated Conceptions' (ibid.) - a work, in
other words, which has genuine affinities with Milton or 'Hebrew'
poetry.9
Coleridge seems as a rule to have found it nearly impossible to analyse,
or confront, the real source of his reservations about Wordsworth's
writing. For an accurate, and in some ways moving, picture of his con-
fusion at having to criticise the friend, 'to whom for the more substan-
tial Third of a Life [ he has ] been habituated to look up', and for whom
'Love . . . begun and throve and knit it's joints in the perception of his
Superiority', one has only to look at the letter written in May 1815,
hesitantly explaining his reservations about The Excursion (CL, iv, pp.
571-3), but never once openly facing the depth of disappointment he
feels. By comparison, the letter to Poole of 1803, quoted above, is
unusually honest, since the emotional basis for the criticism it offers is
tacitly acknowledged. It is a letter that should put Coleridge's exploratory
criticisms of 1802 in perspective. Phrases like 'daring Humbleness of
Language & Versification' or 'strict adherence to matter of fact, even to
 'Radical Difference' 127
prolixity' (CL, n, p. 830) stand out as over-specific labels which are us-
ed to rationalize, even to explain away, the sense of disillusionment Col-
eridge is actually feeling. One could argue that this is simply a matter of
articulation: that he is still wondering, in 1802, what is the cause of the
unease, and that by 1803 he has things clearer in his own mind. It seems
more likely, however, that 1802 is a time when he makes intuitive value-
judgements, then blocks them on an intellectual level. This is partly
because the reverence for his friend is a habit that sticks whatever else is
changed; partly because he is surprised that Wordsworth, of all people,
should be content to achieve so little.
Coleridge's thinking about fancy and imagination, cryptically sum-
marised in Biographia, has a private history (part emotional, part intellec-
tual) which I have tried in this essay to unfold. It goes back to the period
in these writers' relationship when two separate things were happening:
Wordsworth was composing his most overtly fanciful poetry, and Col-
eridge for thefirsttime was downgrading fancy to the merely mechanical.
A causal connection between the two cannot of course be absolutely pro-
ven, but Coleridge's disappointment and sense of betrayal, even when
disguised, speak for themselves. As is so often the case with these two
writers, the real causes of fundamental difference are not acknowledged.
It is the disparity between, on the one hand, Coleridge's increasingly con-
firmed symbolic thinking, and, on the other, Wordsworth's entrench-
ed literal-mindedness, that explains the growing divergence in 1802. Not,
as Coleridge would have it, a disagreement about poetic diction. 'Radical
Difference', then, is a more appropriate phrase than either poet perhaps
realised: Coleridge's famous distinction between fancy and imagination
rests on a profound, though unvoiced, criticism of his friend.

Notes
1
Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (Everyman, 1975), p. xi.
2
'You are a perfect electrometer in these things' he confides to Wedgwood
earlier in the same letter (CL, II, p. 877) - using a phrase he had once ap-
plied to Dorothy Wordsworth (CL, I, p. 331).
3
See the Note to The Thorn in Lyrical Ballads, 1800.
4
See particularly, BL, II, pp. 40-1. That Wordsworth too maintains the
belief can be seen in his letter to Thelwall ofJanuary 1804, where he speaks
of 'the passion of the subject', 'the passion of the metre', 'the Passion of the
sense', and adds that he can scarcely 'admit any limits to the dislocation of
the verse . . . that may not be justified by some passion or other' (EY, pp.
434-5).
5
'You speak of [the Leechgatherer's] speech as tedious', Wordsworth
writes to Sara in June, outraged by her recent letter: 'everything is tedious
when one does not read with the feelings of the Author - The Thorn is tedious
128 LUCYNEWLYN

to hundreds; and so is the Idiot Boy to hundreds. It is in the character of the

old man to tell his story in a manner which an impatient reader must necessari-
ly feel as tedious' (EY, p. 367). The extreme defensiveness is typical of Word-
sworth's state of mind in 1802, but the revisions made to The Leechgatherer,
as a direct consequence of Sara's criticisms, show his absorption of her point
of view.
6
Coleridge is not far, here, from Wordsworth's fear of anarchic language,
described in the second of his Essays on Epitaphs as 'a counter-spirit, unremit-
tingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate,
and to dissolve' {Prose Works, II, p. 85).
7
For comparable definitions of the sacramental, see The Destiny of Nations,
11. 18-20, The Statesman's Manual(SM, pp. 29-30), and CN, II, 2546. Robert
Barth, S. J . , in The Symbolic Imagination, Coleridge and the Romantic Tradition
(Princeton, 1977), examines this aspect of Coleridge's thought in detail.
8
See the letter to Wordsworth of c. 10 September 1799, which clearly con-
nects the idea of The Recluse With 'hopes of the amelioration of mankind' (CL,
I, p. 527), and that of May 1815, in which the same idealistic claims are still
preserved (CL, IV, pp. 574-15).
9
It was presumably Coleridge's admiration for 'Hebrew' poetry that made
him write his Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale ofChamouny (September, 1802),
which strains after religious sublimity in a sequence of sub-Miltonic
exclamations.
 Imagining Wordsworth: 1797 - 1807 - 1817

RICHARD GRAVIL

The symbiosis of Coleridge and Wordsworth is a well attested literary

fact. One may debate the detail, and one may question some extrapola-
tions of cause and effect, but no critic of the period can doubt that the
verse of Tintern Abbey, for instance, and the feeling of Frost at Midnight, are
the fruits of an exchange which was not merely intimate, but at its best
generative of extensions of the human imagination. It is equally the case,
however, though this is a view less often heard, that the long-term effect
of the friendship was a weakening of each poet's confidence in his own
identical voice. Wordsworth's 'descent upon Coleridge' is fairly well
documented: there is evidence for supposing that Wordsworth's insen-
sitivity to Coleridge's imagination was a primary cause of its extinction.
Paradoxically, however, it has also been argued that Coleridge's im-
aginative efflorescence became dependent upon the proximity of his
brother poet.1
That Wordsworth both fostered and stifled Coleridge's distinctive
poetic voice is almost certainly true. But the idea that Coleridge was the
weaker personality, which is in some sense assumed by all the current ac-
counts of their relationship, seems to me to be open to radical question.
Coleridge, after all, pursued his own course through life, and came to be
regarded as the arbiter of Wordsworth's merit. Wordsworth not mere-
ly accepted Coleridge's status in that regard, to a degree which borders
upon self-immolation, but devoted the major part of his lifetime to a
labour ordained for him by Coleridge. He undertook to write, at Col-
eridge's behest, a long philosophical poem expressive of the younger
poet's views to which he strove to subordinate his own. At the same time
he subjected the more natural products of his own imagination to correc-
tive revision in accordance with Coleridge's critical strictures.
With its critically retrogressive strictures on Wordsworth's theory and
practice, Biographia Literaria is part of the history of a sustained rivalry,
the most substantial single instalment of a running battle which goes back
to 1798.2As Coleridge says in a letter of 1817, 'To the faults and defects
129
130 RICHARD GRAVIL

of Wordsworth's poems I have been far more alive than his detractors,
even from the first publication of the Lyrical Ballads, though for a long
course of years my opinions were sacred to his own ear' (CL, iv, p. 780).
Correspondence in 1801-3 with Godwin, Southey and Poole, including
comment on the perversity of Fox and Lamb in preferring the poems Col-
eridge dislikes, makes clear the 'feelings of hostility' Coleridge already
entertains towards those poems which he tosses and gores in 1817. That
Wordsworth's reciprocal failure - and publicly owned failure - tores-
pond to The Ancient Mariner fuels the long stand-off is not in doubt. Col-
eridge read in cold print in 1800 that:
The poem of my Friend has indeed great defects;firstthat the principal person
has no distinct character . . . : secondly, that he does not act. . . thirdly that the
events . . . do not produce each other; and lastly, that his imagery is somewhat
too laboriously accumulated.
Against these perhaps characteristic defects, Wordsworth concedes some
excellences too: The Ancient Mariner has 'many delicate touches of pas-
sion', 'beautiful images', 'unusual felicity of language' and versification
both 'harmonious and artfully varied'. 3 It is barely surprising that as
late as 1818 Coleridge still resented the Wordsworth household's 'cold
praise and effective discouragement of every attempt of mine to roll on-
ward in a distinct current of my own - who admitted that the Ancient
Mariner and the Christabel. . . were not without merit, but were abun-
dantly anxious to acquit their judgement of any blindness to the very
numerous defects'. Nor, perhaps, is it surprising that in 1817 Coleridge
chooses to balance Wordsworth's numerous defects against such oddly
unimpressive excellences as 'an austere purity of language both gram-
matically and logically', 'a corresponding weight and sanity of the
thoughts and sentiments', 'the sinewy strength and sanity of single lines
and paragraphs', 'the perfect truth of nature in his images and descrip-
tions' (an excellence somewhat nullified by his disparagement in the first
paragraph of this chapter of 'faithful adherence to essential nature'), and
'a meditative pathos'. Until Coleridge comes to 'the gift of imagination
in the highest and strictest sense of the word', compared with his less than
graceful exertions of fancy, the list is faintly damning (BL, Chapter 22).
Wordsworth's censure of supernatural incident in poetry, in Peter Bell,
and Coleridge's publication of 'The Three Graves' with its needling
disclaimer that whatever Wordsworth might think, this kind of thing isn't
poetry, are part of this history of almost marital sniping. So, I suspect is
the sardonic postscript to the Duddon sonnets of 1820 in which one may
hear a riposte to Coleridge's criticism (in a letter of 1815) of The Excur-
sion. Conscious of the similarity in theme between his own 'Duddon' and
Coleridge's unwritten 'Brook', Wordsworth admits to trespassing upon
 Imagining Wordsworth 131
ground preoccupied, 'at least as jar as intention went, by Mr. Coleridge, who
more than twenty years ago used to speak of writing a rural poem to be en-
titled ' 'The Brook'' '. After some further phrases admitting of a sardonic
inflection, Wordsworth expresses the hope that his sonnets 'may remind
Mr. Coleridge of his own more comprehensive design, and induce him to
fulfil it'} With one emphasis, 'more comprehensive design' must allude
to the plans for 'The Brook', but with another it could well encompass
Coleridge's comprehensive expectations of The Excursion.
The question, then, is not whether the friendship between Coleridge
and Wordsworth masked a deep theoretical and imaginative rivalry, but
what lay at the root of that continuing struggle. Why is Biographia so
hostile to a large part of Wordsworth's poetry, and what broader ideal
- present to Coleridge's mind in 1817, but perhaps from the outset of
their friendship - licenses the severity of his critique?
There is some substance, one may feel, in Marilyn Butler's suggestion
in Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (Oxford, 1981), that the Biographia
should be seen in the context of ideological revisionism. In the chapter
devoted to Coleridge's abhorrence of revolutionary principles, Chapter
Ten of Biographia, Coleridge observes that Wordsworth's conversation
at Nether Stowey 'extended to almost all subjects except physics and
politics; with the latter he never troubled himself. It would seem that,
in the interests of commending Wordsworth to the propagandists of reac-
tion, Coleridge is not content with assisting at the obsequies for Words-
worth's levelling muse: he extends to Wordsworth, in retrospect, his own
'withdrawal from the consideration of immediate causes', as he had put
it in his letter to George Coleridge in April 1798. To depoliticise Words-
worth, after all, was a relatively minor imaginative exercise, for one who
could say to Crabb Robinson, in December 1810, of no less a precursor
than John Milton, that he was 'a most determined Aristocrat. . . and he
would have been most decidedly hostile to the Jacobins of the present day'
(Misc C, p. 388).
But Coleridge's imaginative revision of his friend began far earlier,
and needs another hypothesis. The author of 'Constancy to an Ideal Ob-
ject' , it has been observed, is one who always aspired to liberate being
from the accidents of temporal existence. 'Wordsworth' in this sense is
a creation of Coleridge's need, an ideal Wordsworth liberated from the
accidents of the existing Wordsworth's particular concerns. Coleridge
did not rewrite 'Wordsworth' in 1817: he began to create the Words-
worth he revered as early as 1797 - from the earliest references to his
friend as a Shakespeare without the 'inequalities' (June 1797), and an
'amiable giant' (March 1798). The ideal object to which Coleridge re-
mained thus constant was the creation of a Wordsworth who is defined
132 RICHARD GRAVIL
toward the close oiBiographia - some two years after the publication of The
Excursion, and a decade after Coleridge had heard The Prelude, as * capable
of producing . . . the FIRST GENUINE PHILOSOPHIC POEM'.
The process of transforming Wordsworth began early, but did not run
smoothly. A 'semi-atheist' in 1796, Wordsworth has progressed by May
1798 to being one who 'loves and venerates Christianity', though Cole-
ridge admits 'I wish he did more' (CL, i, pp. 216, 410). In May 1799
Coleridge is lamenting that the amiable giant 'has hurtfully segregated
and isolated his being' (to Poole, CL, i, p. 491), which develops into an
anxiety, by October 1803, 'lest a film should rise and thicken on his moral
eye' (CL, n, p. 1013). Nevertheless, Coleridge can still, in January
1804, prophesy immortality to The Recluse as long as it is 'a faithful
transcript of his own most august and innocent life, of his own habitual
Feeling and Modes of seeing and hearing' (to Sharp, CL, n, p. 1024).
Corresponding entries in the Notebooks are still more illuminating
than the letters. The Notebook equivalent of a well-known letter contains
a strange metaphor of enshrinement:
I am sincerely glad that he has bidden farewell to all small poems - & is devoting
himself to his great work - grandly imprisoning while it deifies his Attention &
Feelings within the Sacred Circle and Temple Walls of great Objects & elevated
conceptions. (CN, I, 1546)
In the same month, October 1803, an entry on envy begins by analys-
ing his reasons for feeling 'unkindly used' by Wordsworth.
A. thought himself unkindly used by B. - he had exerted himself for B. with what
warmth! honouring, praising B. beyond himself, etc. etc. - B. selfish - feel-
ing all Fire respecting every trifle of his own - quite backward to poor A. The
up, askance, pig look, in the Boat, etc. Soon after this A. felt distinctly little ugly
touchlets of Pain and little Shrinkings Back at the Heart, at the report that B. had
written a new Poem/ an excellent one! & he saw the faults of B. and all that belong-
ed to B. and detested himself dwelling upon them, etc.
At this point Coleridge makes a striking discovery.
And what was all this? - Evidently the instinct of allfineminds to totalise - to
make a. perfectly congruous whole of every character - & pain at the being obliged
to admit incongruities . . . (CN, I, 1606)
In an interesting aside, Coleridge compares his resentment of Word-
sworth's incongruities with his resentment at Mr Pitt having been the
author of the Irish Union, thereby subverting A's theory of 'Pitt's
contemptibility'.
A later and painfully moving entry (October 1805) combines a com-
parison between Wordsworth and Empedocles, with a desire that Word-
sworth might be perfected by an infusion of Coleridge's own spirit:
 Imagining Wordsworth 133
To W. in the progression of Spirit/ once Simonides, or Empedocles or both
in one? O that my spirit purged by Death of its weaknesses, which are alas!
my identity might flow into thine, and live and act in thee, and be Thou.
(CN, II, 2712)
Yet another entry laments how Wordsworth - immured within
those elevated conceptions - ceases to include Coleridge in the old
equality, and begins to pronounce, even to Coleridge, on 'points
of morals, wisdom and the sacred muses' (CN, n, 2750).
Such entries reveal a stylites syndrome very clearly: Wordsworth,
set upon his pillar by Coleridge, and kept there by Coleridge's entrea-
ty, injures Coleridge's feelings by an increasing assumption of superiori-
ty. Wordsworth's persistence in modes of poetry which do not interest
Coleridge is taken, in part, as a slight. More deeply, such dilatoriness
contributes to an accumulation of disappointment and resentment.
Yet in the main, by 1799, Coleridge had found himself an amanuen-
sis of unusual calibre. Wordsworth, captive and captivated, would
spend the greater part of his creative life attempting to write a poem
more dear to Coleridge than to himself . More than this, he meekly
revises his other and more personal work in the light of Coleridge's
unremitting criticism: and from early on, responds to the insidious
pressure of generous praise for any verse which expresses Coleridgean
conceptions in modes congenial to Coleridge. It is almost as though
Wordsworth adopts Coleridge's view of himself - as an emergent bard
undergoing necessary metamorphoses on the way to an end ordained by
Coleridge.
Labouring dutifully at the philosophical poem, Wordsworth finds an
ingenious excuse to produce something more congenial: he writes The
Prelude, to which Coleridge accords generous praise in every respect ex-
cept one: it is not (I will return for my reason for saying this) 'a Philosophical
poem'.

II

My suggestion that Coleridge denied to The Prelude the status of 'a

Philosophical poem' conflicts with one's sense that he valued it above The
Excursion, and saw in it philosophic themes philosophically handled. We
have not only the late observation that it was 'superior on the whole to
The Excursion' (a not unqualified commendation found in the Table
Talk, 21 July 1832 [ Misc C, p. 411 ]), but the fresher testimony of January
1807, in his poem To William Wordsworth: composed on the night after his
134 RICHARD GRAVIL
recitation of a poem on the growth of an individual mind. Wordsworth's 'pro-
phetic lay', he then recorded, was a pioneering investigation of human
growth, of nature and nurture, of perception and of the creativity of
perception.
Of the foundations and the building up
Of a Human Spirit thou hast dared to tell
What may be told, to the understanding mind
Revealable. (11. 5-8)5
Coleridge's response is couched in the vocabulary of friendly allusion.
Wordsworth's poem, the later version suggests, has to do with 'Thoughts
all too deep for words'; its author's powers are 'tides . . . and currents';
the poet's companionable stars and streams reappear in Coleridge's ap-
preciation. He also appears to have grasped more clearly than most
subsequent criticism what The Prelude is essentially about. By sub-titling
his response (in its revised and considered version) ' . . . a poem on the
growth of an individual mind' and by opening his praises by referring
to its story as prophetic, not historic, Coleridge recognises that while he
has been listening to a poetic Bildungsroman, and a crisis narrative (his
apportioning of space recognises the proportions of Wordsworth's ac-
count of growth, crisis, and restoration), he has also been listening to an
account of human possibilities which is intended to be normative, not
idiosyncratic. He gives particular weight to the poem's closing theme:
Then (last strain)
Of Duty, chosen Laws controlling choice,
Action and joy!
The Snowdon meditation is, of course, concerned precisely with this
theme. Wordsworth's higher minds are gifted not with poetic speech, but
with autonomy. In them Coleridge would recognise what he himself
wrote of in his Theory of Life:
In Man the centripetal and individualising tendency of all Nature is itself con-
centrated and individualised - he is a revelation of Nature!. .. and he who stands
the most upon himself, and stands thefirmest,is the truest because the most in-
dividual, Man.
But 'the form of polarity, which has accompanied the law of individua-
tion up its whole ascent' still pertains:
As the independence, so must be the service and the submission to the Supreme
Will!6
He might also have heard between Wordsworth's lines his own thoughts
on those who are masters of Time, those whose lives express what, in the
Treatise on Method he would call 'the initiative'. While the idle, in Col-
 Imagining Wordsworth 135
eridge's eyes, merely kill time, the higher mind 'may be justly said to call
it into life and moral being . . . He organises the hours and gives them
a soul', so that of him 'it is less truly affirmed that he lives in Time, than
that Time lives in him'. 7
Such, of necessity, would be the context of ideas in which Coleridge
responded to Wordsworth's presentation of men

Who are their own upholders, to themselves

Encouragement, and energy and will. . .{Prelude, XII: 11. 261-2)
In The Prelude Wordsworth has shown how individuation depends upon
action and joy; and how the project of an individual life is always open
to reclamation or to loss. Coleridge's experience may not have made him
comfortable with Wordsworth's belief that a life sustained by 'natural
piety', by loyalty as it were to itself, may retain its trust in 'Emotions
which best foresight need not fear / Most worthy then of trust when most
intense' {Prelude, xm: 11. 115-16). But insofar as the concept of 'duty'
could be expressed by both poets in such terms as Wordsworth's 'obe-
dience to paramount impulse not to be withstood' or to 'a moral law
established by himself {Prose Works, n, p. 24), Coleridge properly
recognises in Wordsworth's concluding argument his own thinking. Both
poets were engaged in the initiation of that stream of thought which was
to be continued by Kierkegaard, Marcel and Jaspers, who also saw du-
ty as preferable to the unrest of change, and the weight of chance desires,
and - in Kierkegaard's formulation - found that duty and liberty are
reconciled in love: for 'duty is as protean in its forms as is love itself, and
it pronounces everything good when it is of love and denounces
everything, however beautiful and specious it may be, if it is not of
love'. 8
A radical difference which this assimilation of Wordsworth and Col-
eridge obscures, however, is that Wordsworth's conclusion in The Prelude
is lacking in any convincing use of a term equivalent to Coleridge's
'Supreme Will'. And this lack, not apparently felt by Coleridge in his
poetic response to Wordsworth's reading, is nonetheless making itself
subliminally effective in the shaping of Coleridge's lines.
In lines 61-75, Coleridge finds himself reflecting on his own life, and
'plucking the poisons of self-harm'. It is precisely because Wordsworth's
celebration of naturally self-authenticating life is existentially stoic to the
exclusion of any felt dependence upon a higher WAX, that Coleridge's feel-
ings , in lines 61-112 follow in themselves the pattern of a crisis narrative.
Coleridge has in fact paid scant regard to the emotional quality of Word-
sworth's own crisis (the 'crisis' of The Prelude in Coleridge's reading is one
in 'the general heart of human kind', line 36), since Coleridge always im-
136 RICHARD GRAVIL
agines Wordsworth to be one who watches 'calm and sure/ From the
dread watch-tower of his absolute self (11. 39-40). The emotional crisis
of The Prelude, then, is borrowed in 'To William Wordsworth' by its
auditor, overcome by his
Sense of past Youth, and Manhood come in vain,
And Genius given, and Knowledge won in vain. (11. 69-70)
That the poem ends in prayer is easily misunderstood. It is not, surely,
that Wordsworth casts a prayerful spell: rather it is prayer that enables
Coleridge to rise. His poisonous sense of dependency upon the amiable
giant can be cancelled only in a greater dependency, already prefigured
in the litanic language which opens the final paragraph of the poem - 'O
Friend! my comforter and guide! / Strong in thyself and powerful to give
strength!'. Prayer is needed, not only because there is something troublous
about sitting 'in silence . . . like a devout child' at the feet of a brother poet,
but because Coleridge cannot otherwise bring to a calm resolution a poem
which is threatening to revert to the condition of emotional storm which
dominates the Letter to Sara Hutchinson. When Wordsworth's poem closes,
the poet's bodily presence becomes a shade oppressive:
And thy deep voice had ceased - yet thou thyself
Wert still before my eyes, and round us both
That happy vision of beloved faces . . .
Coleridge finds himself within the magic circle which has been for five
summers and the length of nearly five long winters a token of the hollow-
ness of Joy, the transientness of pleasure. As he found in the Letter to Sara:
To visit those I love, as I love thee,
Mary and William, and dear Dorothy,
Is but a temptation to repine -
The transientness is Poison in the Wine,
Eats out the pith ofJoy, makes all Joy hollow,
All pleasure a dim Dream of pain to follow!
The Letter to Sara, however, is not the only poem in which we find an
analogous recourse to prayer. We may read To William Wordsworth in one
way if we think it is repressing the Letter. If we understand it as repress-
ing The Eolian Harp - itself coiled at the heart of Dejection - we may
see the gesture of prayer as containing a figure of renunciation. For prayer
in The Eolian Harp has been used to deprecate an earlier witchery of sound,
and earlier shapings of the unregenerate mind, speculations which spoke
of the incomprehensible without the saving sense of Him
Who with his saving mercies healed me,
A sinful and most miserable man,
Wilder'd and dark . . .
 Imagining Wordsworth 137
III

That it is a similar lack in The Prelude that disqualified it from the ex-
pected accolade, can be deduced from Coleridge's remarkable letter to
Wordsworth expressing disappointment with The Excursion. Quoting
lines 12-47 of To William Wordsworth, so that we cannot doubt his recall
of ThePreludeand its effect, Coleridge's letter of 30 May 1815 flatly pro-
claims ' This I considered as ' 'the EXCURSION" ': the second instal-
ment of The Recluse he had anticipated
as commencing with you set down and settled in an abiding Home and that with
the Description of that Home you were to begin a Philosophicalpoem, the result and
fruits of a spirit so fram'd & so disciplin'd as had been told in the former. (CL,
IV, p. 574)
This, unlike ThePrelude, he had expected to exhibit 'the matter and ar-
rangement ofPhilosophy'':
I supposed you first to have meditated the faculties of man in the abstract . . .
demonstrating that the Senses were living growths and developements of the
Mind and Spirit in a much juster as well as higher sense, than the mind can be
said to be formed by the Senses: . . .
(It is hard to say whether Coleridge felt that The Prelude had in any sense
addressed itself to this question, as opposed to simply marshalling the
data.)
The remainder of Coleridge's specification for the philosophical poem,
it can hardly be said too emphatically, is not merely tangential to Word-
sworth's proper concerns as a poet of the human mind, but wholly and
radically incompatible with the argument of The Prelude and of the so-
called 'Prospectus' to The Recluse. Wordsworth - and one must take the
letter seriously and read it attentively if one is to grasp the fundamental in-
tellectual dyspathy between two poets whose brilliant friendship had little
to do with philosophical concurrence - was, in Coleridge's recollection,

to have affirmed a Fall in some sense, as a fact. . . the reality of which is attested
by Experience & Conscience . . . and not disguising the sore evils under which
the whole Creation groans, to point out however a manifest Scheme of Redemp-
tion from this Slavery . . . and to conclude by a grand didactic swell on the
necessary identity of a true Philosophy with true Religion . . .
No service is done to either poet by supposing that Wordsworth, as op-
posed to 'Wordsworth', found the reality of a 'Fall' attested by cons-
cience; or heard the whole Creation groaning for deliverance, or found
manifest a scheme of redemption; or felt convinced of'the necessary iden-
tity of true Philosophy with true Religion'.
138 RICHARD GRAVIL
That Wordsworth attempted to fulfil Coleridge's desire for upwards
of three decades is a sacrifice that can only have been motivated by a com-
manding veneration. He tried to conform, by repressing in himself what
Coleridge frowned on, to Coleridge's image of him: and in a miraculous
degree, he succeeded. The Excursion is the proper monument to Col-
eridge's revision of Wordsworth: a poem apologetic for its occasional
lapses into common speech, devoid of dramatised character or lapses into
the matter-of-fact, and preaching, in the language of the clerisy, the
necessity of a Platonised Anglicanism. It is not a more Coleridgean poem
in any positive sense: but it is a poem in which Wordsworth has careful-
ly expunged all that he can identify in his former practice as having
displeased Coleridge. Coleridge, of course, wanted more than this. In
a memorable Notebook entry he sees the mental presence of Shakespeare,
Milton and Bruno as 'pure Action, defecated of all that is material &
passive' (CN, n, 2026): why should Wordsworth not achieve this ideali-
ty, not merely to posterity, but in existence? He is willing, as we have
seen, to contemplate his own death if that should contribute to the perfec-
tion of one poetic voice by a commingling of both (CN, n, 2712).
The Prelude, of course, is rightly preferred by Coleridge, as a superior
poem. Paradoxically, although he may not have recognised this, it is also
a more Coleridgean poem in the sense that Wordsworth succeeded in
some of its climactic passages in grafting on to a Wordsworthian stock
a Coleridgean bloom. Thomas McFarland observes, in his essay on their
symbiosis, that in Book v Coleridge's influence 'almost succeeded in
pulling Wordsworth out of orbit' but that Wordsworth's resistance takes
the form of writing a book about books in which 'he talks about almost
anything rather than books' (Forms of Ruin, pp. 85-6). Coleridge's suc-
cess, however, is merely delayed.
Coleridge's imagination, it has not yet been sufficiently noticed,
habitually treats the data of perception in a symbolic or indeed an
eschatological manner to which Wordsworth's is ordinarily resistant. In
reading Wordsworth, as we see in his comments on the 'Salisbury Plain'
poetry in Chapter 4 ofBiographia, Coleridge is liable to interpret a land-
scape inundated with a dramatised consciousness - in this case, that of
a mind haunted by guilt and sorrow - as revealing rather 'the tone, the
atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world': few of
Wordsworth's characteristic effects are actually of this kind. (When Col-
eridge quotes, in Chapter 22 ofBiographia, those Piel Castle lines which
describe the youthful poet as prone to add to what he sees 'the gleam, /
The light that never was on sea or land,/ The consecration and the poet's
dream', it is immediately apparent that what Coleridge terms im-
aginative is in Wordsworth's mature judgement illusory.)
 Imagining Wordsworth 139
The * spots of time' in The Prelude characteristically record experiences
in which the natural or human world is perceived in a heightened and un-
familiar mode by a mind under the influence of physical or emotional
disturbance. What is perceived, however, is not - in the boating, or
birdsnesting, or poaching, or skating episodes, or the Paris spot, or on
Salisbury Plain, or on Penrith Beacon - given the kind of doctrinal in-
terpretation to which Wordsworth ascends in his two alpine spots, his
hymn before nightfall in the Simplon Pass, and his hymn before a forgot-
ten sunrise on Snowdon. In both instances, I believe, the candid reader
must feel an unwonted layering in the rhetoric which is experienced as
something distinctive, something unusually impressive, and yet dis-
concerting. The Simplon Pass experience becomes disturbingly im-
pressive at the point where Wordsworth's rhetoric levitates from
Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside
As if a voice were in them
to
Characters of the great apocalypse
The types and symbols of eternity
- which levitation is received by some readers, at least, as a fall from the
authentic voice of experience.
The Snowdon meditation, too, moves from Wordsworthian ex-
perience to Coleridgean gloss, from what 'Nature thus/Thrusts forth
upon the senses' to the bliss of 'higher minds' when encountering 'the
consciousness/Of whom they are'. Despite the Norton note on the mat-
ter {Norton 'Prelude', p. 464, note 4) the meaning is clear enough: in the
kind of experience 'Snowdon' is about, higher minds become conscious
of the yet Higher Mind whose creation they themselves are, or of Whom
they are a part. My 'or', of course, recognises an ambivalence in Word-
sworth's phrase, which in truth we should extend further to cover his later
(1850) use of a lower case 'consciousness' and an upper case 'Whom':
for Wordsworth is speaking of an innominate underpresence which it is
open to Coleridge's higher mind - and there can be no doubt that the
other higher mind so genially introduced in the closing book is Col-
eridge's - to experience as a person of the trinity, if he so desires. To
Wordsworth it may remain, more congenially, a spirit in the woods, or
an ever-during power subsisting at the heart of endless agitation.
Capable, then, of Spinozist, or Berkeley an, or Christian construction,
Wordsworth's underpresence is ideally honed for Coleridge.
Ideally, in both senses, but still not in a way that could preclude a sense,
on Coleridge's part, that Wordsworth had left something out. What
Wordsworth cannot bring himself to do in his closing book - despite the
140 RICHARD GRAVIL
1850 recognition that we cannot all hold to our course 'unchecked,
unerring, and untired,/In one perpetual progress smooth and bright',
a recognition which would have done little to cheer Coleridge had
it been offered in 1805 - is to move from a willingness to recognise
the existence of some form of deity, to a personal conviction of sin.
And that distinction was (as Thomas McFarland's Coleridge and the
Pantheist Tradition has so comprehensively shown) at the heart of Col-
eridge's thinking.
When Wordsworth published The Excursion in 1814 he gave little
sign of having resolved this ambivalence: indeed he advertised it
in the 'Prospectus'. While this claimed in line 15 that his theme included
'melancholy Fear subdued by Faith', the implications of this capitalised
'Faith' are instantly nullified. For him, we learn in lines 33-4,
Jehovah and all his angels are but another provisional myth by which
people have figured to themselves the unfigurable - 'I pass them
unalarmed'.
Wordsworth might agree with Schelling that it is of little consequence
whether you call your sense of spirit Pantheism or something else - 'We
gladly grant everyone his own manner of making intelligible to himself
the age . . . The name does not matter; what counts is the substance' 9
- but to Coleridge, Wordsworth's failure to recognise what's in a name
made the rest of his self-abnegating career seem just another of his (Col-
eridge's) failures. In the end, Wordsworth simply would not totalise. The
great project succeeded in part: the poet of The Excursion is one who has
deserted the 'Lanes and allies' of the affective life in which it pained Col-
eridge to see him wander, and abandoned his propensities for the
dramatic mode and the matter-of-fact. Coleridge had in large, if
negative, measure succeeded in realising his Idea of Wordsworth. For
us, The Prelude and The Excursion are recognisable as the tremendous
fragments of a fostered idea. But for Coleridge these were to be measured
against the total idea: for one whose intention was - through The Recluse,
or 'The Brook', or the 'Opus Maximus' - to pollinate the mind of the
new age, the 'Wordsworth' project fell sadly short of the mark.
When Coleridge listened injanuary 1807 to the song of Wordsworth's
self, he had recently written to Thomas Clarkson in terms which leave
us in no doubt at all what his real judgement must have been of Word-
sworth's misty allusions to the deity:
. . .But all the actions of the Deity are intensely real or substantial; therefore the
action of Love, by which the Father contemplates the Son, and the Son the Father,
is equally real with the Father and the Son - and neither of these three can be con-
ceived apart, nor confusedly - so that the Idea of God involves that of a Tri-unity;
and as that Unity or Indivisibility is the interest, and the Archetype, yea, the very
substance and element of all other Unity and Union, so is that Distinction the most
 Imagining Wordsworth 141

manifest and indestructible of all distinctions - and Being, Intellect, and Ac-
tion, which in their absoluteness are the Father, the Word, and the Spirit will and
must for ever be and remain the 'genera generalissima' of all Knowledge.
(Letter to Clarkson, 13 Oct. 1806, CL, II, pp. 1195-6)
In a sense the measure of Coleridge's imagination is that he could sincere-
ly have felt that if Wordsworth were to produce 'a faithful transcript of
his own most august and innocent life, of his own habitual feelings and
modes and seeing and hearing' (CL, n, p. 1024) it would have ended up
by inferring and revealing 'the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state
of man and society being subject to, and illustrative of, a redemptive pro-
cess in operation', or 'in substance, what I have been all my life doing
in my system of philosophy' (Table Talk, 21 July 1832 [Misc C, pp.
410-11]). The measure of how masterful Coleridge's imagination could
be is that Wordsworth's career took the course it did, in its long ascent
towards baptism.

Notes
1
Major contributions to the study of this literary 'symbiosis' include Nor-
man Fruman, Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel (New York, 1971), Stephen
Parrish, The Art of the 'Lyrical Ballads' (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), chapter
3 of Mary Jacobus, Tradition & Experiment in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
(1798) (Oxford, 1976), John Beer, Wordsworth in Time (London, 1979), and
of course Thomas McFarland 's Romanticism and the Forms ofRuin (Princeton,
1981), particularly its first chapter on 'The Symbiosis of Coleridge and
Wordsworth'. Lucy Newlyn's forthcoming study of'echo and allusion' in
their work will put the debate on a new level of particularity.
2
I have discussed the Biographia's treatment of Wordsworth's poetry in some
detail in 'Coleridge's Wordsworth', TWC, Spring 1984. The remainder of
the first part of the present essay is closely based upon part of 'Coleridge's
Wordsworth'. The deleterious effects upon Wordsworth's poetry are
discussed (as they appear in 'Home at Grasmere' and The Excursion) in my
'Wordsworth's Last Retreat', Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s. 43 (July 1983), pp.
54-67. In his essay on 'Coleridge's Interpretation of Wordsworth's Preface
to Lyrical Ballads' (PMLA, 93, October 1978), Don H. Bialostosky deals very
cogently with the confusions created by Coleridge, and sustained by those
critics who assume that the theses attacked by Coleridge are in fact argued
by Wordsworth.
3
Wordsworth's note appeared at the close of volume 1 of the 1800 edition.
4 WPW, III, pp. 503-4. Coleridge's remark on 'The Three Graves' is quoted
in Stephen Parrish's essay above.
5
I am citing the standard text in PW. The ms. version of the poem given in
that edition's Appendix 1 (L), and corrected in Norton 'Prelude', pp. 542-5,
is of course closer to the audition, and more personal, but like many early
drafts it is also less clear. The later version, which is the one Coleridge quotes
to Wordsworth in the 1815 letter, can be accepted as a more successful em-
bodiment of what Coleridge thought. Lines 54-69 of the ms. version do not
142 RICHARD GRAVIL

appear in the revised poem. They elaborate on Coleridge's emotional

response, and their ambivalence about how 'comfort from Thee' only 'scat-
ter'd and whirl'd me' (11. 56-9), and how 'thy Hopes of me . . . were
troublous to me' (11. 61-2) is consonant with the standard text.
6
Hints Towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory ofLife, ed. Seth B.
Watson (London: John Churchill, 1848), p. 86.
7
S. T. Coleridge's Treatise on Method as Published in the Encyclopaedia Metro-
politana, ed. Alice D. Snyder (London: Constable & Co, 1934), p. 13.
8
Either-Or (New York, 1959), vol. 2, p. 151.
9
F. W. J . von Schelling, Of Human Freedom, tr. James Gutmann (Chicago,
1936), p. 91.
 The Otway connection

DAVID V. ERDMAN

When in hisfinalversion of Dejection: an Ode (in Sibylline Leaves, 1817) Col-

eridge wrote 'As Otway's self had framed the tender lay' (line 120) replac-
ing the language of earlier versions ('Edmund's self or 'William's self
or 'thou thyself, i.e. Sotheby!), he may have been making a substitution
that 'disturbs every knowledgeable reader', as George Dekker believes
(Coleridge and the Literature ofSensibility, p. 238). He may, on the other hand,
have been inscribing a code reference to a precursor poem lying behind
the whole symbiotic family of'Intimations' and 'Dejection' odes by his
dear friend Wordsworth and himself, the earliest surviving member be-
ing The Mad Monk of 1800.
In its immediate context, in Coleridge's verse letter to Sara dated
'April 4, 1802, Sunday Evening',1 that portion of the 'lay' being recited
by the wind as a 'Mad Lutanist' on a wind-harp is a tale of the moaning
and screaming of a lost child, quite plausibly compared to Wordsworth's
ballad of Lucy Gray - as it often is - although strictly Lucy Gray is never
heard to moan or scream but is only said to sing 'a solitary song / That
whistles in the wind'. Indeed Reeve Parker in Coleridge's Meditative Art
(Ithaca, 1975, pp. 97-200) by associating the lost child with the 'groans
and shudderings' of the preceding lines helps us recognize allusions to
the female vagrant's tale in Wordsworth's Adventures on Salisbury Plain (and
to Milton's fallen angels and routed pagan deities). As a retrospective
identification of the complaining voice that 'moves' the complaining
poet, however, it is true that, as Dekker says, 'Merely to mention Ot-
way's name was to summon up a host of other ill-fated literary geniuses
ranging from Spenser ['Edmund's self] and Collins to Chatterton and
Burns' (Dekker, p. 238). The failure of a poet's genial spirits was a com-
mon theme in the Augustan period, whose commentators 'recalled the
neglect of Dry den and Milton and the still more ghastly - if apocryphal
- end of Otway' (Dekker, p. 199).
For Coleridge, however, perhaps the point of his putting the name Ot-
way into the 1817 version of'Dejection', when he was himself a sadder
but less desperate man, 2 was to dismiss in mockery the early identifica-
tion of Wordsworth and himself with 'mighty Poets in their misery dead'
143
144 DAVID V. ERDMAN
('Resolution and Independence'). What I wish to suggest also is that it
was a way of commemorating, for himself and Wordsworth at least, the
influence upon their dejection poems of The Poet }s Complaint of his Muse,
a seventeenth-century 'Ode' by Thomas Otway. I see the theme and
shape of this ode lying behind The Voicefrom the Side of Etna, or, The Mad
Monk published in The Morning Post of 13 October, 1800 - a poem which
contains a stanza beginning 'There was a time' which has often been
noticed as remarkably echoed in, and thus perhaps a source for, the first
stanza of the 'Intimations' ode.
Since The Mad Monk belongs somehow to both Wordsworth and Col-
eridge and is itself a manifest and self-proclaimed parody - a parody as
it were of the still unwritten 'Intimations' and 'Dejection' odes - there
can even be a question as to whether these two odes existed in some form
before the parody was written, or only later were written to fulfill its pro-
phetic mockery.
There is mockery within mockery, indeed. What The Mad Monk
declared itself to be, in a subtitle, was the parody of a gothic novel: 'AN
ODE, in Mrs. RATCLIFF'S manner'. What it did not declare was its
derivation from Otway's Complaint. In fact, when Julia Di Stephano Pap-
pageorge investigated the novels of Ann Radcliffe, she discovered little
discernible influence on the gothic recesses and insanity of The Mad Monk,
but an impressively significant use of Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho
in Coleridge's 'Dejection' ode. In brief, she discovered that the 'central
thematic and atmospheric component of the poem, the poet's address-
ing the wind which' 'moans and rakes / Upon the strings" (11. 6-7) of his
"Aeolianlute" as a "MadLutanist" (1. 104), constitutes [aborrowing
from and] an allusive reference to Ann Radcliffe's lute music' in the
Mysteries, one of the novel's mysteries being the source of emotion-
charged sounds 'made, we finally learn, by a mad nun loose in the
forest'.3
This discovery, we may note, enables us to flesh out our understan-
ding, hitherto only skeletal, of the process whereby Coleridge managed
to replace the wind harp with 'the wind-as-harpist' and thus achieve the
important shift from passivity to activity which George Dekker sees as
the positive theme of Dejection.*
And if the subtitle to The Mad Monk of 1800 can lead us to an impor-
tant source for the symbolic action of 'Dejection', perhaps the allusion
to Otway in the latter poem may, even for the knowledgeable, point to
the source of The Mad Monk as Otway and to its theme as a poet's Com-
plaint ofHis Muse. Both Otway and the author of The Mad Monk are poets,
each reporting on the madness of a brother poet. As we recognize the
thematic and inter-personal similarities and contrasts involved, perhaps
 The Otway connection 145
we may reasonably infer that the two monks of The Mad Monk, the mad
one who complains that 'There was a time . . . ' and the sad one who
reports the overheard complaint to readers of The Morning Post, are the
same two poets who subsequently gave to the world an Ode intimating
philosophic if not poetic 'Immortality' and an Ode distilling 'Joy' from
'Dejection'. These poets are, like Otways's mad poet, complaining of
their muses' cruelty; yet they achieve through their complaints the tran-
quility of a philosophic and creative mind.5 Reeve Parker's chapter on
'Dejection' documents how thoroughly and at times desperately Col-
eridge himself observed and believed in this result of 'meditative con-
sciousness' (Parker, p. 18Iff.). But let us now look at Thomas Otway and
his poem.

Samuel Johnson, in his Lives of the English Poets (London, 1783), vol.
I, p. 328, had this to say of Otway's poetry:
Of the poems . . . the longest is the Poet's Complaint of his Muse, part of which I do
not understand; and in that which is less obscure I find little to commend. The
Language is often gross, and the numbers are harsh. . . . His principal power was
in moving the passions. . . . He appears to have been a zealous royalist: and had
what was in those times the common reward of Loyalty; he lived and died
neglected.
Coleridge and Wordsworth might have given stronger praise to the
poet's 'power in moving the passions', but they would have regarded Ot-
way's meteoric career, at court and in Grub Street, as a paradigm to
avoid, whether or not one had to believe literally that his death at thirty-
three had come from attempting to digest a charitable crust of bread on
a long-empty stomach.
Otway's poem is - another disturbing truth - a loose and baggy
monster of 21 stanzas totaling 704 lines; over 33 lines per stanza, though
odic in pattern; while The Mad Monk is complete in 51 lines (8 stanzas);
also, about a third of the way through, the Complaint shifts atfention from
the cruel Muse to her evil child, Libell - who need not concern us here.
In the relevant part of Otway's Complaint and in The Mad Monk the
author interviews an insane friend (a poet or 'monk') who is in a suicidal
frame of mind. Otway's suicidal friend is failing as a poet, and the Ot-
way persona projects his own career anxieties upon him; in the Coleridge
poem the reporter signs himself pseudonymously 'Cassiani, jun.', im-
plying that the monk/poet interviewed on the 'side of Etna' (place of
philosophical, suicidal associations) is his senior (recognizably Word-
sworth) upon whom he projects his own career crisis.
Otway comes upon his friend, 'whose Muse was crazy grown', on a
146 DAVID V. ERDMAN
'high Hill' (the high hill of Donne's Truth?), a place barren of anything
but 'Heath, coarse Fern, and Furzes'. Coleridge locates his mad senior
in vegetation that would suit the 'thoughts of more deep seclusion' of 'A
Hermit or a Monk' such as the 'lofty cliffs' a few miles above Tintern Ab-
bey had suggested to his theoretically reclusive friend.
The muse of Otway's friend has proved a very bawd, and has finally
jilted him - a realization which overwhelms both poets. How had Ot-
way's 'friend' (a fictional projection) got himself into this barren
wilderness? He explains that he and his dear muse thought it might
restore her sanity if they moved to the country, fleeing the 'nauseous
Follies of the buzzing Town'. They had reached some place like
Grasmere, where the Bard could 'lay him down' far from any path, but
where the Earth was bare, and naked all as at her Birth (I quote in
paraphrase) - a locale still responding to God's fiat to 'Let Grass and
Herbs and every green thing grow' including 'fruitful Trees'.
The interviewed poet confesses, alas, that his rural effort to be a recluse
has been a disaster. He had been blessed by his muse with 'Off-springs
of the choicest kinds' and had been transported to a height whence he
'Look'd down and laugh'd at Fate'. Then all of a sudden, 'I round me
look'd and found my self alone: My faithless Muse . . . was gone'. Plung-
ed into dejection, he managed still to write, but produced only deform-
ed baboons and apes as 'the hideous issue of my Brains'. Waking, he
found that his ungrateful muse had robbed him of Time, Friends,
Reputation, 'And left me helpless, friendless, very proud, and poor'. All
the muses, he now knows, are prostitutes who serve the bawd Fortunne.
Otway is duly impressed - and goes on to explain that behind the
whole ugly scam is a witch who corrupts states and is called (bless us!)
'The Good Old Cause'.
The interviewed poet sighs deep and cries, 'How far is Peace from
Me?' It is nowhere in sight (we're only a third of the way through the
poem) and future 'Joy' is farther away than ever.
Stanza 10 begins:

A Time there was, (a sad one too)

When all things wore the Face of Woe, . . .
This was enough to start Coleridge's Mad Monk who, when interview-
ed on the side of Etna, offered the same theme in reverse. To contrast
good times and bad, Otway dwells on the bad, the Mad Monk on the
good:
There was a time when earth, and sea, and skies,
The bright green vale, and forest's dark recess,
With all things , lay before mine eyes
 The Otway connection 147

In steady loveliness:
But now . . . .
And perhaps also to start Wordsworth on his 'Intimations' ode:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light. . .
It is not now as it hath been . . . .
(There may be echoes here of Otway's opening strophe about 'the Earth
. . . naked all as at her Birth' before God had said ' L e t . . . every green thing
grow'.)
Or, also, the first lines of what became stanza vi of Coleridge's Dejection:
There was a time when, though my path was rough
This joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:
For hope grew round me . . .
But now afflictions bow me down to earth: . . .
(II 233ff, Letter to Sara)
The thematic context, in each case, is the lament of a poet who has fallen
upon the thorns of life from a state of 'loveliness'. But the 'Mad Monk'
ode was published in October 1800. If the 'Intimations' and 'Dejection'
odes are its offspring, did Wordsworth wait until 27 March 1802 to write
his, on that 'divine' Sunday morning when, according to Dorothy Word-
sworth's journal, 'At breakfast William wrote part of an ode'? Was he
then just beginning the 'Intimations' - as the conventional assumption
has been until recent questioning - or had he already written a first part,
long ago? And on the next Sunday, 4 April, when 'William . . . repeated
his verses' to the Coleridges (according to Dorothy), were these verses
the 'Intimations' ode we know? And was the letter version of Dejection
which Coleridge mailed to Sara Hutchinson, headed 'A Letter to—/April
4, 1802. - Sunday Evening' - was this his immediate response to
Wordsworth's ode, and was it the first, the initial, version?
Mark Reed, in Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Middle Years (p. 156 &
n) considers that Wordsworth had now been writing 'probably some part
or all of stanzas i-iv', the rest in early 1804. George Dekker accepts these
probabilities as to Wordsworth's Ode (in an extremely thorough in-
vestigation of the collaborative and literary and biographical context of
the 'Dejection')6 but he suggests the further probability that 'the essen-
tial components of Dejection: an Ode existed as actual stanzas of poetry before
the verse letter to Sara Hutchinson was drafted' (p. 47).
Dekker's argument is that the verse letter dated 'April 4' is, 'in effect,
148 DAVID V. ERDMAN
an intermediate and in many ways deviant draft of Dejection: An Ode' (p.
54): a 'reshaping of lines already written - and written in a spirit nearer
that of the correspondence of 1800-1801 and of the textus receptus of 1817'
(p. 42). The verse letter, for instance, contains only two 'distinct echoes
of the Immortality Ode' - lines 133-41, about dwelling 'in one happy
Home' and crowning himself 'with a Coronal', and lines 294-5, both
passages bearing 'all the marks of impromptu writing' (pp. 48-9). And
I think it must be agreed that there is no evidence to prevent the supposi-
tion 'that the lines now comprising Stanzas i-n were composed well
before 4 April 1802, as far back, perhaps as the the preceding spring or
even the summer of 1800P (p. 52: my italics) or earlier (see February echo
noted below).
Dekker backs away from the longer interval, noting that the opening
lines may well have been 'inspired . . . by Dorothy's description of the
new moon which she and William saw on 5 March and which, very likely,
Sara and Coleridge saw the same evening at Gallow Hill', but he remains
radically sceptical about the patness of the April date, though 'it is as good
a date as any for the poem which must have been put together about that
time' (p. 52).7
A passage clearly belonging to an early form of the Ode is lines 211-15
in the verse letter, 121-5 in the published version. For Coleridge had
echoed them in a letter to Thomas Poole of 1 February 1801:
O my dear dear Friend! that you were with me by the fireside of my Study here,
that I might talk it over with you to the Tune of this Night Wind that pipes it's
thin doleful climbing sinking Notes like a child that has lost it's way and is cry-
ing aloud, half in grief and half in the hope to be heard by it's Mother.
(CL, II, p. 669)
This, of course, is the passage that might have been composed by Ot-
way or Edmund or William - or Sotheby! And it is a relevant coin-
cidence that when Coleridge had been in what he presented as a suicidal
mood in December 1796, he had written to Poole, after the collapse of
Pantisocracy and of his Watchman, that to contemplate having to depend
on Grub Street would be to have 'the evil Face of Frenzy' looking at him
and to be haunted by 'the Ghosts of Otway [ that name comes first! ] and
Chatterton' as well as by 'the phantasms' of his 'Wife broken-hearted,
& a hunger-bitten Baby!' (CL, i, p. 275). (This helps us see why the star-
ving poet Otway - or any other - might be responsible for the wind-
music that tells of 'a little Child . . . Not far from home' who 'screams
. . . to make it's Mother hear!')
When,fiveyears later, Coleridge wrote his 'Letter to —' version of De-
jection - leaving the blank in his title - he again associated Poole with
this mother and child motif. He did address certain lines in this version
 The Otway connection 149
to 'Sara' and 'dear Sara' and even 'dearest Sara', and he did, we assume,
send it to Sara Hutchinson; yet he at first had not been certain to whom
he might send it. Perhaps he had had in mind a round robin, on the theory
expressed in the preface to his 1796 Poems and, as Reeve Parker notes,
more illustratively in a notebook entry of 1803 'that has the excitement
of fresh recognition' (supplied, I take it, by his having written 'Dejection'
and published it):
One excellent use of communication of Sorrows to a Friend is this: that in relating
what ails us we ourselves first know exactly what the real Grief is - & see it for
itself, in its own form & limits. Unspoken Grief is a misty medley, of which the
real affliction only plays the first fiddle - blows the horn, to a scattered mob of
obscure feelings. (CN, I, 1599)
At any rate, a month after the date of the verse letter of 1802, on 'May
7, Friday', writing a cheerful letter to 'My dear Poole', Coleridge, hav-
ing inserted transcriptions of '2 pleasing little poems of Wordsworth's'
(the second of which concludes with the line, 'And love & thought &Joy!')
adds this revealing and self-critical remark:
I ought to say for my own sake that on the 4th of April last I wrote you a letter in
verse [ the 'Dejection' of course ]; but I thought it dull & doleful - & did not send
it -
God bless you, dear Friend! &S.T.C.—
(CL, II, 801)
We must note Coleridge's inclusion of self in the blessing. Possibly,
with only a month's time, the fresh recognition had not had time to work;
perhaps the draft which Coleridge almost sent to Poole in April lacked
the lines of Joy and rejoicing at the end of the Sara version; perhaps they
were there but with a gloomy echo like ' Otway's Self instead of
'William's Self in line 210.8
However that may be, instead of shaping a climax of rejoicing for a ver-
sion to send to Poole with this May letter, Coleridge found it easier to copy
out for Poole Wordsworth's cheerful lines To a Butterfly and The Sparrow fs
Nest. Both, interestingly enough, celebrate Wordsworth's blessedness in
having a 'Sister' who has served as his muse ever since he was a 'Boy':
'She gave me eyes, she gave me ears, / And humble Cares & delicate
Fears. . . ' {WPW, i, p. 227).
The fact that the names Otway and Wordsworth can function as in-
terchangeable stand-ins for the 'Mad Lutanist' of expressive grief points
clearly to Wordsworth as that 'other' poet whom Coleridge cryptically
recognizes in such disguises as that of the insane friend of Otway and the
insane Monk on the side of Mt Etna. As a Wordsworth-watcher in 1800,
what Coleridge imagines might drive his senior insane must be the
killing-offof 'Lucy' if Lucy can be understood as the muse who gave him
150 DAVID V. ERDMAN

eyes and ears, i.e. his Sister as shield of his soul. The point The Mad Monk
makes is, if we bear Otway in mind, that to murder the maiden muse is
to bring on insanity and the end of genial spirits. Perhaps one thing Col-
eridge is saying in that poem is that William's great flaw is his failure to
appreciate either Dorothy or S.T.C. But to get the discussion on firm
ground, we need to examine the human context of interpersonal (and in-
terpoetical) relations as they developed in 1800 and threatened, by 1802,
to make 'allJoy hollow' for Coleridge and suspend his 'shaping Spirit of
Imagination' (April letter, lines 161, 242). If we recognize the newspaper
'Monk' poem of October 1800 as Coleridge's parody of Wordsworth's
domestic and poetic acts and thoughts during the spring and summer
preceding, in spirit a sequel to his Monthly Review parodies of other poets
and himself, in 1797, as 'Nehemiah Higginbottom', we are able to
recognize some of the ingredients in the developing personal symbiosis
of our two personae in this season as they began the life that earned them
the cognomen 'Lake Poets'. 9
In April 1800 Coleridge made his first visit to Dove Cottage and
learned that Wordsworth had decided to publish 'a second Volume of
Lyrical Ballads, & Pastorals', and was already turning out poems for it.
By early May Coleridge was back in Bristol, with some of these to show
to Poole and Davy, and (apparently) with thefirstpart ofChristabel, which
Davy praised highly. To bring the poets closer together, Dorothy Word-
sworth was on the look-out for housing, and by the end ofJuly the Col-
eridges moved into Greta Hall, in Keswick - where they resided for the
next twelve years.
The Lyrical Ballads project was still, by unwritten contract so to speak,
a joint undertaking, but William's relegation of S.T.C. to share the chore
work with Dorothy must from the start have produced in Coleridge the
uneasy emotions that surfaced in The Mad Monk. William was willing to
write most of the poems, and was dashing them off in merry haste to clear
his mind for the serious work they all felt to be the important thing on his
agenda, the great Recluse. Coleridge was willing, he himself felt, to do
most of the negotiating with the publisher. 'Indeed', observes Word-
sworth's biographer, Mary Moorman, 'Coleridge could not have worked
harder for the Lyrical Ballads if they had been his own "great work'' in-
stead of a small work by his friend. The manuscripts of the poems and
letters about their publication . . . show how much of the labour of cor-
respondence and preparation he undertook'.10 How could Coleridge, in
his secret rivalrous self, not take comfort from the very smallness of what
the 'greater man' was occupied with - a comfort that enabled him to
strike a magnanimous pose? Wordsworth's name was to go on the
volume, a publication to be justified by sales, not immortality, and at the
 The Otway connection 151
end of the year Coleridge would profess to be 'especially pleased that I
can now exert myself loudly and everywhere in their favour without
suspicion of vanity or self-interest' (CL, i, p. 654). This to the publisher,
Thomas Longman. A few days later, writing to Francis Wrangham (who
had reviewed the first Lyrical Ballads in the British Critic as if all were by
Coleridge) he was true to his word and, making clear that the new volume
was all by Wordsworth, insisted: 'He is a great, a true Poet - I am only
a kind of a Meta-physician' (CL, i, p. 658). At the same time he was
careful to distance himself from Wordsworth in Wrangham's mind: it
was Wordsworth who owed Wrangham this letter, but Coleridge had to
write it for him, since Wordsworth was a vile procrastinator: and
Wrangham was not to think of them as intimates: 'Wordsworth & I have
never resided together - he lives atGrasmere. . . . His address is . . . .
As to our literary occupations they are still more distant than our
residences' (CL, i, p. 658).
This guarded ebullience occurred in December, but in the spring it had
been understood that Coleridge was also contributing to the new volume.
Some time in June, when he was in Bristol showing some of Word-
sworth's contributions (and reading The Brothers) to Humphry Davy and
Thomas Poole, he had thefirstpart of Christabel to show them; Davy heard
or read it and was full of praise. n Yet something made Coleridge put off
showing it to the Wordsworths for many weeks - either his wish to com-
plete it first, or his anxiety lest William disapprove of it as heartily as he
had of The Ancient Mariner. {Christabel, too, might spoil the sales.) Dorothy
records that on 31 August 'Coleridge read us a part of Christabel. Talked
muchabout [not the poem but] themountains,etc.etc.' (DWJ, I, p. 58).
Finally, on 4 October, Coleridge having sat up 'all the night before,
writing essays for the newspaper', arrived at Dove Cottage drenched with
rain, with a 'second part of ChristabeV to read. The Wordsworths (or
Dorothy at least) were 'exceedingly delighted' (DWJ, I, p. 64). And the
next morning 'Coleridge read Christabel a second time; we had increas-
ing pleasure. A delicious morning' (DWJ, i, p. 64). Though he had been
'intending to go', Coleridge stayed on two days. During that time, alas,
the delightful work of his muse was held at arm's length and then effec-
tively slain.
Dorothy and William were working on 'an addition to the Preface';
after tea the second day they 'read The Pedlar' (William's emphatically
Wordsworthian self-assertion). And then, in Dorothy's laconic words,
they 'Determined not to print Christabel With, the L.B.' (DWJ, I, p. 64).
There was talk, perhaps only meant to be talk, of publishing a separate
volume with Christabel and The Pedlar (i.e. The Ruined Cottage), but nothing
came of that.
152 DAVID V. ERDMAN
Coleridge even accepted this with open cheer (as Mary Moorman
deduces, the decision was 'unanimous'). Or, in a kind of parody of good
cheer, he went overboard in explaining the decision to Davy (on October
9; CL, i, p. 631). Now the problem was not that the poem was unfinished
but that it was getting too long: 'The Christabel was running up to 1300
lines' - that would be almost double the number that survive, but he is
less likely to have thrown half of the poem away than to have been work-
ing up his statement to a high degree of falsity - and that the poem was
'admired by Wordsworth' but not by its author! 'I would rather have writ-
ten [Wordsworth's] Ruth, and Nature's Lady ['Three years she grew
. . . ' ] than a million such poems' as Christabel (see CL, i, p. 632 for even
more of this self-abasing mockery).
Indeed, Coleridge carried it off so well that, for instance, on Wednes-
day morning, the 22nd, they 'were very merry' at Dove Cottage, accor-
ding to Dorothy, although William (trying to write Michael and having
a hard time lifting up its stones) 'composed without much success at the
sheepfold' - and Coleridge came in to dinner having 'done nothing'.
After supper, 'Wm. read Ruth, etc. . . . Coleridge ChristabeV (DWJ, I,
pp. 68-9).
Another part of the collaboration, more directly involving the one who
declared himself 'only a kind of a Meta-physician' (see above - I think
he split the word to make a pun: he could be the physician of Wordsworth
in this respect), was the 'addition to the Preface' which William and
Dorothy were 'employed all the morning in writing' on that Sunday
when Coleridge 'read Christabel a. second time' (DWJ, i, p. 64). This is
not the place to give more than a quick look into the collaborative agonies
and conflicting accounts of that Preface, but only to note that while the
Wordsworths were busy on it they did not involve Coleridge, and that
when Coleridge was telling Davy that Christabel was expendable and that
it was a 'delightful' thing that Wordsworth's ballads had been written,
he went on to talk about the work he had most 'at my heart', defining it
as an 'Essay on the Elements of Poetry . . . in reality . . . a disguised System
of Morals & Politics', yet indicated no connection with the Lyrical Ballads.
Years later Wordsworth would maintain that he had written the Preface,
but 'solely to gratify Coleridge', and that he could remember the very
spot, 'a deserted quarry in the vale of Grasmere' (a setting as barren as
the pathless spot where the poet Otway interviewed his friend the ' wan-
dring Bard'), where Coleridge 'pressed the thing upon me' and Word-
sworth agreed 'out of sheer good nature' (Moorman, p. 492).
Now let us look at the particular poems by Wordsworth that were
pressed upon Coleridge during the weeks before publication of The Mad
Monk and what message the great poet may have seemed to be sending to
 The Otway connection 153
his Meta-physician. In the first week of August 1800, Dorothy and Col-
eridge were at work copying for the printer enough of Wordsworth's new
poems to complete a fourth sheet of copy for the Lyrical Ballads. Dorothy
copied out Strange Fits ofPassion. Coleridge copied She Dwelt among the Un-
trodden Ways, and A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal, writing directions for the
printer. A few days later 'Tis Said That Some Have Died for Love was copied
by Dorothy, with notes by Wordsworth and Coleridge (Reed, n, p. 78).
These seem the poems that could have inspired the lamentations of The
Mad Monk, for they all have to do with the fear - then the reality and the
'difference to me' - of the death of the poet's beloved 'Lucy'.
What the author of The Mad Monk claims to be overhearing is the Com-
plaint of a poet who has murdered his muse and gone insane. The long
debated question, ever since George McLean Harper and Emile Legouis
published the record of Wordsworth's secret affair with Annette Vallon,
has ranged from the proposition that 'Lucy' was Annette, to conjectures
that she was Dorothy ('murdered' to stop their incest - not really a likely
proposition; or to prevent their love from becoming incestuous - rather
more probable) or some still undiscovered woman. Coleridge made one
suggestion - in a mocking Epigram in the Morning Post of 11 October
1802, the week after the Wordsworth wedding - to the effect that,
though 'strict and holy' in his own eyes, Wordsworth was still associating
with a prostitute named Annette. Reading back from that ironic charge
(Spots in the Sun was its title) we may suppose that the insanity of the
overheard 'Monk' of 1800 was derived from the thought that he was kill-
ing off his beloved Annette - slowly, by distance? Or by some current
decision?
What I think likely is that in 1800 when Coleridge was reading the
'Lucy' poems with Dorothy, he assumed that William was secretly say-
ing to himself and Dorothy (as in early versions of Nutting) that they must
avoid in England the ostracism their intimacy had provoked in Germany;
that, in effect, the Dove Cottage family should include a proper wife for
William - as they all finally agreed (in the good Christian part of their
hearts).
In 1802, while Coleridge was still pitying himself for his entrapment
in a domestic establishment that prevented him from doing more than
hold hands with Sara Hutchinson, we find that it was Wordsworth who
wanted to enlarge his trap. Indeed he sought both from his Muse and his
Meta-physician advice - and approval of an arrangement whereby he
could cut himself loose from (to use Coleridge's language to Poole, quoted
above) the 'phantasms' of a wife and daughter out of wedlock, Annette
and Caroline, now within visiting distance because of the Peace of
Amiens, and thus be able to propose marriage to Mary Hutchinson (a
154 DAVID V. ERDMAN
phantom, but a 'phantom of delight', who would prove to be * a Woman
too!') and thus also be able (this was the beauty part) to keep the muse
his Sister within a respectable family - which could also include (why
not?)S.H.andS.T.C.
It was precisely to talk this over with Coleridge that Wordsworth kept
him up all night on 3 April 1802, impelling his weak-willed friend to ex-
ercise his 'own tenderness of Heart' and 'disinterested Enthusiasm for
others, and eager Spirit of Self-sacrifice' (which Coleridge possessed, he
later felt, because of his 'being & having ever been, an unfortunate
unhappy Man'). One of the Griefs expressed in the Dejection lines address-
ed to Sara Hutchinson the next day is Sara's precarious status in the pro-
posed household.
I am quoting what Coleridge claimed were his unexpressed thoughts
on the occasion, in a belated notebook entry made on midnight, 12 May
1808, pouring out his repressed feelings - having that day, for the first
time (he told himself) allowed himself to utter his 'Complaints . . .
relatively to [Wordsworth's] conduct towards me, and that of [erased:
perhaps naming Mrs Coleridge & Mary & Dorothy]'. He has been cruel-
ly treated 'by almost every one' because of his eager sacrifice of self. 'O
God! if it had been fore told me, when in my bed I - then ill - continued
talking with [ Wordsworth ] the whole night till the Dawn of the Day, urg-
ing him to conclude on marrying [Mary Hutchinson]' (CN, in, 3304).
A comparable self-despising can be found in the curse he put on himself
in 1821 (for falsehoods he had circulated that led to the duel in which John
Scott was shot): 'If I had the craft of the Draftsman, I would paint . . .
myself as a Dutch Mercury . . . the God o f . . . prudential Interest . . .
of Thieves, Tradesmen, Diplomatists, Pimps, Heralds, and Go-
betweens - the soothing, pacifying God'. 12
Kathleen Coburn in her note on the 1808 entry, after observing that
Coleridge's multiple agony included his resentment at Wordsworth's
separating himself from one woman to marry another with 'the sort of
freedom for which Coleridge longed but which his conscience did not per-
mit him', adds that 'A better consequence of the night's talk was Dejec-
tion: An Ode, written the next day.' Nor must we accept Coleridge's cruel
self-contempt as the deepest truth about his ambivalent sentiments about
his greatest Friend. In self-contemning moments he could express bit-
terness about his friend as well. The 'Dejection' triumphs, not only over
his own dejection but over his envy, and, in the version published on
Wordsworth's wedding day and the anniversary of his own, constitutes,
as Reeve Parker suggests, 'an epithalamic gesture' of tremendous
sincerity.
Parker can keep us from overcrediting the finality of Coleridgean ex-
 The Otway connection 155

pressions of resentment, by calling our attention to another Morning Post

poem, published three weeks earlier and constituting the prelude to this
epithalamion: the 'Hymn Before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni',
which he reads 'as an allegorical celebration of Wordsworth's emergent
being as poet and husband' expressing 'Coleridge's perhaps envious but
certainly yearning blessing of the marriage as the event to . . . domesticate
and humanize, in effect to realize, the sublime austerity of his Friend' (p.
160). As Parker reads the evidence in his letters and in Dorothy's jour-
nals - a sampling of which I have presented above - what Coleridge
saw as he watched Wordsworth productively at home in Grasmere was
'that Wordsworth was emerging, like Mont Blanc, from the dark night
of doubts and personal anxieties that had, at least to Coleridge's mind,
beset him, and that he was entering on a career of radiant and produc-
tive creativity, secure in the undersong of domestic affections Coleridge
likened to the ' ' still hive at quiet midnight humming'' ' (Parker, p. 158).
Fortunately, before he sent Dejection to the Morning Post, Coleridge had
cleared up some of the ambiguities of the verse-letter - for instance the
two passages that distinctly echo the 'Immortality' ode but ambiguous-
ly express the 'Spirit of Self-sacrifice' into which he was entering for the
great occasion. The first, as Dekker (p. 49) observes, does not make clear
'whether he is wishing the Words worths and Hutchinsons all dead and
in Heaven or all living together in one house in Grasmere':

When thou, & with thee those, whom thou lov's best,
Shall dwell together in one happy Home,
One House, the dear abiding Home of All,
I too will crown me with a Coronal —
Nor shall this Heart in idle Wishes roam
Morbidly soft! (11. 113-18)13
One message conveyed by the 'Intimations' ode which Coleridge was
struggling to accept in silence - or ambiguity - was that since Word-
sworth was winning the palms that would certify his attainment of 'the
philosophic mind', without any help from colleagues other than the
brooks and hills, the writing of his philosophic epic, The Recluse, might
not require help from Coleridge. (Actually, we know that Wordsworth
panicked when his friend decided to leave England without supplying his
schema.) From the occasionally bitter Coleridgean point of view, the title
itself can be read as announcing that the poet was given, even in
childhood, intimations of his poetic immortality. And in a curious way,
Wordsworth's great 'Poem to Coleridge' (posthumously entitled The
Prelude) would also, in its closing tribute to Coleridge as loving and
understanding friend, imply both an appreciation of his generous and
mediating service - and reticence about his philosophic mind or genial
156 DAVID V. ERDMAN
spirits. I refer to the conclusion of the 1805 version; the 1850 version, in
a passage revised after Coleridge's death, drops all this and gives credit
primarily to Coleridge's religious faith.14

Manifestly the complicated and fluctuating intimacy of these two poets

involved shifting proportions of admiration and mistrust. There was
something in Wordsworth which he himself spoke of as a belief that he
had 'a talent for command'. He had studied military history and tactics
in his boyhood; he could grieve for Buonaparte (over what reverses he
does not specify) until that unhappy warrior seized the imperial crown.15
His definition of the 'Character of the Happy Warrior', composed about
the time he was completing the 'Intimations' ode, contains a large ele-
ment of self-definition - for instance, 'a natural instinct to discern/What
knowledge can perform', a soul 'alive to tenderness' and 'homefelt
pleasures' yet even as a commander in 'the heat of conflict' able to hold
firm to the decisions which he had 'In calmness made' (11. 8-9, 26, 35,
53-4, 60). When he firmly excluded Christabel from the Lyrical Ballads
while praising it, he was exercising that talent.
Evidently there was something in The Ancient Mariner and Christabel, not
to mention Kubla Khan, that he responded to as a commander confron-
ting demon power. It was what Coleridge called 'pure imagination', i.e.
imagination uncontrolled by will.16 Wordsworth himself had a great
empathy with power under control: the 'force' (pun) of a waterfall that was
held in stationary control (like emotion recollected in the mind of a poet
who has thought deeply, too deeply for tears). Such powers were to Word-
sworth legible as characters of 'the great Apocalypse', all 'like workings
of one mind'. But the great poems of Coleridge, fragmenting implosions
and explosions not firmly held in check, were rather too much either for
their author or his 'Father Confessor'.
On the other hand, there was something in Coleridge that made him
portray the shooting of albatrosses yet wish to be commanded by a power-
ful institution or a 'commanding genius'. In intermittent 'pants' he em-
braced and resented powerful control. By setting a strong force in mo-
tion - in a poem or in his relations with others - and then not controll-
ing it, he could remain free of competition and judgment (anyone's final
decision must await the completion of the Opus) and thus forcefully de-
fiant, cryptically. As Reeve Parker observes, 'The stimulating friendship
with Wordsworth cost Coleridge dearly, for he invested Wordsworth with
a power destructive of his own self-assurance' (p. 218). Coleridge was not
simply imagining things when he poured forth into a diary or blurted in
an intimate letter, grievances against his commanding friend. And
 The Otway connection 157
Wordsworth was not being paranoid in sensing a powerful hostility in
these poems, with their vertiginous enticements and open endings.
To conclude this discussion I should like to draw upon a recent collec-
tion by Warren Stevenson (in 1983) of essays he published in various
journals in 1962, 1973, and 1976 - sadly overlooked by bibliographers
(those of the Romantic Movement at least) - which he now titles Nim-
bus of Glory: A Study of Coleridge's Three Great Poems (Salzburg, 1983). 17
Behind Kubla Khan and the Tartars of Purchas his Pilgrimage, with their
ancestral voices prophesying war, Stevenson notes a 'subtle claim on the
sympathetic attention of Coleridge' in their possession of qualities which
Wordsworth had and Coleridge lacked, 'those qualities of warlike
bravery and decisiveness in which Coleridge seems to have regarded
himself as being deficient, and for which he retained a certain childlike
admiration. One thinks of his undergraduate escapade of running away
to join the dragoons. Compare the following note: ' 'Every thing, that has
been known or deemed fit to win woman's love, I have an impulse to
make myself - even tho' I should otherwise look down upon it - lean-
not endure not to be strong in arms, a dazzling Soldier . . . " ' (CN, m,
3158, f. 42, Stevenson p. 44). The unhappy warrior, dejected when he
thinks of the Grasmere commander girdled by Dorothy and Mary and
Sara, buries his grief in writing a Second Part (not to be finished) of
Christabel.
Stevenson's reading of the heroine's relationship to Geraldine as 'a
subconscious symbolical representation of Coleridge's relationship to
Wordsworth' (pp. 12ff.) is impressive in its details:
Christabel is Coleridge the poet - the true poet, the author of The Ancient
Mariner and Kubla Khan: Sir Leoline, her father, is STC - Coleridge's self-
deprecating way of referring to himself as the mere social being, versifier, family-
man, and friend. Sir Leoline is 'weak in health' and 'seldom sleepeth well'; his
wife is dead, and life has become a kind of living death for him. 'Each matin bell,
the Baron saith, / Knells us back to a world of death.' STC was unhappily mar-
ried and made similar laments. . . . Geraldine, the malignant demon whom
Christabel unwittingly succors, is a transmogrification of Wordsworth - rather,
of the worst element in Wordsworth's nature. . . .
Christabel's inability to tell the truth is itself the curse. . . . [Her] silence . . .
prophetically symbolizes the congealing of Coleridge's poetic impulse; and her
sense of sin and confusion is part of her spiritual death, which is conceived of as
a vicarious atonement for the sin of Geraldine.
Stevenson finds an important iconographic explanation of Geraldine's
mysterious 'bosom and half her side' as 'lean and old and foul of hue' in
a passage in Collins's Ode on the Poetical Character which Coleridge pointed
to as having greatly inspired him. Collins describes a magic band or gir-
dle, woven on the day of creation of the world, which is the emblem of
158 DAVID V. ERDMAN
poetic genius - the very thing at issue here. In Spenser it is the magic
girdle of Venus, which bursts when put on by an unchaste woman. The
same symbol of poetic power is the druid circle - which Coleridge in
Kubla Khan calls for as his proof of inspiration - and which Wordsworth
had used, as Stevenson notes, in The Vale of Esthwaite to hint at his own
bardic initiation:
The spectre made a solemn stand,
Slow round my head thrice wav'd his hand.
Stevenson's summary, an intriguing exercise of fancy, is worth full
quotation:
Geraldine's deformity is thus vitally linked to the total symbolic structure of
the poem, which deals on one level with the psychic conflict and poetic rivalry of
Wordsworth and Coleridge. When she unbinds her cincture and inner vest,
Geraldine is at once revealed as 'poetically unchaste', a false aspirant to the title
of divinely inspired poet, and she symbolizes that part of Wordsworth antithetical
to his own and Coleridge's creative imagination. Her foul and deformed side,
the mark of her shame and seal of her sorrow, symbolizes both Coleridge's in-
tuitive apprehension of Wordsworth's 'hidden vice', and his deep unconscious
feeling that Wordsworth has arrogated to himself the title of divinely inspired poet,
while denying it to Coleridge, the true aspirant.
And there is much more, the Wordsworthian aspect of the Ancient
Mariner; Wordsworth as Peter Bell the Potter, who 'struck - and struck
again', echoic contrary of the youth in his 'elfin pinnace' who also 'struck
and struck again' when a threatening peak 'as if with voluntary power
instinct / Upreared its head'. And the two bards in Kubla Khan. But
Stevenson's full account of this component of Coleridge's three great
symbolic poems must be read for the Coleridge-watcher interested in Col-
eridge's watching of Wordsworth to see quite how fully this line of in-
vestigation seems to me consistent with and more all-embracing than my
own attempt to 'read' the poets' Odes as Complaints of their muses -
in Otway's sense - and of that evil child of poetical unchastity, the
monster named Libell.

Notes
1
In July 1977 a variant draft of this Letter turned up (see G. Dekker, Col-
eridge and the Literature of Sensibility (New York, 1978), p . 249), but I cite the
one long known and cited. Within the lines it addresses 'Sara', but the
heading leaves a blank for the name. The newly discovered version, in the
hand of Mary Hutchinson, is actually addressed to Sara, I gather from Dek-
ker - though he was allowed to see it at Sotheby's but not quote and may
only mean to report that Sara is addressed within the poem, as in the familiar
version. He saw several differences in wording but reports that 'it is substan-
tially the same poem as the verse letter'.
 The Otway connection 159
2
Compare Wordsworth's putting the name Oswald into the 1841 version of
The Borderers.
3
'Coleridge's "Mad Lutanist": A Romantic Response to Ann Radcliffe',
BRH, 82 (1979), pp. 222-35.
4
Dekker, p. 113, quoting John O. Hayden, 'Coleridge's "Dejection: An
Ode" \ English Studies (Apri\1971), pp. 1-5.
5
This cannot be said of the parody, of course, the 'agony' of whose pro-
tagonist escalates from seeing the trickling stream as the blood of the Rosa
he 'struck' (and struck again?) to a wish to 'be for ever dead!' - to the 'deep
dismay' of the listener, who withdraws to his 'goat-herd's tent' remarking
that there is 'no moon!'!
N .B.: For the evidence of Coleridge's authorship of TheMadMonk, which
is now generally accepted (as it was before we debated the question), see
'Who Wrote The Mad Monk? A Debate', Stephen M. Parrish and David V.
Erdman. Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 64 (1960), 209-37 below.
Stephen Parrish argued that there was so much Wordsworthian diction in
the poem that Coleridge could not have written it; I argued that his using it
served the purpose of parody. Parrish in reprinting his essay (Parrish, The Art
of the Lyrical Ballads (Harvard, 1973), pp. 189-213) concedes that 'such evi-
dence can be ambivalent' and cites a compromise suggestion by Robert
Woof, to the effect that Coleridge 'wrote the poem in parodic imitation' not
of Wordsworth but 'of the kind of writing that Wordsworth and Coleridge
attacked' in the 1800 Preface (209 and n). Parrish's own conclusion is that 'it
is impossible to imagine that The Mad Monk can be all Coleridge's and not
at all Wordsworth's'. A nice point alongside my own, that it is a document
of their symbiosis. And that it was a. private parody goes with Parrish's fur-
ther point that 'no reader could have been expected to know what it was a
parody of, the pertinent poems of Wordsworth's being unpublished' (211
and 212).
6
Coleridge and the Literature of Sensibility, passim.
7
There could, of course, have been an earlier draft with different opening
lines.
8
Dekker (p. 239) does assemble a parallel between the two odes - and
Wordsworth's Resolution and Independence understood as 'Wordsworth's
"answer'' to Coleridge' - to which he then adds the slightly upbeat finale
of Otway's drama of triple suicide, The Orphan. The argument is that 'So
long as feeling can be kept alive, something can be made of pain and misfor-
tune. ' Hence a tale of groans and pain followed by 'A tale of less affright,
/ And tempered with delight', can be loosely attributed to Otway. (Or, I
should think, to any of the hundreds of tragedies that in some way purge the
fright.)
Growing more knowledgeable, however, I begin to see the embarrass-
ing potential of a plot which places twin brothers [ say, William and Samuel]
in rivalry for their sister's love, one attempting and one achieving incest;
all three self-destroyed. The 'Mad Monk' managed only one 'murdered'
maiden!
9
For an extensive and penetrating discussion of the literary and
psychological aspects of the Coleridge -Wordsworth interaction, we are all
deeply indebted to the chapters in Thomas McFarland's Romanticism and the
Forms ofRuin: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Modalities ofFragmentation (Princeton,
160 DAVID V. ERDMAN
1981). Giving equal attention to 'Coleridge's Anxiety' and to the anxiety
of Wordsworth, McFarland updates an earlier article which opened the
topic, 'The Symbiosis of Coleridge and Wordsworth', and demonstrates
the tidal pull of the thoughts and acts of each upon the other.
10
Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: A Biography; the Early Years,
1770-1803 (Oxford, 1957), p. 488.
11
See M. Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Middle Years (Cambridge,
Mass., 1957), p. 65.
12
CL, V. p. 190. See my discussion of this in 'Coleridge and the "Review
Business" ', TWC, 6, i (Winter 1975), pp. 3-50.
13
See Dekker, pp. 48-9, 294-5.
14
See x m 246-68; xiv 275-301.
15
See A. G. Grosart, ed., The Prose Works of William Wordsworth (3 vols.,
1876), III, p. 451, on Wordsworth's military interests. Wordsworth's son-
net of May 1801, / grieved for Bonaparte, was probably prompted by
Napoleon's stifling the republics of Switzerland on his way to empire.
16
For a clarification of Coleridge's remarks to Mrs Barbauld on The Ancient
Mariner, see P. Magnuson, Coleridge's Nightmare Poetry (ChaxlottesviHe, 1974),
p. 81.
17
Warren Stevenson's original articles were: (1) '{Christabel: a Re-
interpretation', Alphabet, 4 (June 1962); (2) 'Kubla Khan as Symbol', Texas
Studies in Literature and Language, 14, iv (Winter, 1973); (3)'The Rime ofThe
Ancient Mariner as Epic Symbol', Dalhousie Review, 56, iii (Autumn, 1976).
 Imagining Robespierre

NICHOLAS ROE

O friend, few happier moments have been mine

Through my whole life than that when first I heard
That this foul tribe of Moloch was o'erthrown,
And their chief regent levelled with the dust.
(The Prelude, X,H.466-9y
So Wordsworth tells Coleridge of his feelings when he heard of the
death of Robespierre in summer 1794, while crossing the Leven Sands.
'Great was my glee of spirit, great my joy', he recalls. Coleridge's reac-
tion to the news was different. He immediately collaborated with Sou they
on a tragedy, The Fall of Robespierre, and he continued to explore
Robespierre's character and motives in his political lectures of 1795. Col-
eridge's interest in Robespierre was shared by the leading reformist John
Thelwall, and both agreed that the British prime minister Pitt lacked
Robespierre's political skill. Coleridge went further, though, and used
Robespierre as a foil in his developing idea of the imagination. When he
wrote about Robespierre's death in The Prelude Wordsworth knew that
Coleridge had not shared his feelings at the time, and that his friend's
complex response to Robespierre was ultimately of the greatest impor-
tance to himself. Why then did Wordsworth insist so emphatically upon
his exultant feelings,

'Come now, ye golden times',

Said I, forth-breaking on those open sands
A hymn of triumph, (x, 11. 541-3)
- recalling Robespierre's death as a moment of personal vindication?
The 'golden times' never came. France did not recover the revolu-
tionary idealism of former years, and no longer provided a model for
political and social change in Britain. Despite his 'hymn of triumph' and
renewed confidence in the future, the execution of Robespierre was the
beginning of the end of Wordsworth's revolutionary commitment. In the
following months Wordsworth's thinking was much influenced by
Political Justice, until the inefficiency of Godwinian rationalism as a means
to social progress became increasingly apparent. This was the time,
161
162 NICHOLAS ROE
perhaps early in 1796, when Wordsworth 'Yielded up moral questions
in despair'.
In The Prelude Wordsworth claims that
then it was
That thou, most precious friend, about this time
First known to me, didst lend a living help
To regulate my soul. (X, 11. 904-7)
Coleridge and Wordsworth first met in September 1795, but they had no
marked mutual influence until two years later. Nevertheless, Words-
worth deliberately presents Coleridge as a redeemingfigurein Book Ten,
a 'living help' in the aftermath of personal crisis, the successor to his
schoolmaster and poetic mentor William Taylor whose grave Words-
worth had visited on the very day he had heard of Robespierre's execu-
tion back in August 1794. When Wordsworth reminded Coleridge of that
day, he did so in the knowledge that the fundamental differences in their
response to his downfall, and in their personal experiences over the next
three years, provided the immediate context for their early meetings and
mutual commitment to poetry in June 1797. Those differences are the
subject of this essay.

1: Treason and Terror

Many years after the French Revolution, William Godwin looked back
to the time when he had 'blazed as a sun in the firmament of reputation'
as the author of PoliticalJustice. For Godwin, 1794 was memorable not
for the Terror in France nor for the execution of Robespierre, but for an
event in London,
the trial of twelve persons under one indictment upon a charge of high-treason
. . . - it was an attempt to take away the lives of men by a constructive treason,
& out of many facts no one of which was capital, to compose a capital crime -
the name of the man in whose mind the scheme of this trial was engendered was
Pitt - 2
In May 1794 the leaders of the London Corresponding Society and Socie-
ty for Constitutional Information had been arrested and imprisoned in
the Tower and Newgate jail. Habeas Corpus was suspended on 23 May,
and the prisoners were held over the summer until formally charged with
treason on 2 October. Thomas Hardy, Home Tooke, and John Thelwall
were then brought to trial - and acquitted - during the next two
months. Godwin had contributed to the acquittals by attacking the
trumped-up treason charge in his pamphlet Cursory Strictures, which first
appeared in the Morning Chronicle on 21 October and was certainly read
 Imagining Robespierre 163
by Coleridge and Wordsworth then or very shortly afterwards.
In Book Ten of The Prelude Wordsworth also recalls the treason trials
which remained as vivid a memory for him as they had for Godwin. His
condemnation of the government is unequivocal -
Our shepherds (this say merely) at that time
Thirsted to make the guardian crook of law
A tool of murder (X, 11. 645-7)
- and it recalls his nightmare dreams of the massacres at Paris earlier
in Book Ten,
Such ghastly visions . . . of despair,
And tyranny, and implements of death . . . (X, 11. 374-5)
The similarity between Pitt's 'tool of murder' and French 'implements
of death' was deliberate. Unlike Godwin, Wordsworth did not believe
that the scheme of the treason trials had been 'engendered' in Pitt's mind.
Pitt had no capacity for originality. He was an imitator, and a foolish one
at that,
Though with such awful proof before [his] eyes
That he who would sow death, reaps death, or worse,
And can reap nothing better, childlike longed
To imitate - not wise enough to avoid. (X, 11. 648-51)
The 'awful proof Wordsworth had in mind was of course the Terror
in France, which culminated in Robespierre's death on 28 July 1794. In
spite of this example Pitt's government persisted in 'composing a capital
crime', as Godwin put it, and charging the reformists with high treason.
If found guilty, they would presumably have been executed. In The
Prelude, Wordsworth draws a direct analogy between the 'unjust
tribunals' of Paris and those in London. His comparison also extends fur-
ther, for Wordsworth implies that Pitt's schemes had pushed Britain to
the threshold of violence that would bring about his own downfall. In sow-
ing death through his childlike imitation of Robespierre, he too would
reap nothing but death.
Wordsworth's recollection of the treason trials in Book Ten was written
during autumn 1804, exactly ten years after the event. The date is im-
portant, for his portrayal of Pitt as Robespierre's imitator has a curious
link with work on the last seven stanzas of Intimations in the spring of the
same year. In stanza seven of Intimations Wordsworth had described the
four-year-old child's restless urge to imitate, adopting one role after
another,
But it will not be long
Ere this be thrown aside
164 NICHOLAS ROE
And with new joy and pride
The little actor cons another part
Filling from time to time his humourous stage
With all the persons down to palsied age
That Life brings with her in her Equipage
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation (11. 99-107)3
The child's joy infittinghis tongue to a succession of adult roles is sadly
ironic. The 'earnest pains' of his imitation only serve to hasten the loss
of his own 'heaven-born freedom' as a child. He blindly provokes the 'in-
evitable yoke' of years that lead to the prison-house of adult life. In Book
Ten of The Prelude, however, the 'little actor' is William Pitt, and his wilful
'conning the part' of Robespierre is a matter for condemnation. The child
in Intimations impatiently throws aside one role to adopt another, in-
nocently unaware that he is at strife with himself. Pitt, on the other hand,
had only one vocation: to imitate the man whose execution should have
stood as a warning example,
Though with such awful proof. . . childlike longed
To imitate - not wise enough to avoid.
The portrait of Pitt as a perverse child is peculiar to Wordsworth in
1804.4 But Wordsworth was not alone in regarding the treason trials ten
years earlier as an imitation of Robespierre's Terror in France. Besides
recalling the stanza from Intimations, the passage in Book Ten of The
Prelude may also have been influenced by Wordworth's reading of Col-
eridge's Condones ad Populum, and by John Thelwall's political journal
The Tribune. Coleridge and Thelwall both agreed that Pitt was an imitator
of Robespierre. Furthermore, their attitudes to Robespierre himself also
coincided.
Thelwall was acquitted of high treason on 5 December 1794 and that
night he celebrated his freedom over dinner with his wife, William God-
win and Thomas Holcroft.5 Two months later he resumed his political
lectures at Beaufort Buildings in the Strand. To guard against the
misrepresentation of spies and informers, the lectures were transcribed
verbatim and then published in The Tribune. On 23 May 1795 The Tribune
contained Thelwall's third lecture on 'The Prospective Principle of Vir-
tue', which was based upon his reading of Godwin's Political Justice.
Wordsworth was in London at this time and given his friendship with
Godwin, and his democratic politics, he may well have been in the au-
dience at Beaufort Buildings when Thelwall made a sustained 'com-
parison between the character of Robespierre and the immaculate
minister of this country' .6 Thelwall argued that the arrests in 1794, the
suspension of Habeas Corpus, the charges and the trials were a policy of
 Imagining Robespierre 165
terrorism copied from the French, and designed to remove all opposition
to the Government. 'I will ask you', he said,
what might have been the situation of this country, if the late prosecutions had
succeeded? . . . who knows, when you once begin a system of massacre, and
especially legal massacre, for opinion, where you can stop? I do not believe that
Robespierre meditated, in thefirstinstance, those scenes of carnage into which he
at last was plunged . . . I have strong suspicions in my mind, that, if they had
touched the life of an individual who stood at the bar of the Old Bailey, the gaols
of London (and we all know we have abundance) would have been as crammed
as ever the prisons of Paris were, even in the very dog-days of the tyranny of
Robespierre.7
Thelwall was self-dramatising and given to exaggeration, but since his
life depended on the outcome of'the late prosecutions' his suspicions were
understandable, nor were they peculiar to him alone. The government
had been frustrated by the acquittals at the Old Bailey, and this offered
a further opportunity to attack Pitt as an unsuccessful imitator of
Robespierre. In his lecture, Thelwall developed the characters of
Robespierre and Pitt, but to the disadvantage of
that Minister who, without the energy of Robespierre, has all his dictatorial am-
bition; who, without the provocations which Robespierre and his faction ex-
perienced, has endeavoured, vainly endeavoured, to carry into execution the
same system of massacre for opinion, of sanguinary persecution for proclaim-
ing truth, of making argument High Treason, and destroying every individual
who dared to expose his conduct, or oppose his ambitious views.8
Thelwall damns Pitt for endeavouring to execute a 'system of massacre
for opinion', and - ironically enough - for failing to succeed in his am-
bitions. At the same time, he almost acquits Robespierre, who had in-
troduced his system of terror after 'provocations'. The provocation he
had in mind was the European coalition against France, which he believ-
ed had encouraged the leaders of the republic to adopt extreme and
violent policies. In The Prelude Wordsworth makes a similar point,
And thus beset with foes on every side,
The goaded land waxed mad (X, 11. 311-12)
- and at the end of his lecture 'On the Present War' in Condones Col-
eridge takes the argument full circle by identifying Pitt, not Robespierre,
as ultimately responsible for the Terror in France:
It was a truth easily discovered, a truth on which our Minister has proceeded,
that valour and victory would not be the determiners of this War. They would
provefinallysuccessful whose resources enabled them to hold out the longest. The
commerce of France was annihilated. . . . Immense armies were to be supported.
. . .Alas! Freedom weeps! The Guillotine became the Financier-General. - That
dreadful pilot, Robespierre, perceived that it would at once furnish wind to the
166 NICHOLAS ROE

sails and free the vessel from those who were inclined to mutiny. - Who, my
Brethren! was the cause of this guilt, if not HE, who supplied the occasion and
the motive? (Lects 1795, p. 74)

Coleridge's judgement of contemporary events was remarkably acute.

Britain had joined the war against France in February 1793. The follow-
ing month, French armies under General Dumouriez were defeated at
Neerwinden in Holland, and also in Belgium. The simultaneous
rebellion in the Vendee put the republic at risk from within. Coleridge's
analysis of the financial ruin caused by maintaining large armies at a time
when war sapped commerce and trade was correct. Throughout 1793 in-
flation and the shortage of goods meant that prices rose steeply, adding
in turn to unrest in Paris and elsewhere in the country. In response, the
National Convention sought to consolidate the powers of central govern-
ment. Representatives were sent to the armies and into the provinces to
bolster revolutionary enthusiasm, recruit soldiers, and root out counter-
revolutionaries. The Revolutionary Tribunal was set up at Paris, and on
6 April the Committee of Public Safety was established to direct executive
government and policy. As Coleridge indicated, the machinery through
which the Terror was implemented was set up in spring 1793 as a
response to threats from inside and outside the republic. He had genuine
grounds for his claim that by maintaining a war of attrition against
France, Pitt had in fact supplied the 'occasion and the motive' for the
Terror.
In 1795, Coleridge and Thelwall agreed that Robespierre had been
'provoked' into the Terror. At the same time, their need to condemn the
repressive policies of the British government led both to compare Pitt un-
favourably with Robespierre. Like their analyses of the immediate causes
of the violence in France, their insights into Robespierre's character and
motives are also strikingly similar.
Robespierre was executed on 28 July 1794 and his death was first
reported in the London Times on 16 August.9 Six days later Sou they
wrote to his friend Horace Bedford telling him that, with Coleridge, he
had written 'a tragedy upon [Robespierre's] death in the space of two
days!' This 'tragedy' was, of course, The Fall of Robespierre, and Sou they
continued his letter to Bedford by giving his 'opinion of this great man',
who he believed had been

sacrificed to the despair of fools and cowards. Coleridge says 'he was a man whose
great bad actions cast a dis [astrous] lustre over his name.' He is now inclined
to think with me that the [ actions? ] of a man so situated must not be judged by
common laws, that Robespierre was the benefactor of mankind and that
we should lament his death as the greatest misfortune Europe could have
sustained . . . 1 0
 Imagining Robespierre 167

Coleridge's response was more complex than Southey suggests,

and he never actually hailed Robespierre as the 'benefactor of mankind'.
But Southey's letter does anticipate Coleridge's dedication to the
play where he says that he has 'endeavoured to detail . . . the fall
of a man, whose great bad actions have cast a disastrous lustre on his
name' (PW, n, p. 495). In the opening speech of the play, Robespierre
is described as

Sudden in action, fertile in resource,

And rising awful 'mid impending ruins;
In splendour gloomy, as the midnight meteor,
That fearless thwarts the elemental war {PW, II, p. 496)
- andjust visible through the gloom is Milton's 'dread commander' in
Paradise Lost,

above the rest

In shape and gesture proudly eminent
Stood like a tower; his form had yet not lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than archangel ruined, and the excess
Of glory obscured . . . (1,11. 589-94)11

Robespierre's awful stature recalls Satan's towering presence, his

'disastrous lustre' the obscured glory of the fallen archangel. Rather than
seeing Robespierre as 'the benefactor of mankind' as Southey had done,
Coleridge presents him as heroic rebel, undaunted by the ruin brought
upon himself. Like Satan he retains traces of his 'original brightness' in
his resourcefulness and swiftness to action.
Despite the obvious debt to Milton, however, The Fall of Robespierre
does reveal Coleridge's own interest in Robespierre's character and
motives subsequently explored with greater insight in his political
lectures. There is also evidence that the similarity between Thelwall's
and Coleridge's ideas of Robespierre in 1795 may have been influenc-
ed by Thelwall's reading of the play. In late September 1794 five
hundred copies of The Fall of Robespierre were published at Cambridge
by Benjamin Flower. At least 125 copies were sent to London, one
hundred to Kearsley the bookseller and twenty-five to George Dyer
(CL, I, p. 117). Dyer was a friend of Thelwall's and may have sent
a copy to him in the Tower. This would explain what appear to be
echoes of The Fall of Robespierre in Thelwall's 1795 lecture 'On the Pro-
spective Principle of Virtue':

Robespierre had a soul capacious, an imagination various, ajudgement comman-

ding, penetrating, severe. Fertile of resources, he foresaw, created, and turned
to his advantage all the events that could possibly tend to the accomplishment
168 NICHOLAS ROE

of his designs. The mind of Pitt is barren and inflated, his projects are crude, and
his views short sighted.12
Thelwall's lecture develops Coleridge's idea of Robespierre as 'Sud-
den in action, fertile in resource', into a Machiavellian hero who turns all
to his advantage. Thelwall's purpose was to present Pitt in an un-
favourable light and he did so by stressing Robespierre's resourceful
energy and the quality of his mind. Where Robespierre was vital and
creative, Pitt's mind was 'barren and inflated', lifeless and flatulent.
Where Robespierre could foresee and manipulate events to his advan-
tage, Pitt was myopic and his politics inept. 'Having viewed these facts',
Thelwall concluded, 'it is impossible to doubt which of these characters
we must prefer.'
This lecture was delivered and published in London during May
1795, some eight months after the publication of The Fall of Robespierre
and almost a year after the death of Robespierre himself. Three
months before, in February 1795, Coleridge had delivered 'three political
Lectures' at Bristol. One of these was his Moral and Political Lecture,
published during February and subsequently expanded to form the
'Introductory Address' to Condones which was published the following
November. Coleridge's additions in the 'Introductory Address' included
a history of the different factions that had held power in France. His
portrait of Robespierre is close to Thelwall's, but it differs significantly
in Coleridge's emphasis on the contradictions of Robespierre's
character,

Robespierre . . . possessed a glowing ardor that still remembered the end, and a
cool ferocity that never either overlooked, or scrupled, the means. What that end
was, is not known: that it was a wicked one, has by no means been proved. I rather
think, that the distant prospect, to which he was travelling, appeared to him grand
and beautiful; but that he fixed his eye on it with such intense eagerness as to
neglect the foulness of the road. (Lects 1795, p. 35)
So the Machiavellian politician turns visionary, and Coleridge implies
that Robespierre might have redeemed himself had his 'grand and
beautiful' prospect ever been realised. It is probable that this idea of
Robespierre was influenced by Coleridge's reading of his speeches to the
National Convention from which he had already drawn material for The
Fall of Robespierre. In his major speech on political morality, delivered 5
February 1794, Robespierre defended the original ideals of the French
Revolution but countenanced violence as a means of ensuring the rights
of man. 'What is the objective toward which we are reaching?'
Robespierre asked, and then declared the object of the Revolution to be
The peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality; the reign of that eternal justice
whose laws are engraved not on marble or stone but in the hearts of all men, even
 Imagining Robespierre 169

in the heart of the slave who has forgotten them or of the tyrant who disowns
them. 13

In reaffirming the principles of 1789 Robespierre also defined the 'dis-

tant prospect' to which Coleridge refers in his 'Introductory Address'.
But within minutes of advocating the 'peaceful enjoyment of liberty and
equality' Robespierre claimed that only by 'sealing our work with our
blood, we may witness at least the dawn of universal happiness - this
is our ambition, this is our aim'.14 He then described the 'goadings' and
'provocations' the republic had endured from its enemies:
Externally all the despots surround you; internally all the friends of tyranny con-
spire; they will conspire until crime is deprived of all hope. It is necessary to an-
nihilate both the internal and external enemies of the republic or perish with its
fall. Now, in this situation your first political maxim should be that one guides
the people by reason, and the enemies of the people by terror. . . . Terror is only
justice that is prompt, severe, and inflexible; it is thus an emanation of
virtue . . .15
Robespierre's speech confirms Coleridge's insight into his contradic-
tory motives, 'His cool ferocity that persuaded murder, / Even whilst it
spake of mercy!' (PW, n, p. 516). The abstract foundations of
Robespierre's political maxim - 'reason','justice','virtue' - also cor-
respond to those of Political Justice,

the philosophy
That promised to abstract the hopes of man
Out of his feelings, (X, 11. 806-8)
- and for Coleridge this abstraction was the fundamental flaw in God-
win's system. By invoking 'reason' and 'justice' to justify terror,
therefore, Robespierre also appears as an ancestor of Rivers, the God-
winian rationalist and murderer in Wordsworth's Borderers. In The
Prelude, Wordsworth further identified Robespierre's politics with God-
win's philosophy by using the terror as an extended metaphor for his
Godwinian speculations and the despair which preceded his composition
of The Borderers in autumn 1796.
Robespierre's 'great bad actions' did not merely challenge Coleridge's
and Wordsworth's allegiance to France. Although the Terror ceased with
his death, his shadow endured and remained a disturbing presence for
long afterwards. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth discovered in
Robespierre a distorted reflection of their own political and philosophical
positions. For Coleridge, the realisation had a formative influence on his
idea of the 'elect', and also upon his thinking about the working of the
individual mind within the universe of the 'One Life' - the 'living help'
he was to bring to Wordsworth when they met at Racedown in June 1797.
170 NICHOLAS ROE
2: The poet who might have been

During 1794 and 1795: increasingly repressive domestic policies coupled

with food shortage and the burden of the war with France appeared
to make revolution in Britain a possibility. At the same time, France no
longer offered a model for peaceful change elsewhere, as it had done
before 1792. As Coleridge put it, 'The Example of France is indeed a
' 'Warning to Britain'' ' (Lects 1795, p. 6). The same realisation underlies
Wordsworth's concern in his letter to William Mathews of 8June 1794,
where he says that he 'recoils'
from the bare idea of a revolution; yet, if our conduct with reference both to foreign
and domestic policy continues as it has been for the last two years how is that
dreadful event to be averted? (EY, p. 124)
Wordsworth answered his own question by proposing a scheme of
political education to be conducted through the pages of The Philanthropist.
His principal aim was to avoid a repetition of the violence witnessed in
France. 'I deplore the miserable situation of the French', he told
Mathews,
and think we can only be guarded from the same scourge by the undaunted ef-
forts of good men in propagating with unremitting activity those doctrines which
long and severe meditation has taught them are essential to the welfare of
mankind. (EY, pp. 124-5)
In June 1794 the doctrines Wordsworth had in mind were the
'rules of political justice' to which he refers elsewhere in the same
letter. The Philanthropist would propagate Godwin's principles of
passive enquiry and his belief in the perfectibility of mankind, thereby
fostering peaceful change in Britain. His reliance on the efforts of
'good men' like Mathews and himself recalls his question in A Night on
Salisbury Plain,
whence but from the labours of the sage
Can poor benighted mortals gain the meed
Of happiness and virtue, how assuage
But by his gentle words their self-consuming rage? (11. 510-13)16
In 1794 the French Revolution was consuming itself in blood and Word-
sworth took the guiding task of the sage upon himself, the 'gentle words'
of Godwin as his text. The Philanthropist would bring Political Justice to the
'benighted mortals' of Britain, and direct their potentially destructive
rage to a worthier end.
'I know that the multitude walk in darkness', Wordsworth told
Mathews on 8 June, 'I would put into each man's hand a lantern to guide
him'. His prophetic claim is relevant to the state of Britain in 1794, and
 Imagining Robespierre 111
also significant in his subsequent development as a poet. He is echoing
Isaiah, 9, 2,
The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the
land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.
As a prophet of the Godwinian enlightenment, Wordsworth's Philan-
thropist was the 'lantern' that would guide the benighted people of
Britain ('the land of the shadow of death') to future reformation.
The plan for The Philanthropist is in fact a first utterance of Wordsworth's
prophetic wish. It is heard again early in 1800 in the 'Prospectus'
to The Recluse, and subsequently in the closing lines of The Prelude
where the imagination replaces Godwinian rationalism as the means of
future redemption.
In June 1794 the 'rules of political justice' offered Wordsworth certain-
ty and guidance at a time when all seemed tending to 'depravation'. But
Godwin's 'rules' drew only contempt from Coleridge. Like Wordsworth,
in 1795 Coleridge also took the burden of the sage upon himself. For Col-
eridge, though, the only 'gentle words' that might prevent violence were
those of religion:
In that barbarous tumult of inimical Interests, which the present state of Society
exhibits, Religion appears to offer the only means universally efficient. The perfect-
ness of future Men is indeed a benevolent tenet, and may operate on a few Vi-
sionaries, whose studious habits supply them with employment, and seclude them
from temptation. But a distant prospect, which we are never to reach, will seldom
quicken our footsteps, however lovely it may appear . . . . (Lects 1795, pp. 43-4)
The efficiency of religion lay in the certainty of 'an infinitely great revolu-
tion hereafter', simultaneously the establishment of a just society and the
promised millennium. This, he believed, might serve as a means of
popular restraint - 'Rest awhile/Children of wretchedness!' - and an
alternative to the bogus prospect of perfection offered by rival visionaries.
The 'studious' visionaries Coleridge had in mind were Godwin and his
disciples, the 'dim-eyed Sons of Blasphemy' among whom Wordsworth
numbered himself during 1795. Coleridge was right in thinking that
Political Justice was popular among the intellectual leaders of the reform
movement at this time. Prominent members of the Corresponding Socie-
ty such as John Thelwall, John Binns, Francis Place, and Coleridge's
Cambridge hero William Frend were all influenced by Godwin's think-
ing. Thelwall consistently used Politicaljustice in his lectures to advocate
peaceful reform, but Coleridge thought that it might have the opposite
effect. He detested Godwin's atheism, and believed that the philosophy
of Politicaljustice might lead to a moral and political breakdown and
ultimately to violence similar to that of France during the terror.17 But
172 NICHOLAS ROE

where Coleridge could reject Godwin's position unequivocally,

Robespierre was a more problematic figure.
In their various lectures during 1795 Coleridge and Thelwall both
presented Robespierre as a man of vision, although their purposes in do-
ing so were different. Thelwall claimed Robespierre had a 'capacious'
soul, a Varied' imagination, and that Pitt was in every way his inferior.
Coleridge would have agreed, but he found the paradoxes of
Robespierre's character and mind even more fascinating. Where
Thelwall was content to describe, Coleridge was concerned to analyse.
Thelwall's Robespierre was of political significance only, but Coleridge's
Robespierre had a direct bearing upon his thinking about the
imagination.
Coleridge's earliest definition of imagination comes at the beginning
of his Lecture on the Slave Trade, which he delivered 'by particular desire'
on 16 June 1795. 'To develope the powers of the Creator,' Coleridge
says,
is our proper employment - and to imitate Creativeness by combination our
most exalted and self-satisfying Delight. But we are progressive and must not rest
content with present Blessings. Our Almighty Parent hath therefore given to us
Imagination that stimulates to the attainment of real excellence by the contempla-
tion of splendid Possibilities that still revivifies the dying motive within us, and
fixing our eye on the glittering Summits that rise one above the other in Alpine
endlessness still urges us up the ascent of Being, amusing the ruggedness of the
road with the beauty and grandeur of the ever-widening Prospect. Such and so
noble are the ends for which this restless faculty was given us - but horrible has
been its misapplication. (Lects 1795, pp. 235-6)
This is one of Coleridge's most important statements about the imagina-
tion, and it foreshadows the definitions of primary and secondary im-
agination in Biographia. The seminal significance of this passage,
however, lies in its immediate implications for Coleridge rather than in
anticipating his position twenty years later. By redeploying the dying
revolutionary motive to progress in the 'restless faculty' of the imagina-
tion, Coleridge found his own solution to the dilemma confronting a
whole generation caused by the complete failure of the French Revolu-
tion. The Lecture on the Slave Trade offers a momentary insight into the more
extended process of development in Coleridge's thinking about the 'One
Life' between 1795 and 1797. It was this gradual translation of 'splen-
did Possibilities' from revolutionary politics to the individual mind that
was to sustain Coleridge through years when Wordsworth - who had
made a parallel reinvestment of hope in Godwin's philosophy - suffered
a crisis of despair. Coleridge's power to bring Wordsworth a 'living help
/ To regulate [ his ] soul' depended upon his having made this transition,
the nature of which he had recognised as early as June 1795. Its revivi-
 Imagining Robespierre 173
fying influence flows through Wordsworth's poetry of spring 1798, in his
revised conclusion for The Ruined Cottage, in his study of the narrator of
that poem in The Pedlar, and in the lyrical poems written at this time and
subsequently published in Lyrical Ballads. It is not an exaggeration to
claim that the emergent idea of imagination in the Lecture on the Slave Trade
represents a turning point in the development of English Romanticism,
upon which the subsequent literary careers of Coleridge and Wordsworth
depended. That idea of imagination, in turn, was conditioned by Col-
eridge's insight into its 'horrible misapplication' by Robespierre during
the Terror.
Robespierre's misapplication of imagination was caused by his lack
ofpatience. 'Permit me', Coleridge asked Thelwall on 17 December 1796,
'as a definition of this word to quote one sentence from my first Address',

'Accustomed to regard all the affairs of Man, as a Process, they never hurry &
they never pause.' In his not possessing this virtue, all the horrible excesses of
Robespierre did, I believe, originate. (CL, I, p. 164)
Coleridge's definition of patience comes from his discussion of the 'think-
ing and disinterested Patriots', with whom he identified himself, in his
'Introductory Address'. These patriots were the reformists Joseph Ger-
rald, Thomas Muir, Thomas Fysshe Palmer and Maurice Margarot, all
of whom had been tried for sedition during 1793-4 and transported to
Botany Bay. Like Robespierre they were distinguished for their visionary
power, but also for the restraint which he had not possessed:

Theirs is not that twilight of political knowledge which gives us just light enough
to place one foot before the other; as they advance the scene still opens upon them,
and they press right onward with a vast and various landscape of existence around
them. Calmness and energy mark all their actions. (Lects 1795, p. 40)
The thinking and disinterested patriots are, in fact, the prototypes of Col-
eridge's Elect in Religious Musings,

Who in thisfleshlyWorld, . . .
Their strong eye darting thro' the deeds of Men
Adore with stedfast unpresuming gaze
Him, Nature's Essence, Mind, and Energy!
And gazing, trembling, patiently ascend
Treading beneath their feet all visible things
As steps, that upward to their Father's Throne
Lead gradual — else nor glorified nor lov'd. (11.57,58—64)
Robespierre, in comparison, was too presumptuous. He might have
belonged among the Elect but for the impatience which betrayed his own
vision and usurped God's providence, that 'strong controlling love / Alike
from all educing perfect good'. This alone could have reconciled
174 NICHOLAS ROE

Robespierre's 'means' to the 'distant prospect' he had in view, and

avoided the excesses of the terror. As it was, Robespierre remained
unregenerate. He was a patriot manque, a distorted reflection of Col-
eridge's own image. He appears as a grotesque parody of the
'disinterested Patriots' and the Elect, divided against himself and his
country,

- to prevent tyranny he became a Tyrant - and having realized the evils which
he suspected, a wild and dreadful Tyrant... - he despotized in all the pomp
of Patriotism, and masqueraded on the bloody stage of Revolution, a Caligula
with the cap of Liberty on his head. {Lects 1795, p. 35)
Coleridge drew this passage in the 'Introductory Address' to Condones
from the first act of The Fall ofRobespierre. In the 'Address' the theatrical
metaphor works to highlight the contradictory fragments of
Robespierre's political personality, a tyrant ruling in the name of liber-
ty. Coleridge even coined a new word - 'despotize', meaning to act the
part of a despot - to define the split in Robespierre's psyche which he
believed had been caused by his impatience, equivalent for Coleridge to
a lack of faith.18 Not surprisingly, he found an identical dislocation in
atheist Godwin's Political Justice, 'a book which builds without a founda-
tion, [and] proposes an end without establishing the means'. 19
Robespierre's politics and Godwin's philosophy lacked a foundation in
the 'universally efficient' powers of God, and were inevitably self-
defeating. Robespierre rushed headlong to attain his 'distant prospect',
and the spectacle horrified and fascinated Coleridge. At the other extreme
was Godwin, the 'studious Visionary' who denied the existence of God
and passively awaited the triumph of truth through the exercise of human
reason. Coleridge contemptuously dismissed Godwin's vision of future
perfection as an ideal state 'which we are never to reach'. His deeper fear,
however, was that Godwin's ideas might be used by less patient in-
dividuals to justify extreme, and possibly violent, means of social and
political change. It was this possibility that fed his concern about the
popularity of Political Justice 'among the professed Friends of civil
Freedom' {Lects 1795, p. 164). These doubts about the moral effects of
Politicaljustice never became a reality. But they did have an imaginative
fruition, in Wordsworth's Borderers and later in The Prelude.
In Book Ten of The Prelude Wordsworth recalls the 'miserable dreams'
that he experienced during the Terror:
Such ghastly visions had I of despair,
And tyranny, and implements of death,
And long orations which in dreams I pleaded
Before unjust tribunals, with a voice
Labouring, [and] a brain confounded . . . (X, 11. 374-8)
 Imagining Robespierre 175
His night-visions of despair and confusion before those 'unjust tribunals'
subsequently reappear in Wordsworth's account of his Godwinian
speculations about society and human nature. He says that he dragged
'all passions, notions, shapes of faith / Like culprits to the bar' (x, 11.
889-90). Here, though, Wordsworth is both prosecutor and defendant
and is divided against himself over the 'bar' of Godwinian rationalism,
endlessly prevented from reaching a verdict,
thus confounded more and more,
Misguiding and misguided (X, 11. 887-8)
- in exactly the way that Coleridge believed Robespierre had been con-
founded by the means he had adopted to save France. With the republic
threatened from outside and within the country, he had been pushed into
terrorism to protect the gains of the Revolution,
And thus beset with foes on every side,
The goaded land waxed mad . . . (X, 11. 311-12)
A little later in Book Ten, Wordsworth once again uses identical
language to describe his thinking under the influence of Political Justice.
'My mind was both let loose', he recalls, 'Let loose and goaded',
I took the knife in hand,
And, stopping not at parts less sensitive,
Endeavoured with my best of skill to probe
The living body of society
Even to the heart. (X, 11. 862-3, 872-6)
The guillotine has become a surgeon's knife, and the surgeon is Word-
sworth himself performing an operation of vivisection upon 'the living
body of society', as Robespierre had sought to purge the internal enemies
of France and 'seal our work with our blood'. Through a series of
deliberate and striking verbal parallels, the madness of the 'goaded land'
is internalised as the disturbance of Wordsworth's mind,
now believing,
Now disbelieving, endlessly perplexed
With impulse, motive, right and wrong (X, 11. 892-4)
- until he 'Yielded up moral questions in despair', bringing ruin upon
himself as Robespierre had done. However, Wordsworth's extinction as
a Godwinian being carries an intimation of future restoration in its echo
of Matthew, xxvn, 50,
Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost
- but the resurrection was shortly to follow. For Wordsworth in The
Prelude, despair gives way to Dorothy's healing presence, Coleridge's
176 NICHOLAS ROE
friendship and under their influence his own reincarnation as a
poet.
Book Ten of The Prelude imaginatively associates Robespierre's politics
with Godwin's philosophy, Wordsworth's confused Godwinian self with
the author of the Terror. Wordsworth wrote this section of The Prelude in
1804, when the shortcomings of Godwin's philosophy had long been ob-
vious to him. Nevertheless, it apparently insists that this realisation
originally contributed to his moral despair and, moreover, that the very
nature of that despair in some way fostered his receptivity to Coleridge's
ideas when they met in 1797.
Like Coleridge in The Fall of Robespierre, Wordsworth's allusions to
Paradise Lost in Book Ten of The Prelude identify Robespierre as Satan, the
serpent that marred the early peaceful years of the Revolution with
violence. But his effort to damn Robespierre momentarily relaxes at one
point where he admits that even during the 'rage and dog-day heat' of
the Terror he had found
Something to glory in, as just and fit,
And in the order of sublimest laws.
And even if that were not, amid the awe
Of unintelligible chastisement
I felt a kind of sympathy with power - . . . (X, 11. 412-16)
Wordsworth never gloried in the executions at Paris, but the implications
of this passage are almost as disturbing. His 'kind of sympathy' with
Robespierre's absolute power ironically resembles his 'ready welcome'
for Political Justice in 1794, as a means to guard against the scourge of
violence in Britain. In The Prelude his memory of Godwin's philosophy
is of an 'unimpeachable' power
To look through all the frailties of the world,
And, with a resolute mastery shaking off
The accidents of nature, time, and place,
That make up the weak being of the past,
Build social freedom on its only basis:
The freedom of the individual mind,
Which, to the blind restraint of general laws
Superior, magisterially adopts
One guide - the light of circumstances, flashed
Upon an independent intellect. (x, 11. 820-9)
The 'resolute mastery' and magisterial guidance recall Wordsworth's
letter to Mathews of 8 June 1794, where he had based his hopes for social
freedom upon Godwin's ideas. Four months before Wordsworth wrote
that letter, in his speech on political morality, Robespierre had made an
equally sweeping claim for 'virtue and equality', which he identified as
the 'soul of the republic'. Robespierre too had shaken off the frailties of
 Imagining Robespierre 177
feeling and other 'accidents' of human nature, and presented republican
virtue as
a compass to direct you through the tempest of the passions and the whirlwind
of the intrigues that surround you. You have the touchstone with which you can
test all your laws, all the propositions that are laid before you.20
Moments later, Robespierre used that 'touchstone' to justify his ruthless
equation of terrorism with justice. In The Prelude, Wordsworth presents
Godwin's philosophy as a similar touchstone, 'to the blind restraint of
general laws / Superior'. But where Robespierre openly advocated the
use of violence, Wordsworth hints darkly at the similar end to which God-
win might have guided him. He does so by defining Godwinian
rationalism
- the light of circumstances, flashed
Upon an independent intellect
- in words taken from the mouth of a man who would persuade murder.
As is well known, these lines originally appeared in The Borderers, where
Rivers congratulates Mortimer for killing the old man Herbert:
You have obeyed the only law that wisdom
Can ever recognise: the immediate law
Flashed from the light of circumstances
Upon an independent intellect.
Henceforth new prospects ought to open on you,
Your faculties should grow with the occasion. (lll-v-11. 30-5)21
It has less frequently been pointed out that the 'new prospects' and
growing faculties contingent upon Rivers' 'immediate law' ironically
correspond to the 'ever-widening Prospect' and 'restless faculty' in Col-
eridge's Lecture on the Slave Trade. The anti-Godwinian thrust of Word-
sworth's irony lies in the conditional 'ought to open', 'should grow', and
in the immediate context of the play where the only prospect discovered
is death. In the character of Rivers Wordsworth has, in fact, realised Col-
eridge's long-standing fears about the similarities between Godwinian
abstraction and Robespierre's visionary politics.
Coleridge published his Lecture on the Slave Trade in the fourth issue of
The Watchman, 25 March 1796. He omitted much of the definition of im-
agination in the lecture as originally delivered on 15 June 1795, and
unless Wordsworth read the manuscript in Bristol the following
September it seems unlikely that he was familiar with it when he wrote
The Borderers. He did, however, receive a copy of Condones sent by James
Losh on 20 March 1797, but this was probably after completion of a first
draft of the play (EY, p. 186). Nevertheless, Wordsworth must have
known Coleridge's criticisms of Godwin at least since their meeting in
September 1795, when they would certainly have differed over the merits
178 NICHOLAS ROE
oi Political Justice. Two years later, Rivers' speech offers striking evidence
of the extent to which their ideas later coincided when they met again at
Racedown in June 1797, and of Wordsworth's receptivity to Coleridge's
influence.
The shadowy figure presiding over that meeting was not Godwin -
whose influence had been exorcised - but Robespierre, in whose life and
death Coleridge and Wordsworth recognised the man they could have
been. And that realisation ultimately led each of them to discover his own
true identity as poet, the man Robespierre might have been but never
was.

Notes
1
All references to The Prelude will be to the 1805 text in Norton 'Prelude3.
2
William Godwin, ms. autobiographical fragment in the Abinger-Shelley
collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The ms. is undated, but the
paper is watermarked ' Fellows 180 7'. I am grateful to Lord Abinger for per-
mission to quote from Godwin's papers.
3
Quoted from the text in Jared Curtis, Wordsworth's Experiments with Tradi-
tion. The Lyric Poems of 1802 (Ithaca and London, 1971), p. 167.
4
For a discussion of the relation ofIntimations to To H. C. see Lucy Newlyn,
'The Little Actor and his Mock Apparel', TWC(Winter 1983), pp. 30-9.
5
William Godwin, Diary. Abinger-Shelley collection, Bodleian Library.
6
JohnThelwall, The Tribune (3 vols., London, 1795-6), I, p. 254. Cited in
future as Tribune.
7
Tribune, I, p. 258.
8
Tribune, I, p. 254.
9
The French Revolution. Extractsfrom The Times 1789—1794, ed. N. Ascherson
(London, 1975), pp. 114-15.
10
New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. K. Curry (2 vols., New York and London,
1965), I, pp. 72-3.
11
John Milton, Paradise Lost, eds. J. Carey and A. Fowler (London, 1968).
12
Tribune, I, p. 259.
13
The Documentary History of Western Civilisation. The French Revolution, tr. and
ed. P. Beik (London, 1971), p. 278. Cited in future as Beik.
14
Beik, p. 279.
15
Beik, p. 283.
16
The Salisbury Plain Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. S. Gill (Hassocks,
Sussex, 1975), p. 37.
17
For Coleridge's doubts about the moral effects of Political Justice, see the
Third Lecture on Revealed Religion, Lects 1795, pp. 164-5.
18
See my note, 'Robespierre's Despotism and a Word Coined by Coleridge',
N&(i (August, 1981), pp. 309-10.
19
Third Lecture on Revealed Religion, Lects 1795, p . 164.
20
Beik, p. 281.
21
William Wordsworth, The Borderers, ed. Osborn (Ithaca and London,
1982), p. 210. The text quoted is from the ms. published by Osborn as 'The
Early Version (1797-99)'.
 Coleridge's Dejection: imagination,
joy, and the power of love

J. ROBERT BARTH, S J .

Poetic origins are often obscure, as witness the genesis of Shakespeare's

sonnets or the history of Keats' two Hyperions. Among such mysteries,
the relationship between Coleridge's verse 'Letter to Sara Hutchinson'
(written on 4 April 1802, but first published only in 1937) and his Dejec-
tion: an Ode (published in the Morning Post, 4 October 1802, Wordsworth's
wedding-day) has been a matter of considerable discussion and debate.1
Although it is evident that the one is a drastic revision of the other, it re-
mains unclear what were Coleridge's poetic purposes in making the revi-
sion, and what was in his mind in publishing it on the wedding-day of his
friend Wordsworth, which was also the seventh anniversary of his own
unfortunate marriage to Sara Fricker.
A cogent case has been made that 'Dejection' has its origin as much
in Coleridge's relationship with Wordsworth as in his frustrated love for
Sara Hutchinson. The first four stanzas of Wordsworth's 'Immortality
Ode', in which Wordsworth laments his loss of the 'visionary gleam',
were written just days before Coleridge composed his verse-letter to Sara,
and it was two years before Wordsworth was able to complete it. Writ-
ten as they are on what appears to be a similar theme, it is difficult not
to see the two poems as 'in some sense in a dialogue with each other'. 2
The sense of 'dialogue' is deepened when one realizes that Wordsworth's
own stanzas echo clearly a poem of Coleridge written two years earlier
- The Mad Monk (1800), which begins:
There was a time when earth, and sea, and skies,
The bright green vale, and forest's dark recess,
With all things, lay before mine eyes
In steady loveliness:
But now. . . (11. 9-13)
Wordsworth's answer to his sense of loss, written two years later, was a
re-affirmation of the strength still to be found in the world of nature: 'Yet
in my heart of hearts I feel your might' (1. 193).3 Coleridge's answer to
his loss, it has been said, was rather to turn inward, despairing of nature
as a healing power: 'OLady! we receive but what we give' (1. 47). If this
179
180 J. ROBERT BARTH S.J.
is so, the two friends had certainly parted company poetically and
philosophically long before their friendship was ruptured in 1810.
Perhaps even more tantalizing is the question of the relationship bet-
ween the two major versions of Coleridge's poem, the verse-letter and
the textus receptus. As to the poetic superiority of one over the other, each
version has its proponents. As Reeve Parker writes, the Letter to Sara 'has
been called an incomparably greater poem . . . chiefly on grounds of its
being a less disguised personal lament over marital unhappiness, ill-
health, and weakened poetic power'. There are others, however, 'who
prefer the final, shorter ode form for its greater lyric dignity and who find
the sprawling earlier text embarrassing in its self-pity'.4
John Beer, for example, seems to give the nod to the earlier version:
'Both poems have their peculiar value. Dejection stands to its predecessor
rather as an engraving may stand in relation to an original painting. Its
points are made more sharply and stringently: but in order to hear the
full throb of Coleridge's unhappiness the greater length of the earlier ver-
sion is needed. ' 5 Humphry House, too, although he admits that 'a case
cannot be made for the full coherence of the original version', argues for
its overall superiority, stressing especially what he sees as its greater ar-
tistic unity; he argues, in effect, that Dejection betrays the essential unity
of the original.6 George Watson, on the other hand, insists that 'there
can be no doubt of the superiority of the final version, where the original
340 lines have been reduced to a tight-packed 139. . . . On the whole,
. . . the reduction of the ode to its familiar form is a continuous triumph
of critical acumen'. 7 In the last analysis, it comes down no doubt to a
matter of poetic taste, a conflict (as Reeve Parker characterizes it) 'bet-
ween those who like confessional sincerity in art and those whose inclina-
tion is for the orderliness of form'.8
We are faced, however, with the two major versions of the poem; and
one question that seems continually to be urged in the recent history of
Coleridge criticism is Coleridge's purpose in changing the form of the
poem so drastically. Some critics have suggested that Coleridge found
it necessary, for personal reasons, to hide (or suppress) the real origins
of his feelings; others, that he realized his real theme was the loss of his
'shaping spirit of Imagination', and so pruned and reshaped the poem
to highlight that loss; and still others, that, having experienced such deep
grief, he used Dejection to explore the process of grief with which the ex-
perience began. Each of these approaches has something to recommend
it, nor should they be thought of as necessarily exclusive of one another.
The first of these views - that Coleridge found it necessary to suppress
the real origins of his feelings - may be represented by Beverly Fields' in-
 Coleridge }s Dej ection 181
teresting psycho-analytic study, Reality 3s Dark Dream.9 Her case can be
fairly enough summed up in these words from her Conclusion:
The shifts in organization appear to have been made partly for reasons of
coherence but also partly in order to suppress as far as possible the real reasons
for his depression. It was undoubtedly far easier for him to assign the cause of the
depression to metaphysical speculation than it would have been to let the poem
stand as a revelation of the sadomasochistic fantasies that paralyzed his feeling
and his behavior. (p. 166)
Other, less psycho-analytic readers, like Max Schulz and Charles
Bouslog, also see Coleridge's desire to camouflage his real feelings as the
reason for his revision of the poem.10
The second reading - that Coleridge realized his real theme was the
loss of his 'shaping spirit of Imagination' - is persuasively argued by
Paul Magnuson in Coleridge's Nightmare Poetry.n Magnuson finds, in ef-
fect, not two versions of the same poem but two quite distinct poems. The
Letter focuses on 'the pain he has caused Asra' (p. 108), while Dejection
focuses on himself - his own pain, his own loss.
The Letter is nearer the spirit of the earlier Conversation Poems in that there is
an imagined exchange of sympathy, but in 'Dejection,' he faces a far more fun-
damental problem. If he himself has lost joy, and if he is the victim of strong feel-
ings, then his blessing could well turn into a curse upon himself and Asra.
(p. 109)
The only shared experience between them is that of grief (p. 111). He has
lost, perhaps forever, his old sense of the One Life. As Magnuson puts
it, 'We project a meaning upon nature, and whatever we receive from
nature is only a reflection of our minds' (p. 114), but since the poet has
lost joy and his 'shaping spirit of Imagination' (1. 86), for him the world
is now without meaning. There is still hope for 'the Lady', since her soul
is still alive - and so for her things can still live - 'their life the eddying
of her living soul!' (1. 136) - but for him there is no life in the world
because there is no life within him: 'O Lady! we receive but what we
give.'
The third view - that Coleridge, having experienced such deep grief,
used Dejection to explore the process of grief itself - is articulated by Reeve
Parker in his splendid book Coleridge's Meditative Art.n The ode was, in
effect, a gesture 'offered to reassure the Grasmere circle that he was
capable of transcending the impulses toward despair and unseemliness
that were so much responsible for the original letter' (p. 181). The
original letter is merely an expression of grief, while the more shapely,
more carefully crafted ode is an exploration of the state of grief in which
the poet finds himself. This exploration is, in effect and even perhaps in
intention, a kind of therapy. As Coleridge had argued in the Preface to
182 J. ROBERT BARTH S.J.
his Poems of 1796, from the intellectual labor of poetic composition 'a
pleasure results which is gradually associated and mingles as a correc-
tive with the painful subject of the description'.13 Thus there is, in
Parker's phrase, 'a salutary egotism in poetic composition' (p. 181).
Parker thus finds Dejection a much more positive poetic experience than
do many other critics. He believes, in fact, that modern readers of the
poem often read into it their own preoccupations:
In emphasizing the elements of personal distress discernible in and through the
poem and in seeing it as a lament over suspended poetic imagination, readers
. . . have presumed a greater continuity than actually exists between the concerns
of a poet like Coleridge, at the turn of the nineteenth century, and the
characteristic preoccupation of many twentieth-century writers with alienation,
self-doubt, and distrust of the artful imagination. (p. 181)
There is an entry from 1803 in one of Coleridge's notebooks which
Parker believes sheds light on Coleridge's 'heuristic' motives in Dejection:
'One excellent use of communication of Sorrows to a Friend is this: that
in relating what ails us we ourselves first know exactly what the real Grief
is - & see it for itself, in its own form & limits' (CN, I, 1599).14 With the
help of the controlling metaphor of the poem, the storm, the poet is able
to dramatize his situation - and in doing so, is able to 'generalize' his
grief, to (in a phrase of Coleridge) 'abstract the thoughts and images from
their original cause' and to reflect on them 'with less and less reference
to the individual suffering that had been their first subject'.15 When the
poet returns, late in the poem, to an awareness of the wind that still rages,
he is able to achieve, in Parker's phrase, an 'absolute distancing of wind
and poet' (p. 200). He is not under the control of the wind, but rather can
hear in it different voices, as he soon reveals - hearing first the voices
of violence and war, then a new voice, 'A tale of less affright / And
tempered with delight' (11. 118-19). He can now hear in the wind the
voice of Wordsworth's Lucy Gray, and it is a voice of life in the face of
the lonesome wind.
For Parker, then, the 'sounds less deep and loud' at the end of stanza
VII are 'correlative to a mind that, having gone through the process of
deliberately exploring the melancholy grief with which the poem opens,
is winning its way to a substantial calm' (pp. 206-7). Having achieved
this calm, the poet is then able 'to "send his soul abroad'' in the bless-
ing that constitutes the final stanza' (p. 207).
Without in any way denying the cogency of Parker's approach, with
which I find myself generally in considerable agreement, I would like to
go on to suggest that there is a motif implicit in 'Dejection' which is quite
compatible with the exploration of the process of grief - a motif which
has been given little or no attention.
 Coleridge }s Dejection 183
Let me begin with the Letter to Sara. No one would deny, I suspect,
that the Letter, whatever else it is about - loss or grief or despair - is also
about love. It may be love lost or grieved over or despaired of, but any
careful reading makes it clear how preoccupied the original poem is with
love. And this love ranges through the whole spectrum of possibilities.
The most obvious - and indeed central - love is what we may call his
'romantic' love for Sara Hutchinson. She is his 'best belov'd! who lovest
me the best' (1. 120); she is 'My Comforter! A Heart within my Heart!'
(1. 250); she is the ' Sister & Friend of my devoutest Choice!' (1. 324). She
is beyond question the central figure of the Letter addressed to her. At the
same time, however, the context in which she is placed must be taken ac-
count of: she is constantly seen as part of a whole domestic scene, as in
'that happy night / When Mary, thou & I together were, / The low decay-
ing fire our only Light' (11. 99-101), or when he speaks despairingly of
visiting 'those, I love, as I love thee, / Mary, & William, & dear Dorothy'
(11. 157-8). It is not only Sara, but the loving circle of which she is part,
that is the object of his love and longing. This is not to say that there is
no romantic or sexual component in his longing for Sara; there clearly
is. It is to suggest, however, that there is more than one kind of love at
issue, not only in the poem but even in his relationship with Sara.
With this peacefully remembered scene of domestic tranquillity, Col-
eridge contrasts his own home: 'My own peculiar Lot, my house-hold
Life / It is, & will remain, Indifference or Strife' (11. 163-4). It is, perhaps
even more movingly, 'my coarse domestic life' (1. 258). There is joy, to
be sure, in the love of his children: 'My Little Children are ajoy, a Love,
/ A good Gift from above/' (11. 272-3). But his grief (perhaps over the
failure of his own domestic life) lessens the joy of even this great love:
'This clinging Grief too, in it's turn, awakes / That Love, and Father's
Joy; but O! it makes / The Love the greater, & the Joy far less' (11. 287-9).
There is love of Nature in the poem, too, for he goes on to apostrophize
its beauty:

These Mountains too, these Vales, these Woods, these Lakes,

Scenes full of Beauty & of Loftiness
Where all my Life I fondly hop'd to live -
I were sunk low indeed, did they no solace give. (11. 290-3)
But even they have failed him, for - and here the Wordsworthian
parallel will be evident - 'They are not to me now the Things, which
once they were' (1. 295).
Thus there is in the Letter to Sara a whole range of human loves: roman-
tic and sexual love, love of family, love of children, love of friends, love
of nature.16 All are either lessened or lost or in some way frustrated. One
184 J. ROBERT BARTH S.J.
may well say that the Letter is about loss, but I suggest that even more fun-
damental to it is the question of what it is that is lost: love of every kind.
The most basic dichotomy of the Letter is between Coleridge and Sara -
the one who has lost love and the one who is still surrounded by it, as the
last stanza continues to insist:
Sister & Friend of my devoutest Choice!
Thou being innocent & full of love,
And nested with the Darlings of thy Love . . . (11. 324-6)
Whatever else it is, the Letter to Sara is a poem about love and its loss.
Against this background, it is perhaps startling to discover that while
the word iove' (or its cognates - loved, lover, and beloved) appears
twenty-one times in the Letter, its only cognate in Dejection is, ironically,
'loveless' in line 52. Does this mean that a motif that was so prominent
in the earlier version has been completely written out of the later one? I
would like to suggest that what was explicit throughout the Letter has
simply gone underground, becoming an implicit principle of action in
Dejection. I would like to argue, in fact, that the word 'loveless' - 'The
poor loveless ever-anxious crowd' - is a key to the poem.
My argument turns around the interpretation one gives to the much-
quoted line, 'O Lady! we receive but what we give'. This line is most
commonly taken to refer to the poet's relationship with nature: that he
is arguing, in effect, against Wordsworth's belief in the healing power
of nature. Nature has no power to affect our lives; our response to nature
is determined by our own feelings, by the projection of our selves. And
if our feelings, or our inner selves, have lost their sense of life, then there
is nothing but the blankness of despair.
This may indeed be the initial meaning of the line, but it does not, I
think, remain its sole meaning. This understanding of the relationship
of nature and self does last, to be sure, through the two stanzas that follow
- stanza v, which extols joy, 'this strong music in the soul', and stan-
za vi, which laments the passing of that joy. Stanza vn, however, marks
a decisive turn away from this view:
Hence, viper-thoughts, that coil around my mind,
Reality's dark dream!
I turn from you, and listen to the wind,
Which long has raved unnoticed. (11. 94-7)
Putting aside the almost solipsistic view of himself and nature, he final-
ly allows himself really to listen to the wind, to allow its power to work in
him. At the beginning of the poem, he had projected his own feelings onto
the wind - and so could hear only his own depression. This is precisely
what had led to his reflection: 'We receive but what we give'. Later, after
 Coleridge's Dejection 185
rejecting this self-centred and self-pitying attitude ('Hence, viper-
thoughts!'), he is able to let nature touch him, and he finds that it is heal-
ing. Perhaps Wordsworth is right after all.17
Therefore stanza iv was a self-pitying, wrongheaded view, which the
poet now finds strength to reject; and the vehicle for this discovery is the
wind. His perception of the wind had begun as superstition (the folk-
beliefs concerning the weather) and self-projection; but through the pro-
cess of the poem he has come to see it as a natural force from which he can
learn: it has its cycles, from wild to gentle, as he does himself.18 And as
the wind gentles down - singing 'a tale of less affright, /And tempered
with delight' - so does his own soul. He was right in stanza iv:
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element! (11. 56-8)
And this voice is the voice that issues forth from him at the end of the
poem, offering blessing to one he loves. It is perhaps no accident that in
stanza iv this voice is contrasted with 'the poor loveless ever-anxious
crowd' - because we come to see that it is the voice of love, of one who
has learned that only if he is open to receive will he be able to give. Had
he not opened himself to the voice of nature - first wild but ultimately
healing - he would never have found his own voice. But he did find it,
and in the closing lines of blessing it is indeed 'a sweet and potent voice',
newly potent because it now speaks not out of self-pity but out of loving
concern for another.
The pattern of this poem is, in fact, no different from that of a number
of others of Coleridge's poems. It is the same pattern found in This Lime-
Tree Bower My Prison, in which the poet overcomes his dejection by enter-
ing into the feelings of Charles Lamb as he enjoys the country sunset:
and sometimes
'Tis well to be bereft of promis'd good,
That we may lift the soul, and contemplate
With lively joy the joys we cannot share. (11. 64-7)
What is this but an act of love: a giving of oneself to another? And so with
the Ancient Mariner, who is able to move out of his isolation by an act
of imaginative sympathy with the watersnakes:

A spring of love gushed from my heart,

And I blessed them unaware. (11. 284-5)
Whatever name one may give to such an act, it is a movement of love:
a going-forth out of the self to encounter the being of another. In the last
analysis, Coleridge is not content to remain one of the 'loveless ever-
186 J. ROBERT BARTH S.J.

anxious crowd'; he does not remain mired in 'dejection'. Through the

ministry of nature, he is able to love. Dejection remains, therefore, in its
transformation from the Letter to Sara, a love poem; but it becomes a love
poem in a broader and deeper sense - now not merely the lament of a
frustrated lover, but an ode to the power of love itself, which can bring
him out of dejection into calm, out of selfishness and self-pity into
generous-hearted blessing.
But ifDejection is about love, it is also about imagination and joy - for
the three are inextricably bound together - and about the power of art.
That Dejection is concerned with imagination is perhaps the best known
truth about the poem: the poet is dejected at least in part because he has
lost his 'shaping spirit of Imagination'. He has allowed the understan-
ding - the analytic faculty, the power of mind that deals with parts and
with merely sense impressions - to take away his power to shape his ex-
perience of the world into a meaningful whole: 'by abstruse research to
steal / From my own nature all the natural man' (11. 89-90).
What is it, though, that has brought him to this sad pass? Surely it is
the loss ofjoy, the very joy that he wishes for the 'virtuous Lady'. Joy is

the spirit and the power,

Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower
A new Earth and new Heaven. (11. 67-9)19
It is joy that can enable one to bring together man and nature, heaven
and earth, sense experience and spiritual reality, and it is at the same time
joy that celebrates the union of all these things. The 'natural man' could
feel joy, for he was in harmony with nature and could not only perceive
but feel the unity of all creation. His faculties all in harmony, he could
appreciate the 'wholeness' of experience and rejoice in it, for wholeness
and joy are functions of one another. Hence the joyful exclamation of
'The Eolian H a r p ' : ' O ! the one Life within us and abroad' (1. 26).
However, having 'by abstruse research' narrowed down his vision of the
world, the poet can now see only parts of the great world. And with the
loss of wholeness, joy is lost.
For joy is not only a feeling but a power of perception; it affords both
creative vision and emotional exaltation. Joy or 'delight' is, in fact, a
prerequisite not only for harmonious living but for the writing of poetry.
As Coleridge had written of the Abyssinian maid:

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air . . . (Kubla Khan, 11. 42-6)
 Coleridge's Dej ection 187
This is, I suggest, precisely the role of Lucy Gray, the tale 'tempered with
delight'. The poet has revived within himself, or the wind has raised
within him, or better yet, the poet and the wind in fruitful concert have
revived a song - not the song of the Abyssinian maid but the song sung
by the little girl. As Irene H. Chayessays, 'the poet of'Dejection" begins
in his reverie to re-compose another man's poem and for the moment
becomes a poet again'. 20 His imagination has come to life again.
But we are concerned for the moment with the role ofjoy. How can a
tale that tells of the suffering of a frightened child - her moans and grief
and fear - be a cause of 'delight' for the poet, or indeed for anyone? The
answer has to do with the nature of aesthetic experience. The wind is,
after all, a 'Poet, e'en to frenzy bold' (1. 109). Through the agency of the
wind and the power of the poet's poet-friend, the actual experience of
grief (both Coleridge's grief and the grief of the lost child) is transformed
into a tale, an artistic form, which distance the listener from the actual
experience, giving it shape and meaning. The terrifying experience is
sublimated to another level of reality, a mythic level, which is both mean-
ingful and sustaining. For myth universalizes our experiences, showing
them to be part of the larger experience of mankind; and by binding us
to each other through our common humanity, especially through our
common experience of suffering, myth allows us to draw strength from
each other. It is thus we learn that mankind survives, even in the face of
diminishment and loss. Therefore the experience the poet could not bear
becomes through art (the 'tale' which the wind tells) not only bearable
but even hopeful.
This is not to say, of course, that in the 'tale' the grief is taken away.
It still retains, for the reader as well as for the poet, a strong sense of the
terror of the child irretrievably lost. It is, however, 'tempered' by art, so
that the grief is bearable and life can go on. And if the tale of the wind has
made the child's grief bearable to the hearer, so the poet's tale of his own
grief (his poem, Dejection) may serve the same function, giving him
enough 'distance' from his grief that he can bear it - and that life can
go on.
Rachel Trickett has remarked that the secret of morality in Word-
sworth is that love must precede understanding.21 Her comment recalls
Shelley's famous dictum in the Defence of Poetry that 'the great secret of
morals is love, or a going out of our own nature and an identification of
ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person,
not our own'.22 What Trickett, like Shelley, has in mind of course is not
merely morality but poetry, as a distillation and articulation of the highest
human values. And if this is true of Wordsworth, it is no less true of Col-
eridge; without love there can be no poetry. Without love, nojoy; without
188 J. ROBERT BARTH S J .
joy, no working of that shaping power, imagination.
But since the three - love, joy and imagination - work so closely in
concert, any one of them can help to rouse the others. In Dejection, the
momentary return of imagination and imaginative delight - in the
poet's recollection of Lucy Gray - can stir in him a return of love, mov-
ing him to the loving gesture of blessing which closes the poem, and can
hold out at least the hope of a more personal joy for him, as he prays the
gift of joy for one he loves.
One question yet remains: what did Coleridge mean by publishing De-
jection on Wordsworth's wedding-day and his own anniversary? I would
like to suggest that he intended the poem as a kind of ironic epithalamion,
for himself rather than for his friend. For Coleridge's tribute to the power
of love is bound up, however subtly, with the nuptial imagery of the first
half of the poem. The nuptial portrayed is, of course, the marriage bet-
ween nature and man, and it is joy which presides over the solemnity:
Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power,
Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower
A new Earth and new Heaven. (11. 67-9)
But this wedding involves, paradoxically, both life and death:
And in our life alone does Nature live:
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud. (11. 48-9)
And yet, if our union with nature implies death, it does so in a sense
analogous to sexual union as 'a little death' - a death which can bring
about new life, in this case indeed 'a new Earth and new Heaven'. So too
the ' phantom light' (1. 11) - the ghost of the old moon held in the arms
of the new - implies death, while the new moon affirms life. The old
moon must die if the new moon is to be born. (One might even suggest
that the 'silver thread' with which the phantom light is 'rimmed and circl-
ed' might point ahead to the 'wedding garment'.) Thus the phases of the
moon, which are of course cycles of nature, are caught up in the nuptial
imagery, which itself, as Robert Siegel has suggested, 'reflects the theme
of imaginative wholeness'.23
However, in striking contrast to the ideal marriage described in stanza
v, in which Joy,
wedding Nature to us gives in dower
A new Earth and new Heaven,
there is the poet's own wedding with nature (stanza vn), which brings
forth net 'a new Earth and new Heaven' but a terrifying storm. The
storm is not to last forever, though, for the poet hears at length another
voice of nature:
 Coleridge's Dejection 189
A tale of less affright,
And tempered with delight.
And if the poet's stormy wedding with nature - which is indeed more
like a divorce than a marriage - may be seen as metaphor for Coleridge' s
ill-fated marriage to Sara Fricker, then the incomplete but longed-for
union with the kinder face of nature ('tempered with delight') may be
taken as a metaphor for his impossible yet somehow sustaining union
with Sara Hutchinson.
Coleridge's marriage to Sara Fricker is over, no doubt, leaving behind
only a 'phantom light' like that of the old moon, and marriage to Sara
Hutchinson is only a longing. But if the song the poet hears in the wind
is indeed Lucy Gray, then there is at least a sustaining dream at the end.
Lucy Gray is dead, to be sure, but she is still alive as a dream, a mythic
reality, as Lucy 'sings a solitary song / That whistles in the wind'. So too
the poet's love for 'the other Sara' is alive for him, at least as a comfor-
ting dream.
But this love is not merely a dream; like the song sung by Lucy Gray,
it has something of the healing power of myth. As Coleridge's spiritual
divorce from his wife is reflected in his divorce from nature, from 'the one
Life within us and abroad', the 'sympathy between his soul and Sara
Hutchinson's looks forward to a new wedding of his soul to nature'. 24
And he too, I might add, like Lucy Gray, sings his 'solitary song' - this
poem - that 'whistles in the wind', affirming life even in the midst of
death.
This is indeed the power of love: to bless, to heal, even - and even in
the face of dejection - to bring the hope of joy. And the power of love
is, as we have seen, for Coleridge as for Wordsworth, deeply bound up
with imaginative power. Wordsworth wrote, at the end of The Prelude:

This spiritual Love acts not nor can exist

Without Imagination.
{Norton 'Prelude', XIV, 11. 188-9, 1850 text)

Coleridge would stress, I think, the corollary: that imagination cannot

exist without love. He could write this poem only because the love he
thought he had lost was not wholly dead in him, because - whether or
not his love was returned - he was still, or perhaps again, capable of giv-
ing love. Perhaps indeed his gift of love was all the greater because it was
at last unconditional love, given not for his sake but for the sake of the
beloved, given whether or not it was returned. In that generous-hearted
gift of self lay his hope.
190 J. ROBERT BARTH S . J .

Notes
1
The text of the Letter to Sara Hutchinson used throughout will be that of CL,
II, pp. 790-98; it may also be found in S. T. Coleridge, Poems, ed. John Beer
(London: Everyman's Library 1974), pp. 272—80. The text of Dejection: an
Ode is that of PW, I, pp. 362-8; this edition will also be used for all other
references to Coleridge's poetry.
2
George Watson, Coleridge the Poet (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1966), p. 78. See also Fred Manning Smith, 'The Relation of Coleridge's
Ode on Dejection to Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations ofImmortality', PMLA, 50
(1935), pp. 224-34.
3
The text of Wordsworth used throughout will be Poetical Works, ed.
Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest De Selincourt (London, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1936).
4
Reeve Parker, Coleridge's Meditative Art (Ithaca, Cornell University Press,
1975), p. 180.
5
Poems, ed. Beer, p. 257.
6
Coleridge: The Clark Lectures 1951 -52 (London, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953),
p. 137; see also pp. 133-7.
7
Coleridge the Poet, pp. 74-5.
8
Coleridge's Meditative Art, p. 180. A different focus of this distinction is given
by Max F. Schulz in his bibliographical essay, 'Coleridge', in The English
Romantic Poets, A Review ofResearch and Criticism, ed. Frank Jordan (third edn;
New York, MLA, 1972): 'It is probably safe to say that those interested
in Coleridge the man and in the biographical facts behind the composit-
ion of the poem will prefer the ' 'Verse Letter,'' while those concerned with
literary questions of theme and form will be drawn to "Dejection" '
(p. 203).
9
Beverly Fields, Reality 's Dark Dream: Dejection in Coleridge (Kent, Ohio, Kent
State University Press, 1967), pp. 101-64.
10
See Max Schulz, The Poetic Voices of Coleridge (Detroit, Wayne State Univer-
sity Press, 1964), p. 140; and Charles Bouslog, Modern Language Quarterly,
24(1963), pp. 42-52.
11
Paul Magnuson, Coleridge's Nightmare Poetry (Charlottesville, University
Press of Virginia, 1974), pp. 107-25.
12
Coleridge's Meditative Art, pp. 180-209.
13
PW, II, p. 1136; quoted by Parker, pp. 181-2.
14
Quoted in Parker, p. 182.
15
The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. W. G. T. Shedd (New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1856), IV, p. 435; and see Parker, p. 193.
16
This spectrum of loves in the Letter to Sara may account, in some measure,
for the different addressees of its various versions: the very personal 'Sara'
of the original; 'William', 'Wordsworth', and 'dearest poet' (in the version
Coleridge sent to William Sotheby in a letter of 19 July 1802; CL, II, pp.
813—19), emphasizing his close personal relationship with his poet-friend;
'Edmund' (in the version published in the Morning Post on 4 October 1802;
see PW, I, pp. 362-8, notes), again celebrating friendship, though dis-
tanced by the use of another name; and 'Lady' (in the textus receptus published
in Sibylline Leaves in 1816), returning to the romantic love of the original verse
letter, but again distanced by the use of the generic and more formal mode
 Coleridge's Dejection 191

of address. Coleridge's complex thought and feeling give validity to each

of these in turn.
17
An opposite view of the wind metaphor is taken by Panthea Reid
Broughton in her subtle and perceptive essay 'The Modifying Metaphor
in "Dejection: An Ode" ': 'Coleridge was really very skeptical. . . of the
Wordsworthian faith in the active universe' (TWC, IV (1973), p. 242).
Although she later sees Coleridge able to use the closing image of the 'eddy'
as a fruitful metaphor, in Broughton's view Coleridge begins by 'dispell-
ing the familiar Romantic metaphor of the Aeolian harp. . . . Outward
forms, though they may rescue Wordsworth, fail Coleridge; he awaits their
intervention to no avail. And thus the central Romantic metaphor debilitates
because it encourages him to wait passively for a shift in the weather before
he can change his tune' (p. 243). I suggest rather that the poet's waiting has
changed from passive to active ('I turn from you') as he opens himself at last
to the natural influence of the wind which he had shut out. For a view similar
to Broughton's see Marshall Suther, The Dark Night of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(New York, Columbia University Press, 1960), pp. 124-8.
Unlike Broughton, M. H. Abrams, in 'The Correspondent Breeze: A
Romantic Metaphor', sees the wind as truly an agent for change in the poet's
mind: 'By the agency of the wind storm it describes, the poem turns out to
contradict its own premises: the poet's spirit awakens to violent life even as
he laments his inner death' (English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism,
ed. M. H. Abrams (2nd edn; London, Oxford University Press, 1975), p.
39). R. H. Fogle, too, in 'The Dejection of Coleridge's Ode', assumes 'that
Coleridge as a metaphysical realist and a Romantic poet of nature is express-
ing his experience through the interaction of his thoughts and emotions with
natural symbolism and imagery' (ELH, XVII (1950), p. 73).
18
In 'Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric', M. H. Abrams
writes: 'On Coleridge's philosophical premises, in this poem nature is made
thought and thought nature, both by their sustained interaction and by their
seamless metaphoric continuity' (Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in
Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, Norton, 1970), p. 223).
19
Attention has been called to the echo here of Revelation 21:1 ('And I saw
a new heaven and a new earth'), but I have not seen reference to the possibly
even deeper roots of this passage in Isaiah 65:17ff., where the role ofjoy is
made explicit: 'For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the
former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. But be ye glad and
rejoice for ever in that which I create: for behold, I create Jerusalem a re-
joicing, and her people ajoy. And I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and joy in my
people: and the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice
of crying.' With the notes struck not only ofjoy but of creativity, together
with the fact that in Revelation Jerusalem becomes the Bride, it is difficult
not to hear echoes of both passages in Coleridge's lines.
20
Irene H. Chayes, 'Rhetoric as Drama: An Approach to the Romantic
Ode', PMLA, 79 (1964), p. 70.
21
'Wordsworth's Moral Imagination', lecture delivered by Rachel Trickett
at the Wordsworth Summer Conference, Grasmere, 3 August 1983.
22
P e r c y B y s s h e S h e l l e y , ' A D e f e n c e of P o e t r y ' , Shelley }s Prose, e d . D a v i d L e e
Clark (Albuquerque, University ofNew Mexico Press, 1954), pp. 282-3.
23
Robert Siegel, 'The Serpent and the Dove: The Problem of Evil in Col-
192 J. ROBERT BARTH S J .
eridge's Poetry' (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1968), p. 236.1 am more
generally grateful to Siegel, too, for his illuminating discussion of the wed-
ding theme, which has considerably influenced my own reading of the poem.
24
Siegel, p. 238.
 Imagining naming shaping: stanza VI of
Dejection: an Ode

PETER LARKIN

But now afflictions bow me down to earth:

Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth,
But oh! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination
John Spencer Hill finds compelling reasons for believing that July -
September 1802 'were crucial months in the shaping of the theory of the
Imagination' for Coleridge, a period which is straddled by the Letter to
Sara Hutchinson in April and the Ode's publication in October.1 The
material of stanza vi remains fairly constant between the two versions,
though subject to some transposition within the overall scheme of the
poem, and only condensed to one stanza in the later text. Both versions
reflect Coleridge's concern with the nature of imagination he was in pro-
cess of exploring beyond the borders of his Ode, though the concern is
as much in evidence, if rather more problematically, within the poem
itself. The question of how the different modes of Coleridge's writing
(poetic or theoretical) relate to each other is closely bound up with their
author's sense of personal vocation, or with how an authorial voice
distributes itself between overtly critical, poetic or philosophic texts.
From the perspective of the Dejection Ode, Coleridge appears taken up
with the problem of which 'voice' might best name imagination. Which
voice names most essentially, and is this the same as the voice which best
authorizes a description of names? What relation exists between the
voices of critic, poet or philosopher, and is one voice rather than another
responsible for supervising that relation? Or is the very possibility of rela-
tion itself only discernible at the level of opposition, or where one voice
infiltrates another? How, then, does the word 'Imagination' speak in the
Ode? Its resonance (and here pathos) as poetic diction would seem to de-
pend in no small part on its equal involvement within the language of Col -
eridgean theory.
Coleridge characterized the poetic diction of the moderns in the
193
194 PETER LARKIN
Biographia as 'an amphibious something made up, half of image, and half
of abstract meaning' (BLS, I, p. 15). 'Imagination' in the Ode may have
its own need to remain amphibious, for a name that is as much at home
outside a poetic text as inside may distract, bearing as it does a trace of
theoretic ambition and coolness, from the purely subjective trammels of
dejection, even while identifying the cost of dejection. What of the Ode's
dejection? We may need to turn to Coleridge the philosopher in any case
to gain dejection's full import, or acquire some objectification, of dejec-
tion's irreducible object. For the philosophic critic of the Biographia 'the
spirit is not originally an object' (BLS, I, p. 185). A dejected spirit, such
as we meet with in the Ode, however, seems reduced to some contrary
origin where it is constantly found by an 'object' which insists on being
identified with it. The spirit appears thrown back on an unwanted ob-
jecthood from which it can no longer recognize itself as a power of the sub-
ject. If Coleridge's idealist (and itself undejected) formulation hints at
the grounds of a contrary dejection in which the object, not the spirit, is
original, the Ode itself had long anticipated him; there dejection is both
acknowledged and partly relieved by recourse to naming a poetic Power
(imagination), whose loss, though disabling, is nevertheless somewhat
mitigated by a sense that 'Imagination' is a term of growing theoretic
sophistication that is equally a Coleridgean achievement. It is as if Col-
eridge is fully aware that in a time of loss he is addressing himself by a far
better name (imagination in every sense a work of his own shaping) than
he had seemed to do in times of more pressing plenitude. Such an
imagination-as-theory could well become, one might suppose,
evangelical, and in featuring in a poem as an integral part of that poem's
diction, is there to seek out imaginative loss in order to proclaim the good
news of the imagination's own self-understanding. Ultimately, though,
the Ode does not employ the term 'Imagination' simply as an analytical
key to the poetic field, and so as a surrogate of poetry, but in order to be
open to the theoretical resources which might neighbour that field, and
upon which it might to some extent lean. Coleridge's universal I of I-
magination does not dispute the priority of poetic dejection, but it does
complicate the workings of dejection. If there seems no such thing as an
interpretative dejection for Coleridge (however un-innocent interpretation
might be), the interpretative presence underlying 'Imagination' is a trace
poetry may trope on, not simply as the power of imagination-lost, but
as a name (however variously compounded) speculating or spiriting other
dimensions through which to view that loss. Such a trope would seem to
shape imagination's name as the Ode names it.
Stanza vi seems as much involved with fancy as imagination. Fancy
 Imagining naming shaping 195
(more frequently named in Coleridge's verse hitherto) may be, however,
as fancy, not much other than a care-free form of imagination, a proto-
form of the thought of poetic power, though one which still has earlier ac-
cess to the life of poetry. Fancy, though, may deal in transformations of
the mind that cannot be fully underwritten by a thoughtful poet. In the
Ode, a joy which dallies with distress seems too easily squandered,
unserious under stress:
There was a time when, though my path was rough,
This joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness . . . (11. 76-9)
Visions of unhappiness so trifled with may lead to dejection's long
dalliance unless they can become involved in a conceptualizing purity
fancy alone cannot supply. Tilottama Raj an sees the visionary power
evoked by fancy here as partaking of something always borrowed, a pro-
cess in which that which is 'not my own, seemed mine' (1. 81), and she
concludes that, for Coleridge, emptiness of self may always have been
more primary.2 In stanza vi we find Coleridge immersed in trying to
figure the transition from one 'primary' that seems to rob his power of
strength to another mode of making prior, one which in bearing a trace
of transcendental reflection may evade an unacceptable object which
recognizes too much of itself in the self. To imagination, there may be
no primary that has always been more primary; and if not, the resulting
pluralization will occur at the very point where 'Imagination' blends its
own originary, vocational poetic status with the revisionist priority of in-
terpretative terminology. However, any transition from fancy to im-
agination in this stanza is not itself the fruit of a philosophic distinction,
but a slide of figuration. Though we know that by September 1802 Col-
eridge was writing to a friend contrasting 'the modifying and co-adunating
Faculty' of imagination with the 'aggregating Faculty' of fancy, the
names of the two poetic powers in stanza vi are, as names, blocking the
way to interpretation as anything more than a detour between them (CL,
II, pp. 865-6). If interpretation (as the trace of another mode of writing)
is present at all, it represents for Coleridge a device for pluralizing the
primary whereby an empty self (that seems to underly fancy) is on its way
to having its name changed, and with it a whole set of ontological assump-
tions. Desynonymization itself remains more purely a product (and
liability) of imagination: imagination's collusion with conceptuality im-
ages itself as a leading edge cutting across fancy, isolating fancy as a ques-
tionable mode of vision with no powers of revision, so that imagination
may retain to itself the full scope of strategic difference embedded within
visionary understanding, an essential part of its amphibious survival kit.
196 PETER LARKIN
So, while fancy in this stanza appears fused with the past, imagination
seems of the present but suspended, or, as Paul Fry says, a suspense
'lingering in play' .3 The presentments made by imagination seem more
properly translated into the terms of fancy while it remains a matter of
dealing in immediate or local images, whether of self or nature. Imagina-
tion itself seems less than imaginable until it grows more abstruse.
Beyond this ghostly suspension of imaginative activity, and its
displacement towards the discredited reminiscences of fancy, lies a more
radical substitutional shaping into the Spirit of Imagination. It is a
substitution likely to involve a shuttling between poetic and theoretic do-
mains (though the shuttling is part of the suspension). Theory does not
blend with poetry without some liability, however. The rigour of theory
may mutate into a poetic substance no less problematic than dejection
itself. Poetry may have no way of distinguishing rigour from those 'fix-
ities and definites' which (rigorously) define a sliding towards fancy rather
than imagination (BLS, I, p. 202). Coleridge was fond of warning that
metaphysical systems become popular 'not for their truth, but in propor-
tion as they attribute to causes a susceptibility of being seen' (BLS, i, p.
74). If imagination cannot wholly sublimate its origins in the seen,
imagination-as-theory is even more implicated in giving sight to an ob-
ject of the mind. We have already noted in stanza vi some divergence
between a fancy implicated in nostalgia and an imagination which
presides over a statement of definitively surrendered power. Owen Bar-
field writes on Coleridge the theorist: 'it would appear to be . . . memory -
cum-fancy that gives rise to "fixities and definites" '; imagination itself,
Barfield later remarks, 'is precisely an advance of the mind towards
knowing itself in the object' .4 The memory of power seems something of
an embarrassment to 'Imagination' in stanza vi: power remembered
seems more like fanciful memory than the wholly imaginative. Barfield
directs our attention to two further points: imagination (as understood
by Coleridgean theory) must dissolve and dissipate the samefixitiesand
definites which fancy can only rearrange; fancy evidently takes a hand
in producing fixities as such.5 In the Dejection Ode, however, the dissolv-
ing power of imagination is largely suspended (is confined to colluding
with its suspension), and the process of recalling imagination becomes
contaminated by fancy's more privileged role in rememoration. An im-
agination suspended increasingly swerves towards its more theoretic
pole, but the language of theory may not be sufficiently distinguishable
in poetry from the language of fancy, the latter already heavily implicated
in situating imaginative failure. The sense of loss may arise no less from
Coleridge's intuition in the Ode that only fancy can play the terms of
'Imagination' (as a conspiring form of poetic diction) back into the life
 Imagining naming shaping 197
of his poetry. To a philosophic eye, works of the imagination may always
in practice stray to the fanciful, since the root-term 'imagination' is
always secondary to the differentiations it provokes. As Jean Pierre
Mileur insists, poetic imagination is as secondary to the 'natural' percep-
tion of the primary imagination as fancy is to imagination itself.6 From
the Biographia again we learn that imaginative dimness may lead to an ex-
cessive reliance on the senses, bringing superstition and fanaticism in its
train (BLS, I, p. 19). 'Imagination' in stanza vi, if truly naming its own
poetic dimming, would seem to show excessive reliance on fancy on the
one hand and theory on the other.
If both fancy and imagination in stanza vi are by no means the pru-
dent products of desynonymization, despite the traces of theory which
underlie the stanza, words like 'nature' and 'natural' seem much more
easily to move away from identity. Stanza iv affirms that 'in our life
alone does Nature live' (1. 48); but this seems not the life of the 'natural
man' of stanza vi who has appropriated nature's name to himself, but
has no sure life of his own since his 'nature' is all that can be subtracted
from the poet's beleaguered self. In dejected self-differentiation alone
does a residue of a 'natural man' henceforth live. He is that aspect of the
self which can be identified with nature's gift at birth. The 'shaping spirit
of Imagination' seems more receiver than giver, or, in the language of
dejection, more object than subject. What nature holds in its gift the spirit
of imagination? Presumably it is an original self prior to the 'Nature' of
stanza iv. Only thence can 'Nature' receive, assimilating to itself all that
is natural in the 'natural man', though the power of the original self is,
as a birth-gift, linked to a birth that is itself a purely natural or extrinsic
event. Yet the time of birth does not seem coeval with fancy's 'dreams
of happiness', but to be a birth-time linked to a spirit which shapes im-
agination's self-understanding, but at the cost of being precisely that
'time' which is no longer fully available as a poetic presence, but remains
suspended over the stanza as a detachable power of reflection or shadowy
trope. That suspended 'what' given by nature at birth is not simply, for
Coleridge, to be identified with imagination, but is what imagination
shapes, a shaping that may have equal business with suspension. Too
natural a birth produces, as in 'The Nightingale', a natural babe rather
than the babe as original self, one which lisps not shapes, mars by imita-
tion rather than articulates origin. That such contingency appears benign
in 'The Nightingale' suggests that natural birth does not coincide with
imagination until, under the weight of dejection, natural birth becomes
the fixing place, a fanciful fixity, of original power lost. Nature, as Col-
eridge was to write towards the end of his life, 'mocks the mind with it's
own metaphors' (CL, v, p. 497). A Nature that lives only within our life
198 PETER LARKIN
is a weak projection, too lax an appropriation of Nature's image by a
power which has its own designs on the image. The 'more original union'
between all the elements of the Coleridgean universe needs recourse to
a trace of self derived from an extra-poetic language if it is to escape a
damaging inversion of subjective idealism under the pressure of dejec-
tion. For Coleridge, the self's relation to Nature might be described as
one involving a 'tensional continuity' in which the asymmetry of domains
is reimagined as harmonizable when held under positive stress. Dejec-
tion then emerges as a tragic loss of the capacity to apply pressure to the
relation, but not the loss of the principle of continuity itself (a principle
which can still be applied by interpretation) unless dejection fall into the
horror of its condition as negative universalizer. Against this, Coleridge
summons in stanza vi an invocation to imaginative loss haunted by a
trace of imagination-as-theory which is itself able to invade the horizon
at which dejection could become universalizable as theory; in so doing,
it is paradoxically assured that dejection remains implicated at the level
of trope as is 'Imagination' itself. In neither field of theory-into-trope or
trope-into-theory can a victory over dejection be assured, but the
chiasmic shuttling of domains acts out a suspension that is itself the on-
ly truly native trope in a poem of otherwise uncertain figurative power.
Coleridge, that is to say, steals enough dejection from the dejected man
to continue the claim of one able to write imagination's name, a name
at once aggressively 'proper', a literalization of itself fiercely self-
referring, but of weakening sense unless it substitute for itself a role in
theory.
Imagination troping on itself as virtual theory is thorough enough to
contaminate its own (poetically dark) figuring of the cost of analytical
powers. Fry believes Coleridge's tracing of a discourse unfolding its in-
spirational sources in this poem is itself an 'abstruse research'.7 The
abstruse, it seems, is the abstract muse, or an abstract ruse, an intense-
ly active desynonymizer of self and nature, an infection of the whole
which traces the global modifications of imagination itself. If'abstruse
research' was Coleridge's 'sole resource', his afflictions, unlike the earlier
dallying distress, allow of no fanciful substitutions. Abstruseness does not
thereby emerge to a new level of literalness, however; abtruse research
arrests the play of fancy, but can only suspend imagination as a figure of
the arrested, and becomes drawn into the complicities of that arrest. 'Im-
agination' is thus led to the margins of a dejected poem as a term for
power-suspended on the one hand, but on the other, induces a new in-
vasion of figurable theory. This figuration, deeply collusive, links
imagination-lost to the deathly effect of abstract theorizing, a process
already begun, though, in the abstract formulation of a 'shaping spirit'.
 Imagining naming shaping 199
The figure-of-theory, not surprisingly, is at odds with its own letter which
within its own domain would sublimate trope as concept. ' Shape', Ken-
neth Burke remarks, 'is characteristically a troublous word in
Coleridgese'.8 Coleridge in 1818 contrasts shape as against form as be-
ing 'super-induced', 'the Death or the imprisonment of the Thing' (CN,
in, 4397), and Burke points out similarly threatening connotations in
'Religious Musings' and 'The Ancient Mariner' which show that the
prevailing tonality of 'shape' was already at work in the 1790s. Within
the Dejection Ode, the gerund 'shaping' suggests a more positive figur-
ing and figurative power, but it is one which as essentially binds itself to
the noun of 'Imagination', and through it, to the abstruser super-
inducements of theory. It is here that there can be a surplus of recogni-
tions, or an apparent substitution of loss for loss, one that seeks to outplay
the deathly habit of dejection in favour of a lost imagination which knows
a theory plays its loss, that theory is here all too needful a 'shape'. Theory
may not know, nevertheless, how it is that 'Imagination' names.

II

If it were possible to become a stronger interpreter in the course of

writing a poem, what poetic resource could signal this? If 'Imagination'
appears more like an essentially repressed interpretative term in 'Dejec-
tion', there may be some chance of repression and figuration coinciding.
Within a dejected poem, though, repression is likely to be underpower
and patchy, 'Imagination' floating free enough to claim some kinship
with its homonymic role as a seminal Coleridgean principle, though one
muted by manifestation within a threatened poetry. But what self is
poetry? What degree of supplementation can it tolerate before becom-
ing an ejected form? If 'Imagination' is caught up within a symbolic
adumbration of theory, we again approach a dark calculus of parts and
wholes under the general 'infection' of dejection. Is too overt a calling
upon imagination, too apocalyptic a sounding out of loss, itself part of
the pathology of dejection? Once introduce imagination, and the
resulting collusion of everything with everything else may become un-
savoury, at least until blocked by the name of 'Imagination' itself, which
not only stalls any stable figural-repressive economy by too overt or
'weak' a mention of itself, but may go on to compromise any effective
transposition of reference from one type of text to another. The name
grows common to less and less, though seemingly remorselessly expan-
200 PETER LARKIN
sive in potential meaning. Thomas McFarland, in a discerning essay on
Coleridge's theory of the secondary imagination, sees imagination as be-
ing for Coleridge less an'a priori theory of poetry than . . . a means of con-
necting poetic, philosophic, and theological interests'. 'Imagination', he
continues, 'is therefore primarily a connective developed because of Col-
eridge's commitment to systematic philosophizing. It would not appear
to be rewarding, accordingly, to try to make very much critically of its
presence in particular poems. ' 9 It may never be over-rewarding to trace
a theory's practice within the fabric of an individual poem, especially as
the 'theory' may be a trace of all that holds itself over against the poetic
act. The Dejection Ode, perhaps luckily therefore, is not at all times a very
rewarding poem, and it compromises theory by naming it as 'Imagina-
tion' . Such a name signals its otherness from poetry, as well as being the
poem's failed genius. Naming as such may hold out the chance of fail-
ing from within a fairly precise locus, however, one that will make possi-
ble the figure of suspension. If imagination (-as-theory) is, as McFarland
proposes, a Coleridgean connective, a bridge between system and origin,
it is one which becomes deeply inclusive of any source-text, whether
poetic or philosophic, in a way which differentiates the reference of im-
agination rather than facilitating a greater fluency of inter-textual rela-
tion. The potential crossing between poetry and theory is as much a
double-crossing, in that the need for a connective is here (from the
perspective of a weak poem like 'Dejection') too symmetrical, and reveals
a common need for mutual support that rapidly descends into a strug-
gle over imagination's name, a struggle that blocks the bridge from either
end. For imagination, whether as the force of poetry or the transcendental
adequacy of theory, seems no longer a common term. The struggle is to
appropriate it as a proper name.
Coleridge would seem to have glimpsed in 'Dejection' the possibility
of collusion between an imagination-lost in poetry and an imagination-
found in theory; this would certainly have been to have reversed the flow
of imagery from a poetic recognition of the locus of nature's life towards
a more elaborate subsumption of nature within the classification of a
'poetic' faculty - the force of the classification making the poetry itself
derivative. Imagination is not left to shuttle undecidably between poetry
and theory, however, for Coleridge's poem is still bent, from within a dy-
ing fall though it may be, on reconstituting the poetic word. Though im-
agination as poetic vision is a weak figure in the poem, and drifts towards
its extra-poetic supplement, imagination-suspended is much stronger
and far less tolerant of any invasion from the margins of theory. Suspen-
sion, to be sure, figures the substitution of a weaker field of writing (de-
jected poetry) for a stronger one (innovatory theory), but the figure itself
 Imagining naming shaping 201
subsumes poetry's fallenness to theory by casting theory as the founda-
tion of itself, a 'founded' figure which induces the much more potent
trope of willing suspension. Imagination-suspended does not itself
mediate but takes mediation as its vehicle so as to trail supportive theories
of mediation. Coleridge, in a notebook entry dating from 1805, was to
liken a man's imagination 'fitfully awaking & sleeping' to the 'odd
metaphors & no metaphors of modern poetry' (CN, n, 2723). This
rehearses the pattern of his own fitful alternation between poetry and
theory, neither of which has a sufficiency of original power (either may
sleep or awake in the other). Within such a suspension 'Imagination' is
named, as at once the term for all metaphor, but itself suspended within
poetry as a distinctive 'no metaphor' summoned by loss, but equally (by
virtue of suspension) blocking any direct path to the priority of theory.
Only within the trope of suspension can imagination become a 'no
metaphor'. The figure engages with the image of its own literalness (an
image that is equally a conceptualized ground) as the suspending within
suspension, as the otherwise unimageable feature of its own power of
trope; a power which also ultimately entraps theory (were not 'theory'
supplemented by this present essay) by emptying imagination's
reference. Imagination becomes within Dejection a privileged disfigura-
tion made possible by the (troped) suspension of figuration, but is no new
equivalent of the literal. And that is to complicate (unfatally) the matter
of dejection's power over the poet. A 'shaping spirit of Imagination'
would be surplus to the structural needs of any poem in terms of a poet's
reviewing of his equipment (at best, as in Wordsworth's 'Imagination!'
apostrophe in The Prelude, vi, likely to lead to an arrest) were not such a
top-heavy intervention treatable from within suspension. Suspension
allows some play whereby the poetic figures exhausted by dejection can
echo as wise theories outside the standard proprieties of the poem. Col-
eridge at this point appears a distracted poet - the inconsistencies of his
Ode have been the targets of criticism more than once - but his image-
play leads straight out of the poem to a 'bridge' with theory rather than
forming any poetic logic of its own. The trope maintains this suspension-
bridge across which much will set out but nothing arrive. The figure
figures the interpretative relevance of its own play, indifferently finding
and losing itself within suspension. For there is no meta-figure as such,
one that might manipulate both poetry and theory; there are only the
multiple domains of the one figure. Nor can any secure level of meta-
theory adequately conceptualize the suspending of imagination, for Col-
eridge is still strong enough to want to contaminate the theory of imagina-
tion as such.
'Such he is: so he writes', writes Coleridge of Wordsworth's mild,
202 PETER LARKIN

philosophic pathos in the Biographia, but a philosophic self set more

rigorously upon defining imagination surely writes before he is (BLS, n,
p. 123). The priority of knowing over being is a figure which powerfully
haunts 'Dejection', both as poison and cure, before being displaced by
the more potent figure of suspension itself. It is suspension which inter-
minably shuttles between figure and concept, which is to say it successful-
ly subdues the trope of shuttling to its own purposes, for suspension re-
mains a more universal horizon than either figure or concept which it en-
trammels. What such a willing suspension of poetic/theoretic disbelief
wills is poetic diction. In 'Dejection' a poet can believe his own theory
as theory rather than poetic myth and so comes to suspend himself as poet.
Suspension clings to theory as theory as the ground of its trope, for theory
believes tropes have power. The poet sees himself as secondary to a
stronger interpreter (the philosopher) who is himself secondary to a yet
stronger poet (Wordsworth). Poetic weakness is thus related to poetic
strength via the intervening of theory, and the impulse to mediatory rela-
tion is not imagination but its suspension, which establishes a lineage
rather than a sphere of radiance. For a poet to suspend his imagination
may not result in his substituting his own weakness for another's strength,
but a subtle pathway has been set up whereby Coleridgean and Word-
sworthian imagination both detour through the theory of imagination
(a theory equally resistant to both poets); that theory, however, is more
successfully troped on from within Dejection than anywhere else. Imagina-
tion, as Coleridge can still know it, freezes dejection in stanza vi rather
than subdues it, but this may allow time for other offerings to other names
during the later stages of the poem. Here, imagination has hardened
neither to retrospective symbol nor to extrinsic formula, but, in suspen-
sion, engages dejection over a common abyss. Dejection grows con-
tingent in the void, less than all-inclusive, while imagination grows recon-
dite. And whose name shall be the less common?

Ill

Our names, and but our names can meet An Exile

In a well-known passage in the Biographia, Coleridge introduces imagina-
tion as an intermediate faculty between active and passive ways of think-
ing; the whole gravitational process of alternating attention can be
likened to a man 'trying to recollect a name' (BLS, I, p. 85). Coleridge's
own swings between poetry and theory (each potentially active or passive
in relation to the other) is a continuous attempt to recollect the name of
 Imagining naming shaping 203
agination', or recollect that it is a name. Aids to Reflection will identify the
name of a thing with the condition of its real existence, linking 'nomen with
numen'.10 Robert Demaria writes that 'Proper names are nothing less
than the type of words for Coleridge, and as the substance (in Lockean
terms) of reality, they must be identified with the type of whatever is, or
life.M1 In Dejection we witness a struggle between two types, or between
type and antitype: the strife of dejection and imagination, each of which
has claims to recognize Coleridge by a name more haunting than his own,
each capable of suppressing it or substituting for it. Geoffrey Hartman
identifies such compulsive but devious naming as the work of a ' spectral
name' which interposes itself between a given or baptismal name as more
truly 'proper', though it is usually kept secret because 'sacred to the in-
dividual, or numinous (nomen numen)'. 12 Imagination, which is in-
volved in characterizing the mode of relation between general and par-
ticular, implicates itself in the semantico-grammatical distinction bet-
ween common and proper names. Hartman, employing a classic account
of proper names as 'pure signifiers that have only a referent. . . but no
concept or signified' pushes onward his name - pleading to suggest that
'(p)erhaps the second-order discourse we call ''metalanguage" . . .
aspires to the same magic, that of pure signification'.13 Is Coleridgean
imagination in the Ode a spectral name, then, able to ward off dejection,
a warding that secretively awards itself proper status? If so, its ward is
a place of wounding within suspension itself. As suspended, the name of
'Imagination' can, as we have seen, no longer signify imagination-as-
vision without recourse to a trace of theory. That trace comes to be
regathered within the general trope of suspension, a trope which 'Im-
agination' must surely name overall rather than denoting only the 'what'
of suspension. A proper name cannot itself trope, its 'sense' being too
weak to allow of more forceful displacements; rather, it becomes the I-
magic of suspended sense, one whose referent, the namer, grounds within
his naming a trope upon a suspended name. Is he dejected in doing so?
In dejection he has abandoned a baptismal name in favour of a spectral
one which must suspend itself if it is to have any reference. Coleridge,
that is to say, reduces to a 'transdiscursive author' in order to open a space
for the tremors of imagination otherwise less than fully native to either
poetry or theory;14 as the name of its own (dispersed) author, imagina-
tion itself becomes a tenuous mountain-birth whither interpretation
never clomb, marooned at a height unrealized by poet also unless suffi-
ciently potently suspended by it. To question the function of imagina-
tion in Coleridge's poem is to be on the verge of naming it properly. While
in Germany in May 1799, Coleridge had proposed in a letter to Josiah
Wedgwood to write up his ideas in the form of a biographical study of
204 PETER LARKIN
Lessing, or 'under a better name, than my own ever will be' (CL, I, p.
519). In the 'Dejection' Ode of 1802 we read a biography of dejection
which yet resists dejection's claim to title it fully: imagination-suspended
is a better name for Coleridge than his own dejection ever can be, and
as spectral-proper is a name that has not itself been rejected in love.
The oblique invocation to imagination in Dejection, with its complex
pathway between weak and strong poetry, itself borrows the Wordswor-
thian form of 'Imagination! thou shouldst be living at this hour'.
Jonathan Culler notes that 'an apostrophe seems to make a deflection of
the message'.16 In the same way that a proper name might be said to
'deflect' its own descriptive powers, the naming of imagination in the
Ode allows, through its name, a virtual apostrophe to become actual.
Coleridge, however, while wanting to come into imagination's presence
and reprove its suspension, would seem to have repressed the apostrophe
by diverting his voice through the said of interpretation. Theory is not
to be troped on without a residue which resists pure figuration, but
nor can it, by the same token, impose a common meaning upon the
name 'Imagination'. 'Invocation', according to Culler, 'is a figure of
vocation' ;16 it is also, we sense, a figure of a vocable. As for vocation, Fry
sees Coleridge here as 'disjected, cast out of his vocation in having
misconceived it'. The poet 'scatters any conceivable poetic form into so
many disjecta membrapoetae*.17 This is a casting out still able, though, to
name its loss at a point identified by dejection with a name that over-
shadows any dejected locality as such; imagination's proper name
reckons with the spectral presence of a conceiver, a poet-theorist, whose
Ode, though perhaps onomatoclastic in its fragmented and un-
completable name as an ode to imagination, emerges as a name-maker
of imagination.18 Who, though, is left to pronounce the name? Poetry
and theory may instruct the name, but perhaps only dejection comes to
pronounce it, to evince its utterability. In that sense, Coleridge's Ode re-
mains an ode of dejection.
Reason cannot, Coleridge notes in The Statesman's Manual, 'in strict
language be called a faculty, much less a personal property, of any human
mind'. It is to be appropriated no more than one can 'make an inclosure
in the cope of Heaven' (LS, p. 70). It is imagination, however, rather than
reason, which recognizes what is heaven-like in the 'cope' of heaven, but
the space of such a recognition is not the provision of reason which can
acknowledge no locality within itself. Imaginative recognition thus falls
back to a lesser sphere where its 'inclosures' gain no purchase on a
universe of meaning it alone has irreversibly but groundlessly envisioned.
If reason, from the pure solvency of its own self-adequation, cannot class
itself as a faculty, much less as a personal property, imagination must
 Imagining naming shaping 205
contract from the common term of the cope it recognizes to the inclosure
of its own name, a name whose ground is (as reason) a suspension, but
as a recognition of the shapes of reason a 'suspended' ground, a site still
within heaven's cope.
The name of imagination entails another, equally scrambled, personal
appellation more often met as 'Asra' in Coleridge's verse, though in De-
jection he prefers the greater suspension of 'Lady', a common and descrip-
tive name that clearly has a proper reference. This Lady may be a spirit
whose shape is still in place. Does 'Imagination' name Coleridge as
homage-maker as much as image-breaker within this afflicted poem? The
tracing of a weaker self by means of another name (Asra) already has its
equivalent in poetry's unequal self-companioning in theory. Both theory
and the Lady are recognitions of the other which inherits the suspended
heart of the poem, and gradually equips its recovery of a heart-language.
It is an equipping which enables the imagination to know that the other
is itself 'not far from home' (stanza vn, 1. 123) though in a way the other
itself cannot be imagined to know. Such knowing is known/or the other
by an imagination which simultaneously echoes orientation and near-
by disorientation from within its own labyrinthine channels through
poetry and theory, either of which may entail loss or gain. Imagination
supervenes the relation, but as a power suspended modifies only so far
as a naming. The Lady alone can offer to the poet's self what the self
recognizes is there to be given through imagination, but since she has no
certain life beyond the imagination's (name's) naming of her, the suspen-
sion remains, though one not far from the home recognized. Coleridge
still does have a name by which to call on Asra, one not debarred from
acceptance as is his own.
George Whalley suggests we view Coleridge as describing imagina-
tion in his poem to Sara, not as a faculty, but as a state or condition of
the person inseparable from the quality of perception.19 In his
Philosophical Lectures Coleridge was to go on to record that' [a] man of
genius finds a reflex to himself, were it only in the mystery of being' (P
Lects, p. 179). The reflex-type, the genus of genius, can only rebound on
mystery, where the naming of a mediatory power becomes the media-
tion of its name, the hearer and caller of other names, a name proper in
its difference from any description, but improperly assignable or spec-
tral as the difference of reflex itself. A poem's difference from imaginative
power is one of dependence, while that of theory is one of independence,
but both fully articulate their modes of difference. Neither names im-
agination as its own priority without wounding itself, though in the case
of a poem, its difference from the power it would assume may be especial-
ly realized through its defeasibility at the hands of interpretation. But
206 PETER LARKIN
such an asymmetry of relation returns the suspension of imagination to
a poetic fold, its flaw, its ward.

Notes
1
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Imagination in Coleridge, ed. John Spencer Hill,
(London, Macmillan, 1978), p. 8.
2
The Dark Interpreter: the Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca, Cornell University
Press, 1980), p. 232.
3
The Poet's Calling in the English Ode (New Haven, Yale University Press,
1980), p. 11. Cited hereafter as Fry.
4
What Coleridge Thought (London, Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 88-9.
Cited hereafter as Barfield.
5
Barfield, p. 86.
6
Vision and Revision: Coleridge's Art of Immanence (Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1982), p. 8.
7
Fry, p. 173.
8
'Kubla Khan', in Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and
Method (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1966), p. 212.
9
'The Origin and Singnificance of Coleridge's Theory of Secondary Im-
agination', in New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, ed. Geoffrey H.
Hartman (New York, Columbia University Press, 1972), p. 202.
10
Aids to Reflection and the Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (London, George Bell,
1884), p. 153.
11
'Coleridgean Names', Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 77(1978),
p. 35.
12
Saving the Text: Literature, Derrida, Philosophy (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1981), p. 125. Cited hereafter as Hartman.
13
Hartman, pp. 126-7.
14
The term 'transdiscursive' is applied by Michel Foucault to an author con-
sidered to have initiated a new discourse, rather than simply to have writ-
ten a particular book. Coleridge is clearly the author of'imagination' in this
extended sense. Interestingly enough, Foucault considers the question of
the free, meaning-endowing subject as essentially a 'suspended' one. See
'What is an Author?', in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice; Selected Essays
and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and
Sherry Simon (Oxford, Blackwell, 1977), pp. 131-7.
15
'Apostrophe', Diacritics, 7 (1977), p. 59. Cited hereafter as Culler.
16
Culler, p. 63.
17
Fry, p. 182.
18
Cf. 'Literature is at once onomatopoeic (name-making) and onomato-
clastic (name-breaking)' (Hartman, p. 128).
19
Quoted in Imagination in Coleridge, p. 26.
 Mythopoesis: the unity of Christabel

ANTHONY JOHN HARDING

'Christabel', as Walter H. Evert wrote in 1977, has 'eluded critical con-

sensus', and despite a steady flow of commentary continues to baffle
interpretation.1 The poem evidently owes something to the Gothic
romance, and many critics, including Evert himself, have pointed out
the affinities between the figure of Christabel and the Gothic heroine -
young, dutiful, innocent and terribly vulnerable. These affinities can be
overemphasized, however, and on their own they do not provide a suf-
ficient basis for the understanding of the poem. Its remoteness from
novelistic narrative is apparent in many of its most important episodes,
not the least of which is the frightening metamorphosis of Christabel in
Part II of the poem into a stumbling, hissing double of Geraldine. No-
one expects a Gothic tale to obey canons of literary realism, but some-
thing is happening here that refuses to be confined even within the rather
extravagant parameters of credibility that apply to the Gothic prose tales
Coleridge could have known. Both events and characters are polysemous
in the way we usually expect myth to be polysemous. Some of the con-
flicting critical accounts of the poem which now puzzle us by their incon-
sistency may turn out to be harmonious after all, if we take slightly higher
ground and examine the poem's mythopoeic elements.
In particular I would argue that it is a mistake to see Christabel as a
character in a versified novel, a 'heroine', and therefore in any sense to
be 'on her side', whether we welcome or abhor the intrusion of Geraldine
into her mother-blessed world. For all the 'gothicism' of her surroun-
dings, the title 'heroine' is as wrong for Christabel as it would be for
Wordsworth's Lucy. As Jean-Pierre Mileur observes: 'The attempt to
create a narrative romance out of the situation at the poem's center is
thwarted by the inaccessibility of a causal center or source of motive. '2
Attempts at reading the poem as a tale of sexual initiation, or the transi-
tion from 'innocence' to 'experience' in some related sense, simply do
not explain enough, because they provide no adequate explanation of the
particular form Christabel's transformation takes.
The approach I wish to explore, then, is that of treating Christabel as
an instance not of novelistic narrative, nor yet of parable or allegory, but
207
208 ANTHONY JOHN HARDING
of Romantic mythopoesis. That is, I wish to draw the poem closer to
Blake's Visions of the Daughters ofAlbion and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound,
and proportionately to distance it from Lewis's The Monk and Radcliffe's
The Mysteries of Udolpho, applying to Coleridge's poem something like
Shelley's dictum that a poem (as distinct from a 'story') is 'the creation
of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as ex-
isting in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other
minds'. 3
The first problem we encounter in treating Christabel as mythopoesis
is obviously that of the poem's unity or disunity: both the relatedness or
unrelatedness of the poem's two parts, and the completeness or in-
completeness of the diptych, if we envisage it as a diptych. Assuming that
Coleridge's own remarks (as reported by James Gillman and Derwent
Coleridge) establish the poet's unfulfilled plans for the poem, we have
dutifully searched for proleptic evidence that the completed poem would
have been a parable showing how 'the virtuous of this world save the
wicked', or how 'the holy and innocent do often suffer for the faults of
those they love', and we sometimes read back into the Geraldine of Part
I the characteristics of the shape-shifter demanded by the improbable
series of events which Gillman gives us as a summary of the projected
Parts in and iv.4
H. W. Piper's 'The Disunity of Christabel and the Fall of Nature' is
more respectful of the poem as it stands now, but Piper has to sacrifice
narrative cohesion by treating Part n as a failure, an abortive attempt to
resume in 1799 and 1800 the interests and themes of 1797. To Piper,
Geraldine's ambiguity in Part I reflects Coleridge's incipient unhap-
piness with the view of nature canonized in Lyrical Ballads: that the natural
order is benevolent even when it appears for the moment evil. In support
of this interpretation he cites Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner as two
nearly contemporary poems in which 'the setting plays a vital part in the
working out of the poem', though he appears to feel that the 'setting' of
Christabel Part I is much more ambiguous than the settings of the other
two poems. Both the setting and Geraldine' s duplicitous character' call
into question the moral purposes of the natural order'. 5
It is misleading, however, to speak of the 'settings' of Kubla Khan or
The Ancient Mariner as if they had the same independence from the poet's
consciousness, the same kind of 'outness', as the pastoral farms of Tintern
Abbey or the hazel-trees of Nutting. Even in his conversation poems Col-
eridge is far more concerned with nature internalized, or nature as God's
symbolic language (Frost at Midnight), than with nature as 'independent'
entity. Kathleen Coburn's remark about The Ancient Mariner is pertinent:
'For Coleridge, nothing is more strange, more mysterious than the mind
 Mythopoesis: the unity 0/Christabel 209
itself, especially the frightened, or troubled, or guilty mind' - and Col-
eridge himself, on his voyage to Malta in April and May 1804 (during
which he had several unpleasant dreams), saw that poetry may be (in
Alethea Hayter's phrase) a 'rationalized dream' .6 Geraldine is surely an
embodiment of mental, not of 'outward forms'. It is instructive that Piper
has some difficulty in transferring his argument about Geraldine-as-
nature to the second part of the poem. His solution - which is to treat
the second part simply as less skilful than the first, indicating that Col-
eridge had lost sight of the fruitful ambiguities of Parti - imposes a fur-
ther unnecessary penalty on the search for thematic and narrative uni-
ty in the poem.
Yet the unfinished state of the poem, and its division into two parts,
are not the only features it has which stand in the way of a consistent
parabolic interpretation. Unlike, say, Spenser, who keeps the momen-
tum of events going by constantly reminding us (not least through the
steady onward-pacing rhythm of his nine-line stanza) that each scene is
but part of a larger unfolding pattern, Coleridge allows and encourages
us to 'freeze' the action, by having the narrator break into his own
narrative:
A sight to dream of, not to tell! (1. 253)
Can this be she,
The lady, who knelt at the old oak tree? (11. 296-7)
Why is thy cheek so wan and wild,
SirLeoline? (11.621-2)
These interruptions almost too strenuously underline the fact that
the hold which the poem exerts on a reader derives in large part
not from the sense of narrative expectation ('how will she get out
of this one?') but from the intrinsic power of a central, heartstopping
image. Even in some prose romances, such images fail to be neutraliz-
ed by subsequent rescues or escapes, and therefore interrupt the narrative
rhythm of the tale. Readers of Lewis's The Monk, for instance, surely
remember the image of Agnes imprisoned in the vault and clasping
to her breast the decaying body of her child, long after they have
forgotten how she came to be there or how she was rescued. So in
Part I of Christabel the image of Geraldine, with corpse-like bosom
and side, holding Christabel 'As a mother with her child' (1. 301),
is frozen for us by the narrator. It too parodies storge or mother-
love, as well as erotic love, and anticipates the world of The Pains
of Sleep in its psychosexual ambiguity:7
Desire with loathing strangely mixed
On wild or hateful objects fixed.
210 ANTHONY JOHN HARDING
Fantastic passions! maddening brawl!
And shame and terror over all!
Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
Which all confused I could not know
Whether I suffered, or I did . . . (PW, I, p. 390)
The impact of such images can only partly be explained through the
kinds of interpretation usually offered - that they are emblems of life-
in-death, or a horrible parody of mother-love, here given connotations
of necrophilia. Through such commentary, we try to express our sense
that such images momentarily violate some of the most radical structures
of human knowledge, primarily the distinction that we make between liv-
ing and dead, and between birth-event and death-event. The middle
ground between such opposites, as Jane A. Nelson points out (citing Ed-
mund Leach), is the focus of taboo. Mythical thought works from the
awareness of such opposition towards a resolution, which is to be achiev-
ed by the introduction of a third, anomalous category: the revenant, the
incarnate god, the virgin mother. As Nelson shows, the narrativity of
Christabel is closer to non-literary myth than to literary narrative proper
- which is not necessarily to say that it is artless. The poem poses a pro-
blem in poetic and mythopoeic logic, lthe re-union of what in this world is
divided'; and the sense of division and opposition which pervades the
poem is embodied chiefly in 'familial and sexual' relationships - Leoline
and Christabel, Geraldine and Christabel, Leoline and Geraldine.8 It
was a problem that haunted Coleridge for many years, if not to the end
of his life. One of the Malta notebooks contains the entry 'Mem. To ex-
amine whether Dreams of Terror & obscure Forms, ugly or not, be com-
monly preceded by Forms of Awe & Admiration with distant Love' (CN,
II, 1998).
It is notable, however, that in Coleridge's poetry the perception of divi-
sion or opposition very often shows itself in the form of a threat not to the
stability of outward things, nor even to psychic stability as such, but to
the very possibility of poetic utterance itself. The Ode to the Departing Year, writ-
ten at the close of 1796, which 'prophesies, in anguish of spirit, the
downfall of this country', ends:
I unpartaking of the evil thing,
With daily prayer and daily toil
Soliciting for food my scanty soil,
Have wail'd my country with a loud Lament.
Now I recentre my immortal mind
In the deep Sabbath of meek self-content;
Gleans'd from the vaporous passions that bedim
God's Image, sister of the Seraphim. {PW, I, p. 168)
The phrase 'I unpartaking of the evil thing' should not be read as the
 Mythopoesis: the unity of Christabel 211
poet's claim to moral superiority. It is spoken in the character of
national prophet, and is a recognition of the fact that in order to utter
prophetic words at all the poet must be blessed with unity of being.
Biblical thought constantly images evil as 'double-mindedness' (Psalms
12:2, 51:6, 119:113), while the forked tongue or sharp-edged (cutting,
splitting) tongue is the dominant metaphor for false or deceitful
utterance (Psalms 52:2, 57:4, 140:3). Similarly, the inability to speak
one's thought because of disunity in the inward being is a theme
common to several poems of Coleridge that abjure the prophetic stance.
In the 1796 sonnet When they did greet me father, for instance, the poet's
attempt at prayer is frustrated by 'Th'unquiet silence of confused
thought/ And shapeless feelings' (PW, i, 153), where the apparent
self-contradiction of 'unquiet silence' focuses the speaker's dilemma,
inner turmoil preventing the prayerful response demanded by the
occasion. A different kind of inner disharmony prevents the Ancient
Mariner from voicing the prayer he knows he should speak: as he longs
for death, for self-annihilation, he cannot at the same time affirm his
being (or the being of Being) through prayer. In The Pains of Sleep,
too, the first thing in the poet's mind is the possibility of utterance
itself, and the intimate connections between poetic utterance, love,
and prayer. The attempt to pray, like the initiation into love,
presupposes and requires wholeness in the self.
When the prayer-state is successfully achieved in Coleridge's poetry,
there is usually a corresponding emphasis on unity of being, as at the
conclusion of the 1807 poem To William Wordsworth, written after
Coleridge heard Wordsworth read The Prelude (then known, of course,
simply as 'the poem to Coleridge') at Coleorton:
Scarce conscious, and yet conscious of its close
I sate, my being blended in one thought
(Thought was it? or aspiration? or resolve?)
Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound -
And when I rose, I found myself in prayer.
(PW, I, p. 408)
Silent prayer, presumably, just as Christabel's prayer on behalf of her
lover (1. 36) is silent, indicating perfect community between the person
praying and the one prayed to - no need for the intervention of
speech.9 The language of familial and sexual relationship which
Coleridge adopts in Christabel should not blind us to the fact that the
primary 'division and opposition' the poem is concerned with is not
in 'the world', nor even in sexual or familial 'identity', but in the
profoundest reaches of the praying self: an experience corresponding
to Wordsworth's sense of treachery and desertion in the place /'The
212 ANTHONY JOHN HARDING
holiest that I knew of. . .'. 10 In Christabel, as in The Pains of Sleep, the vic-
tim is also the doer of evil (' Sure I have sinn'd', 1. 381), while the agent,
Geraldine, the 'worker of these harms', looks more like a victim, 'still and
mild' (11. 298, 300). Still more to the point, in Part II the moment that
dominates the narrative, the moment for which everything else seems on-
ly a preparation, is the moment when Christabel's power of speech is
paralysed:
Christabel in dizzy trance
Stumbling on the unsteady ground
Shuddered aloud, with a hissing sound. (11. 589-91)
Here the narrative comes to a final halt, save for the 'Conclusion to
Part II' which is really a second way of describing the same condition,
the same discovery of treachery and desertion within the self. The lov-
ing father, compelled to utter his 'love's excess' by sheer pressure of emo-
tion, finds that his words slip, slide, and perish, betraying an unsuspected
rage and pain alongside the love. If the father's words, as suggested here,
are 'wild', like a monster that, once set free, exhibits destructive powers
his maker never intended him to have, then the bitterness they express
is nevertheless there, part of their content, whether 'unmeant' or not.
From this perspective the 'Conclusion to Part n' appears to be a com-
mentary not on a moral truth, at least in the first instance, but on a truth
about speech, and about its frightening disconnectedness from willed
thought and meaning. The fathers Leoline and Coleridge are their own
victims in the sense that each is 'responsible for' the utterance, even
though the bitterness it expresses was unwilled, or unmeant (just as Col-
eridge feared at times that he might have been in some obscure way
'responsible for' the loathsome images summoned up in his dreams):11
pleasuresflowin so thick and fast
Upon his heart, that he at last
Must needs express his love's excess
With words of unmeant bitterness.
Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together
Thoughts so all unlike each other;
To mutter and mock a broken charm,
To dally with wrong that does no harm.
Perhaps 'tis tender too and pretty
At each wild word to feel within
A sweet recoil of love and pity. (11. 662-72)
In this wildly associative, dreamlike, and amoral moment, parallel not
only to Leoline's rage but also to Christabel's dizzy trance, human rela-
tionship is turned to 'sorrow and shame', love to 'rage and pain', and
prayer to 'a broken charm'. Coleridge has perhaps recognized in this im-
age the horror of his own state - the paralysis of poetic and prayerful
utterance.
 Mythopoesis: the unity o/Christabel 213
Hazlitt - if it was Hazlitt who wrote the review of the * Chris tabel'
volume in the Examiner for 2 June 1816 - was quite right to say of Col-
eridge that 'he comes to no conclusion'.12 There is no 'conclusion'
because the real subject of Christabel shows affinity not so much with tradi-
tional narrative poetry as with Blakean mythopoesis. Like Visions of the
Daughters of Albion, Coleridge's poem depicts a strangeness in human ex-
istence; and instead of moving forward to an easy resolution, it ends with
the dominant image of a human soul in its temporally divided and
speechless state, as if recognizing that a miraculous hair's-breadth escape
would be at best a weak palliative. Each part of Christabel focuses on a
distinct moment of horror arising from some profound division and havoc
in the self: thefirstpart on the displacement of Christabel's mother's spirit
by the sinister Geraldine, the second part on the desperate situation of
Christabel struggling to speak her peril but unable to do so, 'O'er-
mastered by the mighty spell' (1. 620). Both moments exist outside the
normal moral cause-and-effect paradigms of the dayworld: both are 'dark
sayings' unfolding the 'disquietness of heart' that emerges unsummoned
from a prayerful moment of 'Deep inward stillness & a bowed Soul' (CN,
i, 259).
These biblical phrases (they are from Psalm 49:4, Psalm 43:5 and
Psalm 44:25) come from an entry in the Gutch memorandum book,
possibly a list of references to be used in a projected Essay on Prayer. The
phrases group themselves around an experience similar to the ones
adumbrated in CN, I, 257, an outline of the prayer experience. In
Christabel and The Pains ofSleep, however, the preparation for prayer and
the gradual composing of the mind to a state of calm contemplation are
followed by the terrible irruption of loathsome phantoms, the sense of
evils done and suffered, which contaminates the still mind of the worship-
per and taints the prayers he is struggling to utter. With her mother's
spirit near, or at least not banished, Christabel prays in 'gentle vows' (1.
285), pious tears just beginning in her eyes - 'both blue eyes more bright
than clear,/ Each about to have a tear' (11. 290-1), another image of
motherhood. After her mother's spirit is banished and replaced by
Geraldine the desire to pray remains ('praying always', she 'prays in
sleep', 1. 322), but there is a change - 'tears she sheds - / Large tears
that leave the lashes bright', 11. 315-16 - and she moves now'unquiet-
ly' (1. 323). In Christabel's troubled sleep we confront the third stage of
prayer as Coleridge described it: 'Repentance & Regret - self-
inquietude' (CN, i, 257).
Some psychoanalytical criticism of Coleridge has perhaps tended to
obscure an important aspect of the 'absent mother' motif in Christabel:
that for Coleridge the idea of mother-love is closely associated with prayer
214 ANTHONY JOHN HARDING
and the ability to pray. Coleridge's memories of childhood prayer, as
Kathleen M. Schwartz points out, always involved his mother - never
his father - and the outline of the Essay on Prayer associates prayer
closely with mother-love (CN, i, 263, and compare CN, I, 750).13 Sir
Leoline's kind of piety seems by contrast distinctly patriarchal - or
Urizenic: 'Each matin bell, the Baron saith, /Knells us back to a world
of death' (11. 332-3).
Part I of Christabel, then, speaks of a Christabel-element in the human
spirit which is openhearted, generous, naturally prayerful and loving.
In the language of the Gutch memorandum book (based on Psalm 22:3),
the Christabel-in-us 'inhabit [s] God's praises' (CN, I, 259). She is or-
phaned, however, by the departure of a certain kind of spirituality that
is associated with womanhood and motherhood. This deprivation leaves
her vulnerable to the irruption of the tyrannous Geraldine. In
mythopoeic terms it is entirely credible that the 'unchangeable form',
Christabel, should accept as well-intentioned and even pitiable the
Geraldine-element, which presents itself as an emissary of higher powers
(11. 227-8), or as descended from 'a noble line' (1. 79).
That-which-is-Geraldine is, however, specious, deceitful, potent and
capable of imposing its will on Christabel, as is shown by its deformed
shape underneath the 'silken robe' (1. 250). 'Geraldine' may here be
glossed not merely as nature (Piper's view) but the natural man,
existence-in-the-flesh, Blake's Rahab. She belongs to a long and
dishonourable tradition of succubae and temptresses, including most
notably Spenser's Duessa, in whom the double aspect of the flesh -
beautiful to view, but subject to corruption and exercising a tyrannical
power over the soul - is imaged (compare The Faerie Queene, I, viii, 1.
47). The result of this psychomachy is the transformation of unaffected
piety, and the holy sleep of a calm soul (CN, I, 191), to a state of 'self-
inquietude'. Geraldine's oldest ancestors are Eve and the serpent; she
is woman as patriarchal religion sees her: duplicitous, seductive, a snare
and a delusion, identified with the flesh, an embodiment of 'lower
powers':

Now this is the present unhappy state of Man; our lower powers are gotten up-
permost . . . . The Woman in us still prosecutes a deceipt like that begun in the
Garden; and we are wedded to an Eve, as fatal as the Mother of our Miseries.14
The worst consequences are saved for the second part of the poem,
however, as Christabel finds herself unable to enlist the help of her father,
whose piety is of the morbid, death-obsessed kind, in contrast to the fresh-
air-and-wildflower piety of Christabel's mother. Instead Sir Leoline
seems strangely attracted to Geraldine's specious grandeur, as a
 Mythopoesis: the unity of Christabel 215
pharisaical piety is often pruriently attracted to what it affects to despise.
Worse still, Christabel is shown 'passively' imitating the serpentine look
of 'dull and treacherous hate' thrown in her direction by Geraldine (11.
605-6), and in the midst of her trance unable to make any sound other
than a serpent's hiss. As in the nightworld of The Pains of Sleep it is the
evildoer who has all along enjoyed the appearance of virtue, while the vic-
tim is shown guilty of complicity in her own downfall. Interpretations that
view Christabel's downfall as purely or primarily sexual in nature sure-
ly narrow the significance of most of Part I of the poem. Christabel fails
to read the warning signs - Geraldine's refusal to pray, the tongue of
light in the dying fire (11. 142, 159) - with the result that Christabel, the
embodiment of spiritual wholeness, quickly permits herself to accept
Geraldine, the embodiment of carnality, existence-in-the-flesh, as what
she appears to be, a lady of 'noble line'. Sure Christabel has sinned, and
as she sinned in Geraldine's person she is punished by being turned in-
to Geraldine. This is the justice of the imagination, the same justice that
is properly meted out to Milton's Satan:
a greater power
Now rul'd him, punisht in the shape he sinnd,
According to his doom: he would have spoke,
But hiss for hiss returnd with forked tongue
To forked tongue, for now were all transformd
Alike. . .15
The forked tongue is no more than a recognition, a rendering into
physical terms, of the fact that Satan and the rebel angels have deceived
themselves as well as their victims Eve and Adam. Christabel too -
callous though this may sound - has deceived herself. She is at least part-
ly subject now to the tyranny of Geraldine, and of those Geraldine serves,
the ambivalent powers of 'the upper sky' (1. 227). The spell is 'lord of
[her] utterance' (1. 268) to such an extent that she cannot explain the
danger to her father but can only blurt out a desperate entreaty that he
send the deceiver away (11. 616-17).
A close connection is assumed here between speech, especially prayer-
ful utterance, and wholeness. Christabel appeals to Sir Leoline by her
mother's soul (1. 616), a reminder that prayer grows from the unity of be-
ing suggested in the image of mother and child, rather than from the rela-
tionship of father to child; compare the narrator's reiterated prayer 'Jesu,
Maria, shield her well!' (11. 54, 582). There is even a hope that the
undeceived and single-natured poet Bracy may be able to banish the evil
'With music strong and saintly song' (1. 561). As far as this narrative is
concerned, however, that-which- is -Christabel is deeply compromised by
its contact with that-which-is-Geraldine, and the consequences are fatal
216 ANTHONY JOHN HARDING
to poetry itself: to be forced into silence, robbed of the power of utterance,
is equivalent to the complete loss of 'poetic space', the power of projec-
ting from the self an answering and reciprocally self-confirming
otherness, the power to affirm Being as the ground of self.
Paul H. Fry has argued that Wordsworth and Coleridge rejected the
older identification of 'poetic space', or the system of relationships that
gives meaning to poetry, with the order of genres. In the new Romantic
poetic, Fry suggests, 'poetic space is what we half perceive and half create
on the basis of an ad hoc symbiosis of mind with nature'. The function
of symbolism within this poetic is 'the making-present of some univer-
sal power that is universally absent until by magic the nomen grows
numinous . . . . Were it not antinomian, defiant of determinism by ex-
ternally given origins, this faith would attach itself to the office of
prayer. '16 If Christabel is essentially, as I have proposed, a poem about
poetic utterance, depicting a state in which the inward stillness necessary
for such utterance, as it is for prayer, is destroyed by disquietness of heart
and self-deception, then Coleridge seems to have rejected any 'ad hoc
symbiosis of mind with nature' almost before it even produced any
results, suspecting, with Blake, that nature and the natural man are not
only ambiguous but tyrannous, deceitful usurpers claiming descent from
the 'noble line' of Being itself. The substitution of the fleshly Geraldine
for the absent mother-spirit is a horrible actualization of the way in which
that-which-is-Christabel, in its orphaned loneliness, makes the natural
man its adoptive parent: and in Part n of the poem the stultifying of
prayerful utterance is the inevitable consequence. If Christabel had been
able to speak to Geraldine, she might have said something like this:

Thou, mother of my mortal part,

With cruelty didst mould my heart,
And with false self-deceiving tears,
Didst bind my nostrils, eyes and ears,

Didst close my tongue in senseless clay

And me to mortal life betray.17
For the prophetic poet, poetic speech must assert itself in absolute
freedom from the mortal part, the 'evil thing', and to allow the lower
powers of mortal life to close around the mind is to resign oneself to
tongue-tied silence.

Notes
This essay is based on a paper presented at the 1983 Wordsworth Summer Con-
ference in Grasmere, England. I am grateful to the organizers of the Conference,
especially Richard Wordsworth and Jonathan Wordsworth, for the opportuni-
 Mythopoesis: the unity o/"Christabel 217

ty to present and discuss the paper, and to my fellow participants for their many
constructive suggestions.
1
Walter H. Evert, 'Coadjutors of Oppression: A Romantic and Modern
Theory of Evil', in Romantic and Modern: Revaluations ofLiterary Tradition, ed.
George Bornstein (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), p. 37.
For the texts of Coleridge's poems I use PW. References to Christabel {PW,
I, pp. 213-36) are by line number.
2
Jean-Pierre Mileur, Vision and Revision: Coleridge's Art of Immanence
(Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982), p. 63.
3
'A Defence of Poetry', in Shelley }s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald Reiman and
Sharon Powers (New York, W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 485.
4
These reports can conveniently be consulted in Humphry House, Coleridge:
The Clark Lectures 1951-52(London, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953, rpt 1969),
pp.126-8.
5
H. W. Piper, 'The Disunity of Christabel and the Fall of Nature', EC, 28
(1978), p. 217. Robert Schwartz also emphasizes the 'disunity' of the poem:
'the narrative, while promising the unity of a continuous and discernible
meaning, rarely does more than. .. inform us of a second level of experience'
- that is, the supernatural one ('Speaking the Unspeakable: The Meaning
oiYovmin ChristabeV, University ofSouth Florida Language Quarterly, 19, Nos.
1—2 (1980), p. 34). Edward Dramin points to numerous instances of parody
in the gothicism of the poem, but stops short of saying that parody is its uni-
fying feature (' ' 'Amid the Jagged Shadows": Christabel and the Gothic
Tradition', TWC, 13 (1982), pp. 221-8).
6
Kathleen Coburn, 'Coleridge and Wordsworth and "the Super-
natural" ', University of Toronto Quarterly, 25 (1956), p. 125; Alethea Hayter,
A Voyage In Vain (London, Faber and Faber, 1973), p. 50.
7
For 'storge' see my Coleridge and the Idea of Love, p. 162.
8
Jane A. Nelson, 'Entelechy and Structure in "Christabel" ', SIR, 19
(1980), pp. 385-7. SeealsoJonasSpatz, 'The Mystery of Eros: Sexual In-
itiation in Coleridge's ChristabeV, PMLA, 90 (1975), p. 113.
9
Kathleen M. Schwartz, in 'Prayer in the Poetry of S.T.C.', Diss., Prince-
ton University, 1975, p. 26, argues that Coleridge was more at home with
contemplative prayer, 'the fusion of the self with the divine', than with peti-
tionary prayer.
10
Oxford 'Prelude3, X, 380-1. 1805 text.
11
See David S. Miall, 'The Meaning of Dreams: Coleridge's Ambivalence',
SIR, 21(1982), p. 69.
12
Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, ed. J. R. de J.Jackson (London, Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 205.
13
Kathleen Schwartz, 'Prayer in the Poetry of S . T . C , p. 23.
14
Joseph Glanvill, 'Against Confidence in Philosophy and Matters of Spec-
ulation', 1676, quoted in Donald Greene, 'Latitudinarianism and Sensibili-
ty: The Genealogy of the "Man of Feeling" Reconsidered', M Phil, 75
(1977), pp. 169-70.
15
John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. B. A. Wright (London, Dent, 1962), p. 343
(Bookx, 11. 515-20).
16
Paul H. Fry, The Poet }s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven, Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1980), pp. 134-5.
17
William Blake, 'To Tirzah', Poems, ed. W. H. Stevenson and David V.
Erdman (London, Longman, 1971), p. 591.
218
Kubla Khan
In Xanadu did KUBLA KHAN
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where ALPH, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossom'd many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
And folding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted Burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
Hisflashingeyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread:
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drank the milk of Paradise.
1816 version
 219
The Crewe Manuscript ofKubla Khan
In Xannadu did Cubla Khan
A stately Pleasure-Dome decree;
Where Alph, the sacred River, ran
Thro' Caverns measureless to Man
Down to a sunless Sea.
So twice six miles of fertile ground
With Walls and Towers were compass'd round:
And here were Gardens bright with sinuous Rills
Where blossom'd many an incense-bearing Tree,
And here were Forests ancient as the Hills
Enfolding sunny Spots of Greenery.
But o! that deep romantic Chasm, that slanted
Down a green Hill athwart a cedarn Cover,
A savage Place, as holy and inchanted
As e'er beneath a waning Moon was haunted
By Woman wailing for her Daemon Lover:
From forth this Chasm with hideous Turmoil seething,
As if this Earth in fast thick Pants were breathing,
A mighty Fountain momently was forc'd,
Amid whose swift half-intermitted Burst
Huge Fragments vaulted like rebounding Hail,
Or chaffy Grain beneath the Thresher's Flail:
And mid these dancing Rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred River.
Five miles meandring with a mazy Motion
Thro' Wood and Dale the sacred River ran,
Then reach'd the Caverns measureless to Man
And sank in Tumult to a lifeless Ocean;
And mid this Tumult Cubla heard from far
Ancestral Voices prophesying War.
The Shadow of the Dome of Pleasure
Floated midway on the Wave
Where was heard the mingled Measure
From the Fountain and the Cave.
It was a miracle of rare Device,
A sunny Pleasure-Dome with Caves of Ice!

A Damsel with a Dulcimer

In a Vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian Maid,
And on her Dulcimer she play'd
Singing of Mount Amara.
Could I revive within me
Her Symphony and Song,
To such a deep Delight 'twould win me,
That with Music loud and long
I would build that Dome in Air,
That sunny Dome! those Caves of Ice!
And all, who heard, should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
HisflashingEyes! his floating Hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your Eyes in holy Dread:
For He on Honey-dew hath fed
And drank the Milk of Paradise.

This fragment with a good deal more, not recoverable, composed, in a sort of Reverie brought
on by two grains of Opium, taken to check a dysentery, at a Farm House between Porlock and
Linton, a quarter of a mile from Culbone Church, in the fall of the year, 1797. S. T. COLERIDGE.
 The languages oiKubla Khan

JOHN BEER

A close reading oiKubla Khan makes one aware of an irresolution in the

imagery which stands in marked contrast to the homogeneity of the verse.
Throughout the poem there runs a strong incantatory strain, within
which we become aware of an ingenious poetic language. The feminine
rhymes in the second, third and fourth stanzas bring in a lightness and
variation which is regularly superseded by a powerful and strong iam-
bic movement. The effect of inevitability becomes stronger each time,
until the final lines of the last stanza, which have the quality of a charm.
There is, however, a contrast of effect between the rhythmic movement
of the verse, impressive in the subtlety of its patterning, and the visual
imagery of the poem, which is not only hard to fix into a landscape pat-
tern but is constantly contracting and expanding in the mind, moving
between pictures of an objectively visible scene and suggestions of vast
unseizable subterranean spaces and forces.
As a result, the reception of the poem will vary according to the degree
of submission to its more * enchanting' aspects. One can allow one's mind
to be taken over by its rhythm, while contemplating the shifting land-
scapes described and suggested as one might in a dream. As soon as the
conscious mind takes over, on the other hand, questions will begin to pose
themselves. It will then become obvious that the poem also has the ar-
bitrariness and reductive economy of much dream work. The fact that
a Greek river is flowing through a Tartar landscape, with an Abyssinian
maid somewhere in the background, may not be particularly troubling,
for the mind can deal easily with such superpositions; but the 'sunny
pleasure-dome with caves of ice' may seem all too convenient and
rounded a package for the amount of symbolic freight that it seems by
then to be carrying. We know from Coleridge's notebooks that he had
been attracted by the account of an image of ice in an Indian cave which
waxed and waned in accord with the waxing and waning of the moon -
a marvellous piece of symbolism for correspondences of process between
nature and the human mind; but since this idea is not presented in the
text of the poem itself it cannot be explored except by subsequent associa-
tion. Equally, we may suspect that the genius of the last stanza is, like
220
 The languages o/Kubla Khan 221
other such figures, standing on a mountain top, and that somewhere in
that landscape there is a self-renewing spring of inspiration to counter
the disordered fountain of stanza two - but again these are elements to
be inferred by the reader from clues such as the honey-dew, not to be
found directly presented in the text. At such points, therefore, we glimpse
that this poem is inviting a different reading from those to which modern
criticism usually points us - a reading which will treat the language of
the poem as a threshold which we cross to enter into a imaginative world
corresponding to Coleridge's own at the time when he wrote the poem.
That world is constructed partly in alignment with mythological sym-
bolisms which Coleridge himself had been exploring; but it is also in in-
timate relationship with the landscapes of the writers who meant most
to him when he was thinking in visionary terms. To explore the poem to
its depths, therefore, is to become aware of various poetical languages:
some largely symbolic, arising from the mythological constructions of
previous civilizations, some verbal, echoing relevant passages in writers
whom Coleridge valued. As the poet's work is done, all play together in
a structure which is larger than that of the presented text.

The language of myth and symbol

The text of the Crewe manuscript1 (reprinted above, p. 219) is the

closest we have to that ofKubla Khan as it was originally written down.
For the purpose of the present discussion I shall assume that that original
writing took place during a walking tour to the Valley of Rocks in the late
autumn of 1797, and that when he composed it Coleridge was in a state
of less than complete consciousness. I have elsewhere2 presented the
case for making such assumptions and attempted a reconstruction of the
conversations that might have taken place between Wordsworth and Col-
eridge as they left Porlock and passed through the woods beyond
(specifically mentioned by Dorothy Wordsworth in a letter on that oc-
casion), emerging from time to time to see splendid views across the
Bristol Channel to the mountains of Wales. Issues of life and death might
well have preoccupied them as they observed and discussed the country
around them and perhaps began evolving ideas for the landscape of
seasonless death in The Wanderings of Cain. The rocks lying scattered in
the Valley of Stones, equally, might have directed their minds to the
destructive power of the earth, resisting all attempts to recreate an ear-
thly paradise. And so (to continue the reconstruction) when Coleridge
was taken ill on the return journey and retired to a lonely farmhouse, the
222 JOHN BEER
scene was set for a meditation on the nature of earthly powers, whether
in the world outside or within the individual.
One other point may be noted. If the retirement was to Ash Farm, the
place that fits Coleridge's description best, it was an area of unusual
magnificence, from which the enclosed valley which surrounds Culbone
stretches down to the sea.3 It is even possible that Coleridge knew
something of the history of the place: how Ash Farm, along with the vale
as a whole, had been repossessed in the middle of the eighteenth century
by its owner, who had proceeded to cultivate it. Earlier it had been for
many years a place of banishment, for lepers and others, and then in-
habited by discharged servants from India, who moved about it burn-
ing charcoal for the rising metal industries of the country. English
charcoal-burners were still at work there in the late 1790s.4 To this day
it is an unusually peaceful and even magical place - even though it dif-
fers in equally obvious ways from the language of Coleridge's poem.
But whatever the effect of the actual visible landscape on Coleridge's
mind as he came to compose his poem, there can be no doubt that
other landscapes were already there, imprinted during his reading
of mythology and travel and associated with his more esoteric specula-
tions. Indeed if Coleridge's retirement to the lonely farmhouse took
place during the return from the November visit to the Valley of
Rocks, at a time when the two poets were actively planning The Wander-
ings of Cain, it would also be natural to suppose (in view of the philological
habits of mythologists at that time)5 that Coleridge's sight of the
words 'In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace' 6 evoked
an immediate connection between Can and Cain. And in that case
a number of connections in the poem become more readily explicable.
For Cain is a natural emblem of the daemon in humanity turned
to destruction. As the son of Adam in whom the Fall is realized, he
knows that all men must now die; although he has never experienced
Paradise he has learned what it was like and knows that he cannot
regain it. The desperation of his plight is displayed both in the murder
of his brother and in subsequent attempts to recreate lost paradise.
In eighteenth-century lore, it was commonly supposed that the
widespread cults of sun-worship and enclosures sacred to the sun
had been initiated by Cain and his descendants in their attempts
to recreate the Eden that had been lost. Later, in the persons of Tubal-
cain and his descendants, the enterprise became centred in the working
of metals, with all the ambiguity implied by an activity that could involve
the making either of weapons or of agricultural implements - or for
that matter of musical instruments.7 As the activity of creation goes
on, sometimes manic in its intensity, the ultimate aim is always to
 The languages o/Kubla Khan 223
recreate and repossess a former state of wholeness - a state which,
though lost, is still sensed in the subconscious.
With the central myth of Cain and his ambiguous activities, two fur-
ther mythological strains can be connected. The first is the myth of Isis
and Osiris, in which the idea of the lost glory is further elaborated into
the loss of Osiris and the usurpation of the sun by the destructive Typhon,
while Isis undertakes incessant wanderings in the hope of recreating her
lover. If Osiris were ever to be recreated by Isis Typhon would be van-
quished and disappear, but since she cannot discover his virile member,
her work must always be defeated, her unsuccessful quest being imaged
in the waxing and waning of the moon. So the world remains trapped bet-
ween the workings of a destructive sun and a deprived moon which
reaches the form of plenitude only to lose it again. Were Osiris to be
revived, on the other hand, the world would be dominated by a sun that
united heat and light creatively, as imaged in the figuration of sun-gods
such as Apollo, deity of healing and music.
The dialectic implicit in the Osiris and Isis myth (for it is the heat of
Typhon and the light of Isis that would be blended in the restored Osiris)
becomes focussed on the male-female relationship in the myth of Alpheus
and Arethusa. There was an enclosure sacred to the sun by the river
Alpheus in Greece, but the main myth connected with Alpheus himself
was of his search for the nymph Arethusa: when he rediscovered her they
rose up blended in the Arethusa fountain in Sicily.8
Once the running together of these myths and others is seen to provide
the main structure of meaning in the poem, it becomes possible to under-
stand how a Tartar paradise can associate so readily with a Greek sacred
river. The paradisal imagery in the remainder of the first stanza may also
be seen as precisely apt - for most of the elements mentioned, the sacred
river, the enclosure, the incense-bearing trees and the sunny spots - are
traditionally associated with sun-worship.9 In the second stanza, by
contrast, all that is ambivalent in such traditions comes to the fore: the
fountain is destructive, the woman is separated from the daemon-lover
who still attracts her, nature is distorted and humanity doomed to war.
A miraculous reconciling of the various elements - fire and ice, earth
and water, sunny dome and cave of ice, river of life and sea of death, is
imaged in the music created by the echo of the fountain in the cave - but
imaged only. It is not until the final stanza that the possibility of a true
reconciliation is glimpsed in thefigureof the restored sun-god who recon-
ciles everything into harmony. The Abyssinian maid can be identified
as a priestess of Isis, Abyssinia being the abode of secret wisdom as well
as the site of the Nile springs. The poet creating his dome in air reminds
us of Apollo, building with his music a temple that all could see.10 But
224 JOHN BEER
although the scene closes with the genius having tasted paradisal elements
of honey-dew and milk (suggesting the original paradisal spring of which
all earthly fountains are pale copies), there is still a wistfulness in 'Could
I revive within me . . . ': the scene figures an aspiration, not an ac-
complished fact. In one sense the poem ends triumphantly, for the im-
ages of honey-dew and milk consummate the various streams of
mythological imagery involved, including the food of the Old Testament
Messiah who will redeem man from Cain's condition as well as that of
many pagan gods.11 There is also however insubstantiality in a vision
that seems to last only so long as the musician is there to make it and con-
vince his audience. The concluding sense is of harmony, not of loss, but
that harmonization is shot through with fragility.
I have written at greater length about this elsewhere, bringing together
more evidence for the establishing of such mythological links, and for
Coleridge's knowledge of the traditions involved. I have also argued that
the various ideas are further held together by the imagery and lore of
genius, that favourite eighteenth-century theme, so that when we think
of sun and moon or of spring and river, we are really looking at aspects
of the daemonic, where constructive and destructive factors are working
together in creation or falling apart in destructiveness and loss. With the
aid of such interlinking themes, I have argued, Coleridge was able to
bring together some of the issues that he had been contemplating in his
more esoteric investigations, presenting back to himself a satisfying im-
age of his own aspirations. Such lore as I have come across since I first
wrote on the subject has helped to support and further delineate this pat-
tern. A possible strand which I had overlooked was pointed out by
Richard Gerber, who drew attention to the resemblance between Cybele
(Kubele) in Greek mythology and Cubla (Kubla).12 The sight of
Cubla's first name, he suggests, might well have aroused this run of im-
agery, also, in Coleridge's mind. Cybele is earth-goddess, but an earth-
goddess associated rather with destruction than with growing; the cults
of priests devoted to her drove themselves into frenzies; her common
depiction was with a crown of walls and towers, suggesting military
defence. If the disorders of the second stanza are seen as evidences of her
powers manically and destructively in action, her presence not only gives
another dimension to the 'walls and towers' that Kubla decrees but adds
to the suggestion of sun-worship the need to propitiate fearful elements
in earthly nature. The combination of Cybele and Cain in the name of
Cubla Can would thus initiate the cross-currents of self-assertion and
vengeance in the poem still more vigorously.
In all these ways the poem emerges as a structure of images and sym-
bols by which a complex interpretation of human experience - and
 The languages of Kubla Khan 225
especially of the daemonic element in that experience - is being sug-
gested. Yet this perception does not give us the whole poem. To some
degree the images clothe themselves naturally in Coleridge's words, yet
we are some way from seeing why particular patterns of language and
metre and particular choices of words should have emerged. The discus-
sion so far assumes that Coleridge's mythological interests did not begin
when he sat down to write his poem but had long been a feature of his
thinking. When, after all, he had claimed to his brother at the age of eigh-
teen, 'I may justly plume myself that I first have drawn the nymph
Mathesis from the visionary caves of abstracted idea, and caused her to
unite with Harmony. The first-born of this Union I now present to you
.. .', he was already exploring imagery which reappears in the last stanza
of Kubla Khan (CL, I, p. 7). This was not the only language he had
learned to speak, however: he had also been devouring and assimilating
the work of previous poets and writers who worked in similar ways. Their
language can be seen behind his, evidencing a series of poetic relation-
ships, some intimately detailed, others strong but general, which call for
further examination.
To carry it out will involve the pursuit of literary echoes, in a manner
that has been much used in connection with Kubla Khan. There is a well-
known tradition for such studies, established by John Livingston Lowes,
whereby onefindsa previous use of a striking word (which is then printed
in italics)* and presents it in connection with the corresponding line in
Kubla Khan, where the word is also italicized.13 (In Lowes's case,
however, one finds that many of the usages he cites could be duplicated
several times from other travel-books, so that cases he notes often prove
simply to be striking instances of a more general imagery.)
I have discussed elsewhere some of the problems raised by this kind of
work, pointing out the hazards of trying to establish with precision rules
for pursuing influences from one work to another, but also proposing as
a simple rule of thumb that coincidence is less likely to be at work if one
can trace a phrase rather than a single word, or if a number of echoes from
a previous writer rather than a single one, seem to be at work.14 Accor-
dingly, I concentrate here on authors who are known to have impressed
Coleridge deeply in youth, and look for clusters of usage rather than
single, isolated words. It is a further element among my assumptions that
where such words recur what is likely to be at work is not just a simple
distinguishable 'echo' but a whole context, informing particular words
with recollection of the larger matrix of meaning in which they original-
ly appeared. There is always a danger that such arguments will become
circular, obviously, but readers who care to check my method by look-
I shall do this myself and to avoid confusion silently suppress italics in the original texts.
226 JOHN BEER
ing up important words in writers not mentioned will find it harder than
they may expect to establish rival patterns of previous usage.
Shakespeare, for instance, uses many of the words to be found in the
poem, yet I have traced in his work no pattern or cluster of usages that
is particularly significant for Kubla Khan.

The language ofgenius and sensuousness

Insofar as the symbolism of Kubla Khan can be seen to bring together

various strands of mythology and traditions of interpretation from the
past, its interest is inevitably limited for a modern reader, who has ceased
to assign supreme authority to the Bible as a historical record. In such
terms it may look at best like the poetry of an inspired comparative
mythology, written by a happier Mr Casaubon. But there is more to the
matter than that. Just as Blake at this time was trying to forge a new
mythology for his age to replace what he thought of as an outworn and
discredited Christianity, Coleridge valued the myths of antiquity less for
themselves than for what they suggested about the further possibilities
of human creativity. They were to be read as embodying perennial tradi-
tions of human inspiration, of genius.
As such, these ideas had already had a long history in Coleridge's
mind. They can be associated for example with his general interest in
romance as a whole - an interest which had begun as a child with his
early absorption in the Arabian Nights, and continued apparently
throughout the reading of his childhood and youth, taking in first the
popularfictionof the time such as Tartarian Tales and then, in adolescence,
imaginative philosophers such as the Neoplatonists and visionary mystics
such as Jacob Boehme.15
When we turn to Coleridge's earlier poems wefindmany examples of
words and images that look forward to his most visionary poem, but we
also notice a particularly significant cluster around the year 1793. This
had been a year both of pleasure and disaster for Coleridge. The trial of
William Frend in the Senate House had been an exciting event in Cam-
bridge, followed by a Long Vacation in the West Country where he had
enjoyed some lively company. It was then, probably, that he helped
prepare for the Society of Gentlemen in Exeter the paper (described in
Biographia Literaria)16 in the course of which he compared Erasmus Dar-
win's Botanic Garden to the Russian palace of ice, 'glittering, cold and tran-
sitory', and 'assigned sundry reasons, chiefly drawn from a comparison
of passages in the Latin poets with the original Greek, from which they
were borrowed, for the preference of Collins's odes to those of Gray'.
 The languages of Kubla Khan 227
His attitude to Erasmus Darwin was not one of complete dismissal of
course: for years afterwards his poems would be touched by images that
he had come across in the Botanic Garden, while Zoonomia would help
stimulate his thinking about the nature of life.17 Rather, Coleridge was
seeking to extend Darwin's achievement, to find a way of writing about
scientific matters in verse which would reconcile them with other themes:
theology, politics, the human mind. Evidences of this quest can be found
both in his reading and in his early poetry. At times, however, it was the
quality of the aspiration itself, as celebrated by his more rhapsodic poetic
predecessors, that possessed him. Already in 1748 there had appeared
Thomson's Castle ofIndolence, in which the bard roused those who would
listen with the strings of his harp, 'The which with skilful touch he deft-
ly strung, / Till tinkling in clear symphony they rung . . . '. With the aid
of the muses he had then sung to the ten thousands thronging mute
around him a song which included the invocation,
'Come to the beaming God your hearts unfold!
Draw from its fountain life! 'Tis thence alone
We can excel. Up from unfeeling mould
To seraphs burning round the Almighty's throne,
Life rising still on life in higher tone
Perfection forms, and with perfection bliss . . .' (II, xlviii)
This sublimated sun-worship was matched by the elevation given to the
divine intelligence by Mark Akenside, whose Pleasures of Imagination had
appeared in its first version a year or two before. In both versions ap-
peared the lines,
From Heav'n my strains begin: from Heaven descends
Theflameof genius to the human breast,
And love, and beauty, and poetic joy,
And inspiration. (i, 55-8)
- to be followed by a long account of the ways in which the human mind
could pursue the heavenly intelligence into all its intricate paths of crea-
tion. Nature had a particularly central part to play: to quote the first
version,
Nature's kindling breath
Mustfirethe chosen genius; Nature's hand
Must point the path, and imp his eagle-wings,
Exulting o'er the painful steep, to soar
High as the summit; there to breathe at large
^Ethereal air, with bards and sages old . . . (i, 37-42)18
In the first version, the aged sage Harmodius teaches the poet about
the secrets of the universe, recalling a visionary experience in
which the 'Genius of human kind' appeared before him in heavenly ra-
228 JOHN BEER
diance. After the first pleasurable landscape there was a change of scene:
A solitary prospect, wide and wild,
Rushed on my senses. 'Twas a horrid pile
Of hills with many a shaggy forest mixed,
With many a sable cliff and glittering stream.
The long description which follows contains few verbal parallels with the
second stanza of Kubla Khan, yet there is a distinct resemblance of
emblematic form, particularly in the movement from rough energetic
water to calm stream:
Down the steep windings of the channeled rock
Remurmuring, rushed the congregated floods
With hoarser inundation; till at last
They reached a glassy plain, which from the skirts
Of that high desert spread her verdant lap,
And drank the gushing moisture, where confined
In one smooth current, o'er the lilied vale
Clearer than glass it flowed.
In this vale, protected by the cliffs above, the sage also saw another sight:
On the river's brink
I spied a fair pavilion, which diffused
Itsfloatingumbrage 'mid the silver shade
Of osiers.
As he looks at this scene, the sage sees a shaft of sunlight and learns that
the pavilion, with its shadow on the waters, is 'the primeval seat / Of
man', designed as a place where human youth can grow up nurtured by
the goddess of wisdom - who is accompanied in turn by another god-
dess, the fair Euphrosyne. When the goddess of wisdom discovers that the
young man is in fact attracted only to her companion she complains to the
father-god, who replaces Euphrosyne with an avenging demon; the
young man almost despairs. At this point, however, his goddess inter-
venes: he feels her inspiration 'Vehement, and swift / As lightning fires
the aromatic shade / In ^Ethiopian fields', and with her help is roused to
do combat; at once Euphrosyne appears again, promising never to leave
him:
She ended; and the whole romantic scene
Immediate vanished; rocks, and woods, and rills,
The mantling tent, and each mysterious form . . .
The sage awakes to be instructed by the moral of what he has seen: hap-
piness will always accompany virtue - but only so long as virtue is follow-
ed for herself alone.19
The landscape, it must be repeated, bears little relation in strict ver-
 The languages o/Kubla Khan 229
bal terms to that described in Kubla Khan: occasional 'rills' and 'rocks'
feature in many other such passages. But in its general form, its pitting
of savage scene against paradisal plain, its rough waters and calm waters
and its general moral that pleasure, if pursued directly for itself, will give
rise to an avenging demon, whereas the following of virtue will be accom-
panied by true inspiration, it bears a strong resemblance to the structure
of Coleridge's poem.
Coleridge knew Akenside well by 1796, voicing admiration then for
his combination of 'head and fancy'; his own philosophical poetry bears
the touch of his influence at many points. He also imitated him in a poem
dated tentatively in 1794, and it seems likely that he already knew him
by 1793. In that year, however, his chief poetic heroes seem to have been
the two figures mentioned in the Biographia: Gray and Collins.
Collins, certainly, wasfiguringstrongly in his consciousness then: after
he had met Miss Fanny Nesbitt while travelling in a coach, he had ad-
dressed several poems in his style to her. One of them, On presenting a Moss
Rose to Miss F. Nesbitt, was actually written on the backflyleavesof a copy
of Collins's Poetical Works.20 His devotion that summer is further
demonstrated by the poetic texture of his 'Songs of the Pixies'. The lines
which begin the fifth section, for instance,
When Evening's dusky car
Grown'd with her dewy star
Steals o'er the fading sky in shadowy flight. . .
condense various lines in Collins's 'Ode to Evening', such as
The Pensive Pleasures sweet
Prepare thy shadowy Car
and
Thy Dewyfingersdraw
The gradual dusky Veil. . .
The 'fading sky' echoes Gray's Elegy, 'Now fades the glimmering land-
scape . . .' and Gray is actually quoted in the line, 'A youthful Bard
'' unknown to fame " '.
Both Gray and Collins seem to be echoed in Kubla Khan. As John Ower
has pointed out,21 Gray's Progress and Poesy, which begins with an invoca-
tion to the 'Aeolian lyre', continues with a description of poetry imaged
as a river:
From Helicon's harmonious springs
A thousand rills their mazy progress take:
The laughingflowers,that round them blow,
230 JOHN BEER
Drink life and fragrance as they flow.
Now, the rich stream of music winds along
Deep, majestic, smooth, and strong,
Thro' verdant vales, and Ceres's golden reign:
Now rowling down the steep amain,
Headlong, impetuous, see it pour:
The rocks, and nodding groves rebellow to the roar.
Elsewhere in Gray's poem there is also a reference to fields 'where
Maeander's amber waves / In lingering Lab'rinths creep'. The landscape
is not so close as in Akenside's poem, however, nor are the verbal remin-
iscences overwhelmingly convincing, since they could easily be matched
elsewhere in the poetry of the period. The two most impressive elements
are the fine management of the poetical movement and the use of such a
landscape to describe not simply genius, but poetic genius. Coleridge was
no doubt aware of Dr Johnson's harsh criticism of these lines in his Lives
of the Poets (1781), but whatever common sense might say he was also likely
to be touched by the seductive charms of their rhetoric. The attractiveness
of Collins is displayed in a letter of 1796 to John Thelwall:
Now Collins' Ode on the poetical character - that part of it, I should say, begin-
ning with - 'The Band (as faery Legends say) Was wove on that creating Day,'
has inspired & whirled me along with greater agitations of enthusiasm than any
the most impassioned Scene in Schiller or Shakespere . . . Yet I consider the latter
poetry as more valuable, because it gives more general pleasure - & I judge of all
things by their Utility. — I feel strongly, and I think strongly; but I seldom feel
without thinking, or think without feeling. (CL, I, p. 279)
The poet who could write that had evidently been very powerfully
drawn by Collins and in fact the lines he mentions have a close relevance
to the ending ofKubla Khan. Published in 1747, they take to a further stage
the imagery of genius projected by Akenside. Poetry is seen as having
been born when the Creator, having made the world, retired with Fancy:
Seraphic Wires were heard to sound,
Now sublimest Triumph swelling,
Now on Love and Mercy dwelling;
And she, from out the veiling cloud,
Breath'd her magic Notes aloud.
And Thou, Thou rich-hair'd Youth of Morn,
And all thy subject Life was born!22
This image of a goddess inspiring with her song is followed by a con-
cluding section, in which Milton is portrayed as the poet to have fulfill-
ed the ideal of poetic genius, in a career never to be repeated by anyone
else. By a neat stroke he is projected into a paradisal scene like that which
he himself created - an Eden which lies high on a rocky cliff, guarded
by 'holy Genii9.1 have quoted the lines elsewhere23 and there is no point
 The languages of Kubla Khan 231
in trying to condense them, since it is not particular verbal resemblances
that are in question here but the movement as a whole. Collins's verse,
like Coleridge's, takes on the inevitability of an incantatory chant which
undermines the sense of what is being said: a repetition of the miracle by
which the inspired poet, hearing his 'native strains' from Heaven,
reproduced them for his hearers is being pronounced impossible, but the
ecstatic movement of the poem does not altogether confirm the pessimism
of the statement.
The figure of the inspiring female and the inspired poet in his elevated
paradise are clearly of significance for thefinalstanza of Coleridge's poem
- the movement of which is still less ready to affirm the impossibility of
regaining it. It is in another poem of Collins's, however, that we find the
closest resemblances to Coleridge's poem. John Livingston Lowes long
ago noted the significance of the singing of Melancholy as described in
'The Passions':
And dashing soft from Rocks around
Bubbling Runnels join'd the Sound;
Thro' Glades and Glooms the mingled Measure stole,
Or o'er some haunted Stream with fond Delay,
Round an holy Calm diffusing,
Love of Peace, and lonely Musing,
In hollow Murmurs died away.24
While the 'mingled Measure' gives Coleridge a key phrase for his third
stanza, the movement of the lines as a whole contributes to the close of
the second. Influences can be traced still further, in fact, since behind Col-
lins's 'Thro' Glades and Glooms the mingled Measure stole' one may
discern the shape of Dry den's ' Through all the compass of the notes it ran').
Coleridge's 'Thro' Wood and Dale the sacred river ran' sounds even
closer to Dryden than to Collins, but whereas Dry den then moves to a
powerful succeeding line: 'The diapason closing full in Man', Coleridge,
like Collins, allows the movement to pass to an indeterminate close, the
'died away' of Collins being matched by his own 'sunk in tumult to a
lifeless ocean'. (We may also note in passing, as another possible echo
of Dryden, the line that ends a section in Wordsworth's 'School Exercise'
(1784-5): 'Through all my fame the pleasing accents ran. ') 25
The subversive attractions of Collins were the effects of a sensuousness
not altogether afraid of itself. Collins's delight in the oriental, similar-
ly, found an echo in Coleridge's love of Eastern tales. Many resemblances
can be traced between these exotic stories and details in Coleridge's poem
- indeed, given its subject-matter, it would be surprising if they could
not - the most striking occurring in the writings of an author who
(though Coleridge may not have known it) was imitating Eastern tales
232 JOHN BEER
rather than translating them. It was James Ridley's Tales of the Genii (the
very title of which would appeal to that genius-haunted age) that seem
to have engaged his imagination most fully. Ridley's book contained a
convincing analogue for Kubla's dome of pleasure: the Genius of Riches
produces for the delight of the merchant Abudah a dome which shines
so brightly that he can hardly look in its direction - a dome of gold with
pillars of precious stones, with intermediate spaces of crystal, so that the
inside of the dome can be seen from every direction.
In such tales, however, the proposal of pleasure is usually ominous.
When Hassan Assar, Caliph of Baghdad, found himself in a delightful
wooded landscape and met a beautiful houri, they leapt to embrace one
another, but as they did so were divided by a 'dismal chasm'. And while
they stood on either side, 'viewing the horrid fissure and the dark abyss',
'wild notes of strange uncouth warlike music were heard from the bot-
tom of the pit'. The moral of the event is the same as in Akenside's natural
paradise: the caliph is told that it has happened because he had allowed
himself to be over-influenced by 'the outward appearance of things'.
Abudah, similarly, had been taken through a beautiful landscape, with
woods of spices and perfumes breathing sweetness over the cool stream
as the boast followed 'the meanders of the current'; but when he tried to
open a chest in the centre of the temple the scene turned to darkness and
destruction: the ruins of the temple falling in l huge fragments' while those
who survived ran to and fro in despair, tearing each other to pieces.26
However attractive the siren voices of pleasure, whether in Collins's
cadences or in the attractions of Eastern romance, their appearance
signalled danger. The pursuit of pleasure was likely to be followed by an
unhappy turn of fate. And even if Coleridge escaped the tentacles of this
idea for a time during the summer of 1793, with its agreeable flirtations
and poetic effusions, they re-enfolded themselves all too firmly around
him just after. When he returned to Cambridge he was already beset by
debts; there are also suggestions of amorous adventures with women of
the town. All would be redeemed, he trusted, when he again won the
medal for Greek verse which he had already gained the year before.
'Astronomy' being the set subject he made it the occasion for an effusion
on genius, portraying Newton as a scientific discoverer with all the trap-
pings of inspired genius, gazing into the spring of creative energy and in-
ebriated by the 'holy ecstasy' that seized him.27 The conclusion express-
ed his aspiration to join Newton in the celestial ranks of genius.
Unfortunately, however, he was not awarded the prize, and with the
failure his financial embarrassments became overwhelming, so that he
ran away to London. There still remained in the tradition of romance that
further turn of fortune by which the victim might after all find himself
 The languages of Kubla Khan 233
transformed suddenly into a position of power. When the merchant
Abudah had been overtaken by the catastrophe described earlier, he had
passed into the 'dungeon of lust' from which he was able to rise only with
great difficulty; yet when he finally managed to complete the long caver-
nous ascent he suddenly found himself on top of a mountain, acclaimed
as their sultan by the voices often thousand.28 Coleridge, likewise, was
evidently hoping for a magical event which would transform his fortunes
into prosperity. With the little money he had left he bought a ticket in the
lottery, but the stroke of luck he hoped for eluded him. In despair, he
volunteered for the army, where he stayed until rescued by his
brothers.29
The disaster of late 1793 had been a chastening experience, and Col-
eridge was never to be carried away so fully again. Henceforward it would
be his stated preference to combine feeling with thought and to choose
the useful in preference to the attractive. Yet the very existence of Kubla
Khan is a witness to the hold over his imagination which the poetry of
genius and the arts of Eastern romance still retained. Among other
things, this is a poem about sensual pleasure - including erotic pleasure:
the delights of vision, sounds and scents in the first stanza convey sug-
gestions such as those which are overtly expressed in the Song of
Solomon, where the bride describes herself as a wall, her breasts like
towers, and promises to be a spice-laden garden to her lover.30 The se-
cond stanza likewise suggests the disorders of lust (the working of grievous
sexual energies, emblematized in the rough chasm and violent fountain,
is made manifest in the woman wailing for her daemon-lover). The figure
of genius in the last stanza, similarly, is recognizably an inspired lover,
resembling the lover who in the Song of Songs comes into his garden to
gather myrrh and spice, to eat honeycomb with honey and to drink wine
with milk. It seems likely, as Lowes suggested, that when Coleridge read
of Kubla's paradise garden in Purchas's Pilgrimage, he was reminded of
the false paradise of Alcadine, described just before the parallel passage
in Purchas's Pilgrimes, with its pipes that ran with 'Wine, milke, Honey,
and cleere Water' and 'goodly Damosels skilfull in Songs and Instruments
of Musicke and Dancing'. 31 With such images in the background it is
hardly surprising that Coleridge should write of his mountain of inspira-
tion first as 'Mount Amora', changing it to Milton's Amara only when
the censor of his consciousness had had time to intervene. The pleasures
of sensuousness, which had been tantalizing him before the disaster of
1793, had by no means lost their hold on his unconscious mind.
However, the effluxions of an unchecked libido are not sufficient
to account for the poem's language, either. Other echoes inhabit the
garden.
234 JOHN BEER

The language of collaboration

Coleridge had not been alone in finding 1793 a momentous year. While
he had been enjoying the doomed pleasures of that summer and autumn
Wordsworth had been enjoying different pains and pleasures, to be
recalled in Tintern Abbey. During that summer, at a time when his sen-
suous response to nature was acute ("The sounding cataract haunted me
like a passion') he had been beset by gloomy thoughts as he saw British
ships preparing for war off the Isle of Wight. Passing across Salisbury
Plain, with its Druidic remains, he had been haunted by a Hardy-like
sense that the patterns of human creativity and violence must always
repeat themselves, so that hopes raised by the French Revolution were
bound to be illusory. He had comforted himself a little by recollection of
the Druids' more benevolent activities, but it was not until he passed into
the Wye Valley and saw a different kind of scenery, one which seemed
to impress itself irresistibly on the human consciousness, that he had felt
more reassured. Perhaps, after all, there was a hidden force in nature that
was working for humanity's amelioration.32
In the autumn of 1797, the convergence between Wordsworth and
Coleridge reached its closest point. For the first and only time they ac-
tually planned to write poetry together: The Wanderings of Cain and (when
that idea failed) The Ancient Mariner (PW, I, p. 287). The ensuing year
was marked by shared observations, enthusiastic discussions and in-
terlinking speculations, in the course of which Wordsworth's powers
became steadily more manifest. Although Coleridge's intelligence was
essential to the inspiration of Wordsworth at this time, he constantly
assigned to his friend the dominating place. 'The giant Wordsworth!' is
a typical phrase (CL, i, p. 391).
If we accept that Kubla Khan is a poem about genius it becomes natural
to ask whether Wordsworth's genius, affirmed so enthusiastically by Col-
eridge, was not also a presence in the poem. And here it is relevant to
recall the distinction which appears in some of Coleridge's later works
between two different forms of genius: 'commanding' genius and 'ab-
solute' genius (BL, i, pp. 31-3). The man of commanding genius was
one whose genius was directed primarily outwards: he might be the man
of power who would direct the making of a great harbour, or an aqueduct
that brought water to the desert, or lay out a great palace, temple or land-
scape garden. Such men were however at the mercy of circumstance -
to quote Wordsworth, they
obeyed the only law that sense
Submits to recognize; the immediate law,
 The languages of Kubla Khan 235
From the clear light of circumstances, flashed
Upon an independent Intellect.33
In less propitious times, therefore, they would emerge as the agents of
destruction, becoming the warmakers, the mighty hunters of mankind.
Men of absolute genius, by contrast, can 'rest content between thought
and reality, as it were in an intermundium of which their own living spirit
supplies the substance, and their imagination the ever-varying/arm' {BL,
i, p. 32). Applying this formula back to Kubla Khan, it will be evident
that it expresses well the distinction between the kind of genius displayed
by Kubla Khan in the first two stanzas and that of the inspired genius in
the last. It can also be seen as relevant to Wordsworth himself: a man of
considerable powers who had considered joining the Girondist cause in
France and so been in danger of devoting those powers to the cause of
violent warfare ( - and who, for that matter, had left there a woman
enslaved by love for him). At the time when Coleridge came to know him
well, on the other hand, he was devoting himself more and more to works
of what might better be called' absolute' genius - works in which he drew
on his own inward powers in the hope of exhibiting to other human be-
ings the nature of their own potential creativity. So it is hardly fanciful
to read in the development of the poem an account of Wordsworth's own
progress. We need turn only to Coleridge's reported description of Word-
sworth in the following spring, when he was talking to Hazlitt about his
' matter-of-factness':

His genius was not a spirit that descended to him through the air; it sprung out
of the ground like aflower,or unfolded itself from a green spray, on which the
gold-finch sang. He said, however (if I remember right), that this objection must
be confined to his descriptive pieces, that his philosophic poetry had a grand and
comprehensive spirit in it, so that his soul seemed to inhabit the universe like a
palace, and to discover truth by intuition, rather than by deduction.
('My First Acquaintance with Poets', H Works, XVII, p. 17)
We might equally recall his description of Wordsworth in a notebook
some years later in October 1803:
I am sincerely glad, that he has bidden farewell to all small Poems - & is devoting
himself to his great work - grandly imprisoning while it deifies his Attention &
Feelings within the sacred Circle & Temple Walls of great Objects & elevated Con-
ceptions . . . (CN, I, 1546)
Just as Coleridge at this time had turned away from immediate politics
to study the 'causes of causes' so Wordsworth was looking into the prin-
ciples underlying all human behaviour. He was drawn to look for an ab-
solute truth which would, when found, be compulsively clear to all. But
while he cherished the dream of writing what Coleridge hoped would be
1
thefirstand only true philosophical poem in existence' (CL, iv, p. 574),
236 JOHN BEER
a poem which would present and help to solve the riddles of human ex-
istence, he was also subject to self-doubt and the fear that his sense of in-
spiration might be illusory - so that when he began The Prelude the 'Was
it for this . . . ?' theme (his own version of 'Could I revive within me . . .')
was at first dominant.34
Coleridge's admiration for Wordsworth's strength was not new: it
went back to his discovery of Descriptive Sketches in 1793, when he had been
seized by the power of passages such as the description of the storm.
Reading them, he wrote later, he was struck by a vigour which recalled
the vegetable processes in which 'gorgeous blossoms' rise out of a 'hard
and thorny shell':
The language was not only peculiar and strong, but at times knotty and contorted,
as by its own impatient strength. (2?L, I, p. 77)
There is a sense, then, in which Kubla Khan, with its pictures of com-
manding genius in the first two stanzas and of absolute genius in the last,
is a poem about the actualities, the vulnerabilities and the potentialities
which Coleridge perceived in Wordsworth's powers. In addition, the
language of the poem is often very close to that of the early writing of both
poets. There is a particularly close relationship to Wordsworth's Descrip-
tive Sketches, for example. As usual we need to be on our guard, since a
young poet is likely to be working from the favourite diction of his con-
temporaries; even so, however, it would be hard to find an eighteenth-
century poem which ran so closely to the vocabulary of Kubla Khan. The
very opening:
Where there, below, a spot of holy ground . . .
contains three key words in Coleridge's poem; the convergences continue
- at least in the imagery - when the poet goes on to say that if such a
spot could be found it would be in a language where, among other things,
'murmuring rivers join the song of ev'n', and where
Silence, on her wing of night, o'erbroods
Unfathom'd dells and undiscover'd woods;
Where rocks and groves the power of water shakes
In cataracts, or sleeps in quiet lakes. (11. 9-12)
Any reader who cares to trace the parallels between individual words
and phrases in Kubla Khan and in the writings of the two poets will be
struck by the very large number of such convergences. There are points,
however, where one or other poet seems to be in the ascendant. In the
case of the second stanza, for instance, Wordsworth's usages provide an
even closer parallel than Coleridge's. Consider his 'deep chasms troubl-
ed by roaring streams' (Borderers, 1.1805), 'Slant watery lights' (Evening
 The languages of Kubla Khan 237
Walk, 1. 92), light streaming 'athwartthe night' (GuiltandSorrow, 1. 144),
'the full circle of the enchanted steeps' (Evening Walk, 1. 350), 'While
opposite, the waning moon hangs still' (Descriptive Sketches, 1. 219). It is the
constant appearance of these words in contexts of landscape, and of a
landscape made numinous by a juxtaposition of beauty with fear,
which makes for this constant sense of connection. It is only at the
'daemon-lover' that the relevance of Coleridge's early poetry (e.g. 'She
that worked whoredom with the Daemon Power' (Religious Musings,
1. 332)) becomes decidedly more significant.
The inference which might be drawn from this is that Wordsworth's
idea of genius stood in the tradition which associates it with feelings of
fear and wonder aroused in a numinous landscape, and that Coleridge
was aware of the fact, so that when that theme entered Kubla Khan it was
Wordsworth's poetic language that came most readily to his mind. This
effect emerges still more strikingly when we look for points of what might
be ' intensive' influence - points where there is a cluster of such words.
Wordsworth's 'Were there, below, a spot ofholy ground' has already been
mentioned.
For an equally intense influence from Coleridge's own verse we should
need to turn to his recent Osorio, which includes a line describing the 'in-
numerable company' who 'in broad circle',
Girdle this round earth in a dizzy motion (PW, II, p. 551)
'Girdle' was probably not in the original manuscript of Kubla Khan, as
we have seen, but even so we can still find three direct verbal parallels -
including the use of 'this . . . earth' and the striking resemblances bet-
ween 'dizzy motion' and 'mazy motion'. If we then look for those words
in the poem which had been previously used by Coleridge, but not by
Wordsworth, wefindwords such as 'incense', 'milk', 'mazy' and 'honey-
dew' - words, that is, of sensuous pleasure and suggestion. And here,
we may legitimately suspect, we are looking at the language of genius that
comes more naturally to Coleridge himself from his own past.
To say this is to raise a wider issue. Human beings set to remember
objects or sentences are much more likely to remember those which they
have already expressed in some form.35 In particular, they remember
their own previous constructions. We should expect, similarly, that in a
poem such as Kubla Khan where, as we have seen, the passive side of the
artist's mind seems to have been unusually prominent, that which he had
done before would provide a most ready means of expression. Whereas
he would be likely to recall Wordsworth's lines in terms of their
significance, in other words, he would at the same time be treading more
widely in his own memory, sometimes producing tangential effects from
238 JOHN BEER
past poems whether or not there was a bond of significance as well ('diz-
zy motion' - 'mazy motion' is a good example of such a connection:
strong in repetition of movement and sound, lighter in terms of actual
significance). We should also expect that where parallels of diction and
significance concurred there might be a very intensive effect. A good ex-
ample can be found in his Monody on the Death ofChatterton, where Chat-
terton's inspiration is described in the lines:
See, as floating high in air
Glitter the sunny Visions fair,
His eyes dance rapture, and his bosom glows! (PW, I, p. 127)
No less than seven of the strong words in these lines are found in Kubla
Khan, and the congruity of theme goes without saying. If Wordsworth
is the master of the numinous wild landscape, Coleridge's voice comes
into its own with descriptions of ecstatic poetic inspiration.
Such are the general patterns that seem to emerge from an inspection
of earlier usages by Wordsworth and Coleridge that are echoed in the
poem. It is also profitable to turn to the various words which had not
previously been used by either poet. This list, which is not long, would
include such words as pleasure-dome (as opposed to pleasure and dome
separately), measureless (as opposed to measure), sinuous, greenery, at once and
ever, ancestral and revive. First, obviously, we look for evidence of Col-
eridge's innovatory skills - and we are not disappointed, since the Ox-
ford English Dictionary gives no use of 'greenery' before Kubla Khan\ the
idea of reviving within oneself looks more sophisticated than the usages
recorded there, also (though here we may be on less sure ground). The
most unusual word to a modern eye, 'momently', is not in fact a new
coinage, but both Coleridge and Wordsworth enjoyed using it after-
wards, as we shall see.
The passage which is brought most into prominence when we look for
words not previously used by either poet is the one that follows im-
mediately after 'momently was forced':
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Hugefragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail. . .
The words previously unused by Coleridge (represented here of course
by lack of italics) make up a large and distinctive knot within the poem
as a whole; and the list (apart from 'flail', which is used rather memorably
in 'the measured echo of the distant flail' in Descriptive Sketches 1. 770) is
shared with Wordsworth. The other striking feature of these lines is their
descriptive skill. It is as if when Coleridge moves into representation of
energy he manages also to break free of poetic practice, his own and
 The languages o/Kubla Khan 239
others'. We cannot forget, of course, that the image of threshing is
biblical: Isaiah (40:15) had spoken of the Lord as threshing the moun-
tains and making the hills as chaff, and his imagery had been presented
as an example of the biblical sublime by Lowth, whom Coleridge read
in 1796.36 Yet there is also a freshness here, a vivid realization of the im-
ages being drawn into service. When Coleridge copies phrases of biblical
rhetoric into his notebooks (perhaps as fuel for projected rhetoric) they
sometimes look perfervid and overblown; here the phrases have been ful-
ly assimilated into verse with a life of its own.
This is the nearest we come to a passage of direct originality in the
poem. Elsewhere, as we have seen, Coleridge's originality is to be found
working indirectly by way of previous poetic languages - not only Word-
sworth's but those of eighteenth-century poets such as Gray and Collins.
If we now move still further back, to a poet who stands behind these poets,
we may begin to understand more precisely the kinds of pressure from
the past that are being exerted on certain particular words and phrases,
reminding us of other and older languages.

The language of loss

We have already suggested that the wistfulness towards Milton

expressed by poets such as Gray and Collins might prompt a response
less despairing than their own. They might mourn the impossibility
of ever matching Milton's achievement, yet the very ecstasy of the
language in which they did so could prompt a different response:
that very language was perhaps waiting to be developed by a new Milton,
if one should arise. And was it after all impossible to imagine a poet
of equivalent strength? 'What if you should meet in the letters of
any then living man, expressions concerning the young Milton . . .
the same as mine of Wordsworth', wrote Coleridge to Poole in 1800,
'would it not convey to you a most delicious sensation?' (CL, i, p. 584).
Meanwhile he was cherishing his own dreams of writing an epic poem
(CL, i, pp. 320-1).
Yet if one tried to array Milton too readily in the singing robes of genius
and sensuousness the paradox threatened to come full circle, since he
himself, despite his insistence ('On Education', para. 17) that true poetry
was 'simple, sensuous and passionate', had imposed severe limits on sen-
suous indulgence. Unless he went the full course with Blake and decided
that Milton himself had erred in his view of pleasure, the young man who
hoped to rival him must take on himself the same burden of moral
240 JOHN BEER
knowledge, the same belief that in every sensuous paradise there must
lurk a deadly serpent.37
Coleridge always accepted that knowledge, seeing his own life
as a constant series of movements between pleasure proposed and guilt
supervening. The paradigm is clear enough in The Eolian Harp, where,
as soon as he has set forth a speculative philosophy which might recon-
cile sensuous experience with the divine he rebukes himself (through
the imagined intervention of Sarah) for such 'unhallowed thoughts'
(so, incidentally, invoking the figure of the Lady in Comus when
she unlocks her lips in 'this unhallowed air' (1. 757)). When he and
Sarah enjoyed their married bliss in their Clevedon cottage later
on it was with an under knowledge of admonition, a sense first signalled
in his poem Reflections on having left a Place ofRetirement by the passing Bristol
'son of Commerce' who was made to 'muse / With wiser feelings', declar-
ing that it was 'a Blessed Place' (PW, I, p. 106). The ironic reference is
of course to Satan in Paradise Lost, Book Nine passing through Eden like
one 'long in populous city pent' before the Fall and looking with muffled
envy, 'stupidly good', at the happiness he sees there. For Coleridge,
however, the moral points differently, towards himself and Sarah. They
will be forced to take on Adam's fate and, in the interests of social respon-
sibility, leave their paradise. The admonitory Miltonic note sounds for
them, also.
In Kubla Khan, likewise, every phrase with an echo of Paradise Lost is
shot through with plangency of foreknowledge. The very line with which
the poem opens recalls Adam, seeing
the destind walls
OiCambalu, seat of Cathaian Can . . . (ix, 11. 387-8)
- a foresight clouded with the double irony of Adam's knowledge that
this will be a post-lapsarian paradise, doomed to decay, and the reader's
that, as with the others to be catalogued, that decay has by now been
realized.
So with other words in the poem that recall Paradise Lost. Likenesses
are accompanied by telling differences. If the sacred river recalls the river
that flowed through Eden, the actual description of it, progressing
through caverns to a sunless sea, is in contrast with Milton's description
in Book Four of his river before the Fall, when it divided, part returning
to well up again in a spring near the Tree of Life. As Coleridge writes of
'sinuous rills', similarly, we are likely to be reminded that Milton's river-
fountain went on to water the garden 'with many a rill'; the word
'sinuous', which had not appeared before in Coleridge's poetry or Word-
sworth's, was elsewhere used by Milton to describe the worms and
 The languages of Kubla Khan 241

serpent-like creatures which for all their attractive colouring were to

become pests after the Fall (iv, 1. 481).
The undertone of admonition emerges more strongly in the second
stanza. The word 'savage' occurs during Satan's entry into Paradise:
4
Now to the ascent of that steep savage hill/ Satan had journeyed on' (iv,
11. 172-3). The 'cedarn cover', similarly, recalls his return just before the
Fall:
Nearer he drew, and many a walk traversed
Of stateliest covert, cedar, pine, or palm . . . (IX, 11. 434-5)
- the word 'cover' looking forward simultaneously to Adam's cry after
the Fall: 'cover me ye pines, / Ye cedars, with innumerable boughs, /
Hide me, where I may never see me more' (ix, 11. 1088-90). The woman
wailing for her daemon-lover suggests Eve after the Fall - particularly
if we recall the rabbinical tradition, known no doubt to both Milton and
Coleridge, that the tempting of Eve took the form of actual sexual temp-
tation by Satan 38 (there might also be a distant echo from the tempta-
tion of Samson in Milton's drama, by Delilah, who describes herself
' Wailing thy absence in my widowed bed'). 39
The remainder of the stanza moves into a pattern which recalls the
shape of Paradise Lost as a whole. The violent fountain is redolent of the
vast destruction during the War in Heaven and the natural disorders after
the Fall. When the river thatflowsfrom it moves with a mazy motion we
recall not merely Gray's Progress ofPoetry but Milton's river, which 'flowed
with mazy error' - the strange foreboding note is sounded once again
within a description of Paradise.40 The ancestral voices prophesying
war recall some of the grim visions of the future presented to Adam in the
final books of Paradise Lost, while the syntactical form of the line recalls
the faces that threatened from the walls of Eden as Adam and Eve
departed: 'fierce faces threatening war' (xi, 1. 641).
It is in the last stanza that the presence of Paradise Lost is most crucial,
for there it intrudes with its admonitory implications on the most ecstatic
statements in the poem, importing ambiguity. The most intensive echo
comes, as has often been noticed, from the passage where Milton
describes the later paradises which were to recall Eden, notably the one
. . . where Abassin kings their issue guard
Mount Amara, though this by some supposed
True Paradise, under the Ethiop line
By Nilus head . . . (IV, 11. 280-3)
It is peculiarly appropriate that Coleridge's paradise should, by implica-
tion, be situated by the source of another sacred river, the Nile, in view
both of the sun/moon, Isis and Osiris imagery in the poem and of the lore
242 JOHN BEER
surrounding the troglodytes of Abyssinia (including their supposed in-
vention of the dulcimer, a form of lyre).41 Immediately before that
description in Milton's poem there is another which is also appropriate:

that Nyseian isle

Girt with the river Triton, where old Cham
Whom Gentiles Ammon call and Lybian Jove,
Hid Amalthea and her florid son
Young Bacchus from his stepdame Rhea's eye . . . (IV, 11. 275-9)
It is not simply that the infant Bacchus, as a young divinity, was nurtured
on milk and honey, but that Rhea (as Richard Gerber points out) is an
alternative name for Cybele, so that the threat from the destructive earth-
mother moves in the background of Milton's narrative also.42
Throughout Milton's description, moreover, we are reminded that these
are all false paradises: they may image Eden, but none can actually
replace it. The 'symphony and song' may remind us of the 'dulcet sym-
phonies and voices sweet' in Book One of Paradise Lost; if so, we are
simultaneously reminded that the 'fabric huge . . . Built like a temple'
which was raised to their sound was none other than Pandaemonium, the
meeting-place of the devils (i, 11. 710-57). And even when we see the
words 'deep delight' we may recall that the nearest parallel in Paradise Lost
is also admonitory:

But if the sense of touch whereby mankind

Is propagated seems such dear delight
Beyond all other, think the same vouchsafed
To cattle and each beast. . . (vill, 11. 579-82)
At this point a reinforcing echo is provided by that other master of the
false paradise, Spenser. When Atin arrives at Acrasia's Bower of Bliss
to rouse Cymochles, he finds him surrounded by 'a flock oiDamzelles\
charming him with sensuous pleasures, including 'sweet wordes, drop-
ping like honny dew\ He is shocked to see him 'Thus in still waves of deep
delight to wade' (n, v, 32.4-35.2). These warning echoes from Paradise
Lost and The Faerie Queene link with the fact that the dome is built 'in air'
- not, apparently, on the solid earth.
Although the language of Paradise Lost is one of the clearest presences
in the poem it speaks with no simple voice: it offers sounds and sights of
paradise but in the act reminds, always, that Eden is not to be permanent-
ly or totally regained. That alternation between attraction and admoni-
tion, each redoubling on the other, contributes strongly to the note of
plangency in Coleridge's poem.
The language of Paradise Lost is not the only voice of Milton in the
poem, as we shall see later, but the echoes from it, including the trisyllabic
 The languages o/Kubla Khan 243
Xanadu for 'Xamdu' (probably prompted unconsciously by the sound
of Milton's 'Cambalu') and the Amara of the last stanza, are so strong
that we do well to attend to them - and to the note that they portend.
They point to the deepest division with Coleridge's own psyche and so
to the hindrances he experienced as a poet when his moral consciousness
was actively in play.

The language of mediation

Whenever the language of Paradise Lost emerges recognizably in Kubla

Khan it introduces a tension between the aesthetic and the moral which
reinforces the tension between the first two stanzas.
No-one after Milton quite succeeded in recreating that tension on a
large scale: it perhaps required the impetus and momentum of an en-
thusiasm for the baroque if it were to be sustained for so long. Coleridge
might have seemed unusually well qualified to revive the strain by his
alternations between sensuous delight and deep guilt; but in fact the very
extremity of their operation disabled him. The naturally welling
language of his poetic imagination would regularly be turned to im-
potence or restraint as some act of extravagance was followed by moral
reproach, whether from the external world or from his own conscience.
In such a situation the poetry of William Cowper had an important and
subtle role to play. To 'the head of fancy of Akenside' and 'the heart and
fancy of Bowles' in his catalogue of critical appreciation Coleridge added
'the "divine chit-chat'' of Cowper', his terms acknowledging the sharp-
ness of the tension that needed to be resolved (CL, I, p. 279).43 Cowper
had succeeded in the difficult task of reconciling the religious with the
warmly sociable and finding a single diction that would contain them.
In the 1790s Cowper's ability to walk such tightropes had proved
valuable in another context. For young radicals he was a figure of
markedly liberal views who had yet contrived to remain acceptable across
the whole range of contemporary society - his secret having been to pro-
pitiate the household gods of his age by blending his warm sensibility with
a firmly moral uprightness. The resulting diction provided a secure form
of discourse in times of difficulty. For Coleridge, who knew the alternate
states of sensuous acceptance and gnawing guilt, and who had sometimes
been plunged into depths of despair not unlike those which Cowper knew,
the offered mode of mediation was of unusual value, for it marked the
limits within which sensuousness could be indulged by the virtuous
without danger.
244 JOHN BEER
During 1797-8 Cowper's mediation was to be particularly valuable
to Coleridge as he wrought the art of his 'conversation poems' to its finest
pitch. His presence in the greatest of them, Frost at Midnight, where his
writing becomes a scaffolding from which Coleridge can build a more
delicate diction of his own, has been noticed by more than one critic.44
The relation of Cowper's poetry to Kubla Khan is of a different kind: pro-
viding a safety net for Coleridge in his aspirations to the sublime. That
attempt to bring together poetry and philosophy, pursued seriously on
a limited scale by Akenside, more light-heartedly by Darwin, found a
strong yet sober advocate in Cowper, whose imagery was not altogether
removed from that in C oleridge' s closing lines. ' Philosophy', he wrote,

baptiz'd
In the pure fountain of eternal love
Has eyes indeed . . .
. . . Piety has found
Friends in the friends of science, and true prayer
Hasflow'dfrom lips wet with Castalian dews.
Such was thy wisdom, Newton, Childlike sage!
. . . Such too thine,
Milton, whose genius had angelic wings,
And fed on manna! (The Task, III, 11. 243-5; 249-52; 254-6)
(The last phrase was to be used by Hazlitt in later years to describe Col-
eridge, as he remembered him in 1798, at the height of his
inspiration.)45
In Charity Cowper describes how the philosopher, studying astronomy,
'Drinks wisdom at the milky stream of light' (1.319). Such lines provide
secure underpinning for the more sensuous and ecstatic picture of genius
in Kubla Khan. Elsewhere Coleridge's poem echoes large sections, rather
than individual lines of Cowper's work, the reminiscences being usual-
ly not of words but of more general ideas. A good example is the account
of the Sicilian earthquake in Book Two of The Task, a passage which may
well have come to the minds of Wordsworth and Coleridge when they
visited the Valley of Rocks and considered the kind of force that could
have brought about such a scene. 'Alas for Sicily!' Cowper begins, 'rude
fragments now / Lie scatter'd where the shapely column stood.' The scene
is then explored as one which has displayed the power of God and of
God's wrath, sounds of pastoral pleasure having given way to the noise
of his punitive workings, desolation replacing what was formerly a
paradisal scene:
How does the earth receive him? - With what signs
Of gratulation and delight, her king?
Pours she not all her choicest gifts abroad,
Her sweetest flow'rs, her aromatic gums,
 The languages o/" Kubla Khan 245
Disclosing paradise where'er he treads?
She quakes at his approach. Her hollow womb,
Conceiving thunders, through a thousand deeps
And fiery caverns roars beneath his foot.
In the whole long passage of nearly sixty lines (n, 11. 75-132), there are
some exact verbal links with Kubla Khan: 'fragments', 'paradise', 'caverns',
'rocks', 'Immense the tumult'; but they are few and scattered. It is the tran-
sition from sensuous paradise to destructive upheaval, exhibiting the two
sides of God's activity, which is closest to Coleridge's poem. This sense
of threat to an ordered plan is a recurring theme in Cowper. At one point
he pictures 'th'omnipotent magician' Capability Brown raising a
' palace' for his patron, changing everything in the landscape - woods,
hills and valleys:
And streams, as if created for his use,
Pursue the track of his directing wand,
Sinuous or straight, now rapid and now slow,
Now murmuring soft, now roaring in cascades —
Ev'n as he bids! (in, u, 778-82)
Unfortunately, however, the expense of such building bankrupts the
owner, and so he never enjoys what he has created. Similarly with
another magical work of construction: the Russian palace of ice, the 'brit-
tle prodigy' built by the Empress Anna at St Petersburg, to which the
young Coleridge compared Erasmus Darwin's poetry:
'Twas transient in its nature, as in show
'Twas durable: as worthless, as it seem'd
Intrinsically precious; to the foot
Treacherous and false; it smil'd, and it was cold. (V, 11. 173-6)
This is yet another vivid variation on the theme (which dogged Cowper
even more than others in his age) that any paradisal enterprise is likely
to involve a complementary element of threat, deceit or fragility.
But while Cowper's ideas contribute firmly to the transition between
the first and second stanzas of Kubla Khan, his verbal influence is more
often mediating and reconciling. The larger diction of Coleridge's lines,
with their mingling of elegance and artistry, owed something to the neatly
turned cadences of Cowper's discourse; we may note further that 'spot'
is a favourite word of his ('Think on the fruitful and well-watered spot'
{Expostulation, 1. 418)) and that some of the less common words and
phrases, such as 'sinuous' (in relation to a stream), 'meandering', 'thisearth',
'decree', and 'tumult' all occur at least twice in his work.46
Interestingly, however, the influence of Cowper seems to appear most
directly when Coleridge revises his poem for publication many years
later. When he substitutes for 'hideous tumult' 'ceaseless tumult', he is
246 JOHN BEER
not only softening the diction of the line but substituting for a word more
common in Milton than in Cowper a word which might well recall
Cowper's line 'By ceaseless action all that is subsists' {The Task, I,1. 367)
- a line likely to have appealed to Coleridge's interest in the role of
energy and the nature of Being, and following closely on a description
of a thresher with his flail, sending the chaff flying (i, 11. 355-9). Similar-
ly, when Coleridge changes 'With walls and towers were compass'd
round' to 'were girdled round', the increase in elegance is reminiscent
of Cowper's 'The blooming groves that girdled her around' - used again
(in Heroism, 1. 6) of Etna and Sicily.
Cowper's language affected Coleridge's creating consciousness in
various ways. His description of the Sicilian earthquake, where a sense
of the earth's ambiguous power was overlaid by that of God's vengeance,
added weight to the note of admonition that had run through Milton's
descriptions of Paradise; his use of sensuous imagery for inspired
knowledge gave backing to Coleridge's more unrestrained enthusiasm.
Such influences, however, belonged properly to the speculative activi-
ty that had preceded the making oiKubla Khan. The role of Cowper's dic-
tion, as recalled in the making of the poem itself, tended to be a restrained
and restraining one, helping to mould the sensuous elegances of the dic-
tion and particularly evident when Coleridge came to cast a revisionary
eye over what had been created in a more passive state of mind. As op-
posed to the 'threshold' language which is the poem's most distinctive
feature, this was a language of the circumference, fostering yet limiting
at the same time. Its role, though muted, was still, given Coleridge's
precarious purchase on the idea of genius, a valuable one.

The language of magical transformation

Although Cowper's language helped provide defensive cover for the

advance from Milton's admonitory sublime to a sublime that would en-
compass larger areas of sensuous experience, its full value as a mediating
agency emerged only when Coleridge was writing his meditative verse.
There, in what are often known as the 'conversation poems', Cowper's
delight in the power of human sensibility to respond to delicate
phenomena in nature was extended into a full-scale exploration of the
relationship between mind and nature, based on intimate sensuous
observation. When Cowper praised inspired knowledge, by contrast, the
moral reservations concerning human limitation which underlay his im-
agery of threatened paradise necessarily cast their shadow across that
larger aim also. By the 1790s, moreover, the growth of specialized
 The languages of Kubla Khan 247
knowledges was making the creation of an all-embracing scientific theory
still more difficult, reinforcing the sense that any projected totality of
knowledge might prove to be no more than a doomed construction.
The precariousness of the framework for such a unified, view as pro-
vided by philosophies such as those of Locke and Newton had been fur-
ther demonstrated in Coleridge's time when the attempt of the French
philosophes to build a new order on the basis of nature interpreted by
reason had turned to destruction, defeated by flaws in human nature
itself. There was, nevertheless, an older tradition of unified knowledge
which had not been altogether discredited by recent events. During the
Renaissance the Pythagorean philosophy, which linked the order of
nature to that of music, had been an inspiration to poets and thinkers
alike. This philosophy, unlike that which had been recently fashionable,
did not rely upon an optimistic view of general human nature; on the con-
trary, it assumed that a harmonized knowledge would be reached only
by a few, and under special conditions.
By the 1790s the revival of interest in various forms of Platonism meant
that a young man such as Coleridge would be particularly alert to the
potency of that tradition, which had been at its height in the late sixteenth
century and still active in the early seventeenth, attracting, among others,
the young Milton. And so it is apposite to recognize that despite the many
echoes ofParadise Lost in Kubla Khan, the presence of Milton himself there
is not limited to that of his greatest poem. When the echoes are from a
word which has strong roots in Milton's early career, in fact, the connota-
tions are often different, belonging rather to the magical world of art. The
word * haunt', for example, always a word with good overtones in
Milton's writing, is used memorably in L 'Allegro:

Such sights as youthful poets dream

On summer eves by haunted stream. (11. 129-30)
When we read that the shadow of the dome of pleasure *floatedmidway
on the wave', similarly, we might, if we were thinking only of Paradise
Lost, recall Satan, 'With head uplift above the wave' while his other parts
'Idiyfloatingmdiny a rood'; but such echoes fade as soon as we reach back
into the early poetry and remember the time of peace that greets the birth
of Christ, * While Birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave', or
Sabrina, sitting 'under the glassy cool translucent wave9 .^
An echo of this kind, where the use of 'wave' completed a held moment
of formalized enchantment, recalls, in turn, other poets who stand behind
the early Milton. We have already noted two apparent echoes from
Spenser, and it is a little surprising that his possible presence in Kubla
Khan has been so little attended to in view of the overt 'Elizabethanism'
248 JOHN BEER
of the sentence about Xanadu which Coleridge records as having been
his starting-point:
. . . wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant springs, delightful Streames, and all
sorts of beasts and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of
pleasure . . .
The word 'stately', which Purchas then used to describe Kubla's
palace, is a favourite word of Spenser's, as we discover early in The Faerie
Queene:

A stately Pallace built of squared bricke,

Which cunningly was without mortar laid,
Whose walls were high, but nothing strong nor thick,
And golden foile all over them displaid,
That purest skye with brightnesse they dismaid
High lifted up were many loftie towres . . . (I, iv, 4)
An enchanting sight, one might think, but as Spenser's epigraph has
already revealed, this is the House of Pride - a place therefore of
foreboding, not of permanent pleasure. Yet such buildings remain, like
the Bower of Bliss, images of true beauty: we need think only of Spenser's
lines to Sir Walter Raleigh, 'In whose high thoughts Pleasure hath built
herbowre' - the last phrase of which he uses elsewhere to describe both
true love and the good life.48
There are a number of words which, though figuring in sources ex-
amined so far, stand out in Spenser with particular clarity. In the 'Vi-
sions of Bellay', for example, we find the lines:
. . . Which, like incense of precious Cedar tree
With balmie odoursfill'dth'ayre farre and nie (XI, 11. 3—4)
- a collocation which suggests that the incense-bearing trees and the
cedarn covers were one and the same in Coleridge's imagination.
'Beware' is a particularly Spenserian word, as are 'savage' and 'haunt'.
To Spenser, too, we turn for several uses of the phrase ' compassed rouna"
- for example,
That turrets frame most admirable was
Like highest heaven compassed around.49
(This is a good example of a Spenserean brightness darkened by a
Miltonic overtone, for Milton's two uses of the phrase are 'With terrors
and with clamours compassed round' and 'In darkness, and with dangers
compassed round' (of Satan and himself respectively).)50 As Richard
Gerber points out, Spenser's most significant use for our purposes comes
in the description of the mural crown of the Thames in The Faerie Queene:
In which were many towres and castels set
 The languages of Kubla Khan 249
That it encompast round as with a golden fret.
Like as the mother of the Gods, they say, . . .
Old Cybele, arayd with pompous pryde . . . (IV, xi, 11. 27—8)
Here the walls and towers by the river turn into the crown of Cybele's
pride, forging another possible link in the imagery of ambiguous earth-
powers. It should also be noted, however, that whereas the links with
Paradise Lost can often be established within the implications of particular
phrases or place-names, Spenser's presence is often more diffusive in ef-
fect. Consider, for example, the line
So did the Gods by heavenly doome decree . . .
(The Ruines ofRome,VI,\. 11)
The fascination of this echo is that if accepted it imports into the second
line the implication that when Kubla Khan was decreeing his pleasure-
dome he was also decreeing his pleasure-doom. Yet it is working through
associations primarily of sound rather than of sense. And as one in-
vestigates such possible echoes from Spenser one is often unusually aware
of a whole poetic context that is there giving life to the word or words. Col-
eridge himself wrote of The Faerie Queene,
It is in the domains neither of history or geography; it is ignorant of all artificial
boundary, all material obstacles; it is truly in land of Faery, that is, of mental
space. The poet has placed you in a dream, a charmed sleep, and you neither wish
nor have the power, to inquire where you are, or how you got there. (Misc C, p. 36)
A similar atmosphere of enchantment (working also through the general
dreamwork of the poem) seems to cling to many of the words in Kubla
Khan which have Spenserian parallels; it comes particularly to the fore
in Coleridge's third stanza, where the 'miracle' that is described recon-
ciles heat and cold, a relationship the paradoxical nature of which had
fascinated the Elizabethans. Shakespeare was fond of it: ' . . . hot ice and
wondrous strange snow. /How shall we find the concord of this discord?';
'To bathe in fiery floods or to reside /In thrilling region of thick-ribbed
ice'; 'O, who can hold a fire in his hand /By thinking on the frosty
Caucasus? . . . Or wallow naked in December snow/ By thinking on fan-
tastic summer's heat?'; 'There may as well be amity and life/ 'Tween
snow and fire, as treason and my love'.51 Between these opposites
human sensation sometimes recognizes strange points of concord: when
Coleridge drew up a list of illustrations for his favourite saying 'Extremes
meet', the first was a quotation from Paradise Lost: 'The parching Air /
Burns frore, and Cold performs the Effect of Fire. '52 This, however, was
torturing, a foretaste of the state where the damned are constantly hur-
ried back and forth to burn in 'beds of raging fire' and 'starve in ice' by
250 JOHN BEER

turns (n, 11. 598—603). Coleridge's own search was for points of positive
correspondence between such extremes, allowing them to be reconcil-
ed into a more beneficient unity. 'Socinianism moonlight - Methodism
a Stove / O for some sun to unite heat & light' (CN, I, 1233). It is an
equivalent miracle that is envisaged in the third stanza oiKubla Khan.
There is also an erotic strain here, of course: since the most common
correlatives of fire and ice in Elizabethan times were lust and chastity.
Here, too, if Coleridge looked for the point of reconciliation and harmony
between apparent opposites, he would be taken further into the heart of
Renaissance poetry. The phrase 'of rare device' leads on to The Faerie
Queene, which contains lines such as 'So fashioned a Porch with rare
device' (of the Bower of Bliss), 'A work of rare device and wondrous wit'
or 'could be fram'd by workmans rare device' ,53 Yet here again the most
relevant parallel turns out to be one which has the phrase in a less exact
form:
That fire, which all things melts, should harden yse;
And yse, which is congeal'd with senselesse cold,
Should kindle fyre by wonderfull devyse!
Such is the powre of love in gentle mind,
That it can alter all the course of kynd. (Amoretti, xxx)
Love, for the Elizabethans, was the key which could work such miracles
of transformation, and so it remained for Coleridge. His ideal of a love
which could reconcile the extremes of heat and ice into a temperate sen-
suousness had already been well figured in poems such as Milton's early
Arcades, where the nymphs and swains approaching the Countess, 'Sit-
ting like a goddess bright,/ In the centre of her light', comment:
Might she the wise Latona be
Or the towered Cybele,
Mother of a hundred gods;
Juno dare not give her odds . . . (11. 20-3)
The Apollonian and the Dionysiac emerge here figured respectively
as Latona (mother of Apollo and Diana), or Cybele, multi-breasted
earth-mother: they are seen as reconciled in Milton's Countess just as
they are to be in Coleridge's 'Abyssinian maid'. In Milton's poem the
'Genius of the Wood' goes on to address the swains themselves:
Of famous Arcady ye are, and sprung
Of that renownedflood,so often sung,
Divine Alpheus, who by secret sluice,
Stole under seas to meet his Arethuse . . . (11. 28-31)
Creative dialectic is again in play, this time between Alpheus and
Arethusa, and continues as the Genius describes his own beneficent
work in nature, fostering and protecting growing things everywhere
while at night he can relax and attend to the 'celestial sirens' harmony':
 The languages of Kubla Khan 251
Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie
To lull the daughters of Necessity,
And keep unsteady Nature to her law,
And the low world in measured motion draw
After the heavenly tune, which none can hear
Of human mould with gross unpurged ear . . . (11. 68-73)
We are close here to the inner music that Coleridge wishes to recapture in
his last stanza, a music that would inspire the creative spirit to feats of
miraculous construction, embodying reconciliation of warring elements
in the manner that Sir John Davies pictured when he described Love as
the intervening creator in Orchestra:

Then did he rarefy the element,

And in the centre of the ring appear,
The beams that from his forehead spreading went,
Begot an horror, and religious fear
In all the souls that round about him were;
Which in their ears attentiveness procures,
While he, with such like sounds their minds allures.54

Davies, also, brings us close to the inner significance of Coleridge's aspir-

ation, which is to achieve the poetry that reconciles warring elements.
The ultimate calling of the poet is to become (in Coleridge's own words)
one of the 'Gods of Love who tame the Chaos' (CN, n, 2355). Small
wonder then, that the last lines have led critics to recall an ancient descrip-
tion of poets who, like 'the priests of Cybele', 'perform not their Dances,
while they have the free Use of their Understandings' but who, 'possessed
by some Divine Power, are like the Priestesses of Bacchus, who, full of the
God, no longer draw Water, but Honey and Milk out of the Springs and
Fountains . . .'. For these are the poets as envisaged in the Ion.55 Behind
Spenser and Sir John Davies stands Plato, chief ancient guarantor of the
love-lore that we earlier traced out of the poem's mythical symbolism. By
way of the Platonic tradition, as revived among the Elizabethans, that
idea of a reconciling yet fearful love has lived on into the traditions behind
Coleridge's last stanza, where the Elizabethan music that had returned
to haunt English Romantic poetry, and the visionary symbolism which
he had developed from many mythological sources, find themselves for
a moment magically at one.

After-languages

A reader who has accepted the course of the discussion so far and at-
252 JOHN BEER
tended to the various languages proposed may by now feel glutted by the
richness of the meanings that have emerged. This is likely to be a tem-
porary effect, however. It remains perfectly possible to revert to a reading
that treats the poem as a smaller, self-contained artefact, with images and
words working on each other more directly. At this level, the results of
an investigation such as has been carried out here are simply to help
establish a remarkably high degree of common resolution in the presented
images - certainly in the first two stanzas, where the element of dialec-
tic between natural creativeness and natural destructiveness is reinforced
in all the sources we have examined. The images of the last stanza, equal-
ly, are consistently those of a more absolute paradise - though some-
where behind the triumphant conclusiveness of the final cadences lurk
intimations of false paradises, still warning the poet that to attempt such
absolute creation within the limitations of human life may after all be fol-
ly. Just how the elements in that last stanza are weighed will vary from
reader to reader. The powerful rhythm assists the sense of triumph, yet
to those who attend more delicately to details of language there may seem
to be an accompanying distancing and diminishing effect - almost as
if the whole scene were about to disappear. In the very depths of the
language, I have argued, there lies an irresoluble ambiguity between the
language of loss in Milton's Paradise Lost and the language of surviving
possibility in the Elizabethans and the young Milton. Coleridge is torn
both ways and his language reflects the fact.
It would be a pity to rest in a 'simple' reading of the poem, therefore,
since Kubla Khan provides a many-faceted example of the 'over-
determination' that Freud traced in much dream-work. It is only by
degrees that we detect within its apparently simple diction the various
voices that are contending together, but as we do so new perspectives of
meaning open. The preceding discussion has relied on the assumption
that Coleridge was not only a voracious reader but unusually tenacious
in remembering passages that impressed him in his favourite authors,
and that the peculiar conditions under which Kubla Khan was composed
brought some of those impressed words and images into an unusual con-
centration and complexity of patterning. I have spoken of successive
'layers' of language but to do so would be misleading if it suggested that
each layer was of the same kind. Although held together in a single linear
word-continuum, the different languages of Kubla Khan sometimes
operate in quite different modes. The poem which contains them can-
not, therefore, be reduced to a final fixity, but will constantly be leading
the mind in new directions. Among other things it reminds the reader that
intense study of a poetic structure can bring one, at one extreme, to the
point where it resolves itself into 'music' or, at another, to that where it
 The languages o/Kubla Khan 253
passes into an intermelting array of visual images. Coleridge's query
whether 'that. . . 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' (in the most
convincing part of his later account (PW, I, p. 296)) indicates something
of what is at issue. There remains the question of significance, which
dances in and out, back and forth, freeing the reader to range between
seeing the poem as an attempt at total comprehension of human ex-
perience, as a personal document, or, for that matter, as a poem about
itself.
The language that mediates most readily between the surface and the
hidden layers is that of genius and sensuousness. This was the new way
of writing that Coleridge had been most drawn to in the intervening
years, and it here emerges into a mode that for those who heard the poem
for the first time was startlingly original. While it foreshadows future
developments in the Romantic poetry of feeling, as in Byron and Keats,
it also at the time of composition formed part of a new departure in Col-
eridge's poetry which we associate more generally with his poems of the
supernatural. I have assumed from the outset that the composition of the
poem took place when Coleridge originally said it did, late in 1797. If it
was later, Coleridge's creative breakthrough came with The Ancient
Mariner, conceived in November of that year, and Kubla Khan is to be read
as one of the results of that breakthrough. On the present evidence,
however, it is better to assume that the breakthrough came during the
unusual state of semi-conscious composition described in his 1816
preface, and that the precipitation of his speculative themes in the pat-
terning ofKubla Khan assisted the gestation of the still more riddling^w-
cientMariner. In that poem, the themes we have been examining appear,
but in a different ordering. The note of fear which was struck from time
to time in Kubla Khan, to be quelled in the final triumphant cadences,
dominates much of the longer poem, as Coleridge explores the paradox
that awareness of the esoteric harmony underlying all things might be
granted to an ordinary person only under unusual conditions of fear and
terror. In this poem visionary knowledge, far from inducing a state of
ecstasy, is intermingled with the taking on of guilt. It becomes a cross bet-
ween curse and blessing.56
Another good reason for believing that Kubla Khan came first is that by
late 1797 Coleridge seems, at least for the time being, to have laid the
ghost of Miltonic language in the form in which it had dogged his early
poetry. Milton has little part to play in The Ancient Mariner (which recalls
rather the poetry of Spenser and Sir John Davies)57 while in Christabel the
Miltonic echo that sounds momentarily with 'The gate that was ironed
254 JOHN BEER
within and without, / Where an army in battle array had marched out'
suggests that if the castle is Milton's Hell it is simply in its form as a 'world
of death'. 58
Meanwhile some of the words and phrases in Kubla Khan continued to
enjoy their transformed life in Coleridge's subsequent poetry. In some
cases the effect is slight. 'Down to', which entered his poetry for the first
time in 'down to a sunless sea', recurs in The Ancient Mariner in the Her-
mit's wood which 'slopes down to the sea', the 'honey-dew' in the voice
'as soft as honey-dew'. Here it is as much as anything a similarity of tone
that is being carried over. We may also notice, however, that some of the
most vigorous words and images in the poem echo words in the energetic
middle section: 'burst', in 'We were the first / That ever burst'; 'flung'
in 'It flung the blood into my head'; and the 'bound' of 'rebounded' in
'She made a sudden bound'. The 'chaffy grain' may be echoed very
specifically in the 'Like chaff we drove along' of the 1798 version -
though here we are aware of the common matrix of speculation that lies
behind both poems. The relationship between the flashing eye of the
genius in Kubla Khan and the 'glittering eye' of the Mariner, for exam-
ple, may be a conscious one, marking the difference between inspiration
in its active and passive forms. So much is suggested by the previous glit-
tering eye of the baby in 'The Nightingale'.
Two verbal formulations in the poem seem to have pleased Coleridge
particularly. 'Momently' was used again a year later in a letter to his wife
describing his voyage to Germany ('a beautiful white cloud of foam at
momently intervals roars & rushes by the side of the Vessel') and re-
emerged during the winter of 1799-1800 (CL, i, p. 416).59 Similarly
with the 'fast thick pants' of the earth's breathing. Coleridge's nearest
approach to the phrase in his previous poetry had been his 'thick and
struggling breath' in the 'Ode to the Departing Year', but in 'The Three
Graves' the new form occurs more closely: 'But soon they heard his hard
quick pants.' A few months later the form has been transmuted into a
phrase to describe the nightingale 'That crowds, and hurries, and
precipitates / With fast thick warble his delicious notes'. After that the
use disperses itself into the language of 'And pleasures flow in so thick
and fast' in the conclusion to Part n of Christabel.60 The words associated
with music and song also enjoy a vivid afterlife: the Hermit lsingeth loud
his goodly hymns' while the Pilot's boy laughs lloud and long* \ the Bard
in Christabel sets out to exorcise the evil spirit 'with music loua", 'with music
strong and saintly song*.
For some years the poem enjoyed a limited subterranean life in Col-
eridge's circle. The Crewe manuscript was apparently sent to Southey,
and may have influenced his 'Oriental' writing.61 The first major reac-
 The languages of Kubla Khan 255
tion in print came from Mary ('Perdita') Robinson, who had once com-
posed a poem in circumstances similar to those described by Coleridge62
and who, in her Lines to S. T. Coleridge Esq. (written about the end of 1799)
wrote,

Now by the source, which lab'ring heaves

The mystic fountain, bubbling, panting,
While gossamer its net-work weaves,
Adown the blue lawn, slanting!
I'll mark thy 'sunny dome,' and view
Thy 'caves of ice,' thy fields of dew!63

In the same way Collier was to record in his diary for 1811 Coleridge's
recitation of 'some lines he had written many years ago upon the building
of a Dream-palace by Kubla-Khan' (Sh C, n, p. 47). Mary Robinson's
reference to the 'mystic fountain' suggests that Coleridge might have ex-
pounded the meaning of the poem to her, but if so he was to give up the
practice. His relationship with Sara Hutchinson failed to fulfil the hopes
created by his intense affection for her, and this must have sapped his faith
in love's paradisal transforming power. In such circumstances the ab-
solute paradise projected in his last stanza turned back into the vulnerable
paradise of his first, and the familiar dialectic between sensuous in-
dulgence and guilt reasserted itself. It is not surprising, then, that his at-
titude to the poem itself was defensive. By the time he wrote his preface
in 1816 he was offering it as a 'psychological curiosity' - leaving only
the subtitle, A Vision in a Dream, to tease an attentive reader with other
possibilities.
The most tantalizing silence on the subject of the poem's meaning is
that of Wordsworth, who was close enough to Coleridge in 1797 to have
known something of the speculations involved, but who is not known to
have even mentioned the poem before 1830, when he discussed it with
some undergraduates at Cambridge.64 He told them that he thought it
'might very possibly have been composed between sleeping and waking,
or as he expressed it, in a morning sleep; he said some of his own best
thoughts had come to him in that way'. His view is in line with Col-
eridge's early statement that it was produced in 'a sort of Reverie'; but
the matter does not end there, since there are signs in his own poetry and
prose that he had not only read the poem intently but was aware of its
larger meanings. Elisabeth Schneider has drawn attention to his eloquent
journal letter to Coleridge of late December 1799, describing their visit
to Hardraw Force, where they found themselves in an ice-festooned
cavern, while the stream 'shot from between the rows of icicles in ir-
regularfitsof strength and with a body of water that momently varied'. He
256 JOHN BEER
commented later, 'In the luxury of our imaginations we could not help
feeding on the pleasure which in the heat of a July noon this cavern would
spread through a frame exquisitely sensible. '65 On the same journey the
ruins by a well and the tale told by a peasant gave him the inspiration for
his poem 'Hartleap Well', in which he recorded how a knight, impress-
ed by the leap of a hart which he had been hunting, had commemorated
its feat by raising a 'pleasure-house' at the spot, the ruins of which are
now all that survive. This mute comment by nature on his presumption
is reinforced by the fate of his mansion, 'The finest palace of a hundred
realms' of which nothing whatever remains (WPW, n, pp. 249-54). Just
as Peter Bell may be read as Wordsworth's version of The Ancient Mariner,
so this poem, with its vaunting scheme of pleasure succeeded by an
avenging desolation ('More doleful place did never eye survey') seems
to be Wordsworth's own version of Coleridge's first two stanzas.
Elsewhere the imagery of the opening is echoed in his description of
Gehol's matchless gardens, in a clime
Chosen from widest empire, for delight
Of the Tartarian dynasty composed
Beyond that mighty wall, not fabulous
(China's stupendous mound!) by patient skill
Of myriads, and boon Nature's lavish help:
Scene linked to scene, and ever-growing change,
Soft, grand, or gay, with palaces and domes
Of pleasure spangled over . . . (1805, VIII, 11. 123-31)
The description continues through many lines, down to 'And all the land-
scape endlessly enriched / With waters running, falling, or asleep', before
Wordsworth turns back to his own 'true' paradise: 'But lovelier far than
this the paradise / Where I was reared . . .'. Equally telling, in view of
the bodily language that we have traced in the poem, is the reflection,
earlier in The Prelude,

Caverns there were within my mind which sun

Could never penetrate . . . (1805, III, 11. 246-7)
I have already suggested that the imagery of genius in the poem may
have been connected by Coleridge with his sense of Wordsworth's
powers, and there is some evidence that the point was not lost on Word-
sworth himself. Although he normally took a humble view of himself his
language sometimes suggests something more sublime, as when he
describes the beatitude that hides the soul in its power,
like the mighty flood of Nile
Poured from his fount of Abyssinian clouds
To fertilize the whole Egyptian plain. (1850, VI, 11. 614-16)
 The languages of Kubla Khan 257
and describes Como as 'a darling bosomed up / In Abyssinian privacy'.
There is, equally, a touch of the Abyssinian maid in one of his best-known
figures, the Solitary Reaper, whose song has such a powerfully vivifying
effect in the heart of the hearer; while visionary creation such as that at
the end of the poem is reflected in 'The Power of Sound':
The gift to king Amphion
That walled a city with its melody
Was for belief no dream . . .
(11. 129-31; WPW, II, p. 327)
The most telling reference, however, comes in The Prelude when Word-
sworth (in lines that recall Cowper's 'lips wet with Castalian dews') thinks
of Coleridge in Sicily and remembers him telling how 'bees with honey
fed / Divine Comates':
How with their honey from the fields they came
And fed him there, alive, from month to month,
Because the goatherd, blessed man, had lips
Wet with the Muse's nectar. (1805, x, 11. 1023-6)
A few lines later Wordsworth pictures Coleridge searching for the
Arethusa fountain and, when he finds one that might have been the
original, lingering 'as a gladsome votary'. Such references suggest some
intimacy with the 'subtle speculations' and 'toils abstruse /Among . . .
Platonic forms / Of wild ideal pageantry' (as Wordsworth called them
elsewhere in The Prelude (1805, vi, 11. 308-10)) which Coleridge was fond
of exploring and which had helped to shape his poem.
Coleridge meanwhile seems to have remained unsure what to do with
his work. It was not until Byron heard him recite the lines and responded
enthusiastically that he was encouraged to publish them as they stood.
(Byron, who can be said to have exploited the vein of genius and sensibili-
ty more successfully than anyone else of his generation, himself used the
line 'And woman wailing for her demon-lover' as the epigraph for Heaven
and Earth.)
Mrs Coleridge was driven almost to despair by news of the forthcom-
ing publication ('Oh! when will he ever give his friends anything but
pain?'), 66 while Lamb was cautious about its likely reception, describ-
ing it as 'a vision' - ' . . . which said vision he repeats so enchantingly
that it irradiates & brings Heaven & Elysian bowers into my parlour while
he sings or says it, but there is an observation Never tell thy dreams, and
I am almost afraid that Kubla Khan is an owl that wont bear day light.
I fear lest it shall be discovered by the lantern of typography & clear reduc-
ting to letters, no better than nonsense, or no sense' (LL(M), m, p. 215).
In the event the immediate reception was tepid. Hazlitt, taking his cue
from Lamb, perhaps, commented that the lines showed how Coleridge
258 JOHN BEER
could * write better nonsense verses than any man in England', Kubla Khan
being 'not a poem, but a musical composition' .67 The most favourable
comment, from an anonymous writer in the Anti-Jacobin,68 was that, like
'The Pains of Sleep', the poem was 'not wholly discreditable to the
author's talents'.
Soon, however, the tide began to turn. By 1821 Leigh Hunt was
describing the poem as 'a voice and a vision, an everlasting tune in our
mouths, a dream fit for Cambuscan and all his poets . . . a piece of the
invisible world made visible by a sun at midnight and sliding before our
eyes'. 69 John Bowring, similarly, commented that he who had ever
heard it read well 'without exquisite enjoyment at that time, and a haun-
ting recollection at intervals ever after' certainly had 'no music in his
soul'. 70
With such comments the terms for nineteenth-century appreciation
of the poem were set in place, falling in with a growing fashion for
'musical' poetry. It is possible that one or two of Coleridge's contem-
poraries read the poem symbolically: the 'Indian maid' of Keats's En-
dymion, conceived in the year following its publication, may have owed
something to Coleridge's 'Abyssinian maid', for example. But apart
from a single intriguing use of 'Mount Abora' in Coventry Patmore's
poetry71 there is little further hint of a search for meaning. Instead the
poem was seized upon gratefully as an example of pure music in poetry.
There is of course good reason for this in the poem itself. When we ask
where the originality lies in Kubla Khan as a whole, we are likely to con-
clude that it is in the general sense of enchantment that is embodied par-
ticularly in the rhythms and cadences. But to limit the poem's effects in
this way is not only to accede to those who feel that such poetry is the
purest and best, but to miss the degree to which Coleridge's achievement
in this mode is like an iridescent veil, lightly screening the reader from
conflicts that lie hidden in the very languages that are being used to such
effect. Those conflicts themselves are the result of Coleridge's aspirations:
aspirations towards psychic integration in the individual and harmoniz-
ing social order in the community. In these very quests, also, there is im-
plicit the desire for a version of human knowledge which will answer to
the best potentialities of humankind. Meanwhile, however, the
languages of the poem are betraying a continual clash between that of
Spenser, the Elizabethans and the early Milton at their most lyrical,
which suggests that the aspiration for a total harmonizing and paradisal
knowledge is attainable, and that of the later Milton, which is built in the
sad assurance that for human beings the knowledge of such paradise must
always be a knowledge of loss.
Much of Coleridge's later prose work represented a series of continu-
 The languages o/Kubla Khan 259
ing attempts to find harmonizing solutions to such problems, which he
encountered in himself and in the society about him. Yet as his notebooks
and letters record, those aspirations were always shot through with a
darker awareness of his own failures of will, suggesting that the moral
capabilities of human beings were not powerful enough to sustain any
such state, even if it could be temporarily attained. The struggle between
the two recognitions seems sometimes to have been subtle and intense
enough to thwart the actual production of poetry: to glimpse its more
creative existence by way of the languages that run together beneath the
gothic sensuousness oiKubla Khan is to catch his mind, for once, in its
fullest ferment. It may also suggest something important about the pro-
blems that have been inherent in making serious poetry during the last
two hundred years.

Notes
1
First described in TLS (2 Aug 1934), p. 541 and later reproduced
photographically in articles by John Shelton, Review of English Literature VII
(1966), pp. 32-42, andT. C. Skeat British Museum Quarterly XXVI (1962-3),
pp. 77-83.
2
See my essay 'Poems of the Supernatural', in S. T. Coleridge, ed. R. L.
Brett, 'Writers and their Background' series (1971), pp. 54-60. For my
retention of the four stanza division oiKubla Khan used by Coleridge in all
editions appearing during his lifetime, see my note in the 1970 reprint of Col-
eridge the Visionary, p. 10.
3
See 'Poems of the Supernatural', p. 60, andD. H. Karrfalt, 'Another Note
on "Kubla Khan" and Coleridge's retirement to Ash Farm',7V£f(} CCXI
(May 1966), pp. 171-2.
4
See Joan Cooper, Culbone: A Spiritual History (Culbone, 1977), pp. 27-36.
5
See e.g. Jacob Bryant, A New System of an Analysis of Ancient Mythology
(1774-6), and the Mythological, EtymologicalandHistoricalDictionary derived
from it by William Holwell (1793).
6
Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage (1617), p. 472.
7
See Berkeley's Siris, sect. 187, quoted in Coleridge the Visionary, pp. 119,218.
8
Ibid., p. 211.
9
Ibid., pp. 216-22.
10
Ibid., pp. 251-5; 262.
11
See passages (including Isaiah 7: 15-4) quoted ibid., pp. 265-6.
12
Richard Gerber,'Keys to "Kubla Khan" ', English Studies XLIV (1963),
pp. 1-21. Since this appeared, Coleridge's familiarity with Cybele has been
confirmed by publication of a description in 1805 of rocks, 'once or twice
with a Tower like the Head of Cybele' (CN, II, 2690), and his 1818reflec-
tion that 'in the elder world the Infinite was hidden in the Finite - Every
Stream had its Naiad - the Earth its Cybele, the Ocean its Neptune '(CN,
III, 4378, f.3v).
13
Some typical examples are by R. F. Fleissner, who draws attention to the
river meandering for several miles to the sea in Tom Jones (N&Q CCV
260 J O H N BEER

(1960), pp. 103-5); S. C. Harrex, who notices the 'dome where Pleasure
holds her midnight reign' in Goldsmith's Deserted Village (N&Q CCXI
(1966), pp. 172-3), and Michael Grosvenor Myer, who notes versions of
the ballad The Daemon Lover - especially Scott's in 1812 (N&QCCXXVIII
(1983), p. 219).
14
See my article 'Influence and Independence in Blake' in Interpreting Blake,
ed. M. Phillips (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 196-261.
15
See letter to Poole, Oct 1797, CL, I, p. 347, letter of 1815, CL, IV, p. 606,
and my Coleridge's Poetic Intelligence (1977), pp. 23-32.
16
BL, I, pp. 19-20 - where, however, Coleridge dates the paper a year
earlier.
17
The echoes of Erasmus Darwin have been noticed by Lowes in The Road to
Xanadu, pp. 18f, 35f, 94-9,189f, 464-5, 473, 495; one or two more have been
noted by Norman Fruman, Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel, pp. 243 and
253-4. For Zoonomia see my Coleridge's Poetic Intelligence, pp. 50-7, 74—7.
18
Cf. The Pleasures oj the Imagination (1757), I, 11. 98-102.
19
The Pleasures of Imagination, II, 11. 273-6, 281-8, 292-5, 660-2 (and 175-771
generally).
20
PW, I, pp. 45-6 and n. See W. Braekman, 'The Influence of William Col-
lins on Poems Written by Coleridge in 1793', Revue des Langues Vivantes
(1965), pp. 228-39.
21
John Ower, 'Another Analogue of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" ', N&Q,
CCXII, p. 294.
22
'Ode on the Poetical Character', 11. 34-40.
23
Coleridge the Visionary, p p . 2 5 8 - 9 .
24
'The Passions', 11. 62-8 quoted Lowes, Road to Xanadu, pp. 399-400.
Lowes also mentions Coleridge's project for editing Gray and Collins (see
CN,l, 161 (2) and 174 (15)).
25
Dryden, 'Song for St. Cecilia's Day', 1. 14; WPW, I, p. 259.
26
J a m e s R i d l e y , Tales of the Genii, 1 7 6 6 , 1 , p p . 5 1 - 2 , 1 3 5 - 6 , 7 7 . Cf. m y essay
'Poems of the Supernatural', pp. 65-6.
27
A t r a n s l a t i o n of t h i s b y S o u t h e y is r e p r o d u c e d i n m y Coleridge the Visionary,
pp.297-300.
28
Tales of the Genii, I, p . 8 1 .
29
See, e.g., Lawrence Hanson, Life of Coleridge: The Early Years (1938), pp.
34-40.
30
S o n g of S o l o m o n 4 : 1 2 - 1 5 , 1 6 ; 8 : 1 0 , q u o t e d i n Coleridge the Visionary, p p .
270-1.
31
S. Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes (Glasgow, 1905-7),
XI, pp. 208-9. Quoted Lowes, pp. 361-2.
32
For further accounts, with references, see my Wordsworth in Time (1979),
pp. 43-6, and Wordsworth and the Human Heart (1978), pp. 26-36.
33
See R i v e r s ' s Speech in The Borderers, 11. 1 4 9 3 - 6 , PW, I, p . 187, partly u s -
ed a g a i n Prelude (1805), X, 11. 8 2 6 - 9 .
34
Oxford 'Prelude', p. 633. SeeJ. Wordsworth, The Borders of Vision (Oxford,
1982), pp. 36-8 and nn.
35
F o r detailed e x p e r i m e n t s in this field see F . C . Bartlett, Remembering: A
Study in Experiential and Social Psychology ( C a m b r i d g e , 1 9 3 2 ) .
36
R . L o w t h , De Sacra PoesiHebraeorum, t r . G . G r e g o r y ( 1 7 8 7 ) , I, p p . 1 4 8 - 9 .
Coleridge borrowed the original Latin edition of 1753 from Bristol Library
from 16 to 22 Sept. 1796. BristolLB, p. 123.
 The languages of Kubla Khan 261
37
' I saw M i l t o n in i m a g i n a t i o n a n d . . . h e wished m e to show the falsehood
of his doctrine that the pleasures of sex arose from the Fall.' E. J. Morley,
Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers (1938), I, p. 330. See also my
discussion in Blake's Humanism (Manchester, 1968), pp. 31-2.
38
S e e J . M . E v a n s , Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition ( O x f o r d , 1968), p p .
48-50.
39 Line 806. A more likely reference is to the wailing for Thammuz: see
Paradise Lost, I. 11. 4 4 6 - 5 7 .
40
Paradise Lost, IV, 1. 2 3 9 . I t is also r e i n f o r c e d w h e n S a t a n resolves t o fold
himself in the 'mazy folds' of the serpent; ibid., IX, 11. 161-2. Milton's use
of 'mazy' in Book Four was no doubt responsible for the extraordinary
popularity of the word in eighteenth-century verse.
41
See Coleridge the Visionary, pp. 63, 208, 241, 252f, 342.
42
'Keys to "Kubla Khan" ', pp. 16-17.
43
T o Hazlitt in 1798 h e 'spoke of C o w p e r as the best m o d e r n poet': ' M y First
A c q u a i n t a n c e with P o e t s ' , H Works, XVII, p . 120.
44
See, e.g., H u m p h r y H o u s e , Coleridge (1953), p p . 7 8 - 9 ; N . F r u m a n , Col-
eridge the Damaged Archangel ( 1 9 7 1 ) , p p . 3 0 5 - 9 .
45
'On the living Poets', H Works, V, pp. 165-8.
46
The Task, I, 1. 165; III, 1. 7 7 8 ; ' A n t i - T h e l y p t h o r a ' , 1. 1 1 ; The Task, III, 1.
203; ' A l e x a n d e r Selkirk', 1. 28, ' H o p e ' , 1. 749; ' C o n v e r s a t i o n ' , 1. 467, 'Epis-
tle to L a d y A u s t e n ' , 1,1. 60 (also ' d e c r e e d ' ) ; ' M u t u a l F o r b e a r a n c e ' , 1. 48, The
Task, IV, 100 (in b o t h cases the w o r d 'war' c o m e s later i n t h e line).
47
Paradise Lost, 1,11. 1 9 2 - 6 ; ' M o r n i n g of C h r i s t ' s N a t i v i t y ' , 1. 6 8 , ' C o m u s ' ,
1.861.
48
D e d i c a t o r y S o n n e t to Faerie Queene, VIII, 6; cf. AmorettiLXV, 14, ' V i r g i l ' s
Gnat',1. 135.
49
Faerie Queene, II, ix, 45,11. 1-2. I n t h e Bible t h e f o r m ' c o m p a s s e d a b o u t ' is
more normally used.
50
Paradise Lost, II, 1. 8 6 2 ; VII, 1. 2 7 .
51
Midsummer Night's Dream, V, i, 11. 59-60; Measurefor Measure, III, i. 1. 123;
RichardII, I, iii, 11. 296-9; Merchant of Venice, III, ii, 1. 31.
52
CN, I, 1725, citing Paradise Lost, II, 11. 594-5.
53
Faerie Queene, II, xii, 54.1, III, i. 34-6, V, ix, 27-8. (Cf. also V, v, 12.3: 'A
miracle of nature's goodly praise'.)
54
Sir John Davies, Poetical Works (1733), p. 248.
55
Ion 534 (tr. F. Sydenham (1759), pp. 42-4). Cf. E. Schneider, Coleridge,
Opiumand ''KublaKhan'(1966), pp. 245-6andP. Adair, The WakingDream
(1967), pp. 138-9.
56
S e e m y Coleridge's Poetic Intelligence, c h . vii.
57
Cf. the 'great chrystal eye' of the ocean in 'Orchestra', Sir John Davies,
Poetical Works, p. 155, and the occurrence in the poem of words such as 'eft-
soones', 'Kirke', 'swound' and 'clomb', all of which are Spenserian.
58
See my 'Poems of the Supernatural', p. 82.
59 Q f ' T h e w h o l e scene m o v e s a n d bustles m o m e n t l y ' ; Piccolomini, PW, II, p .
613.
60
' D e p a r t i n g Y e a r ' , 1. I l l ; ' T h r e e G r a v e s ' , 1. 520; ' N i g h t i n g a l e ' , 1. 4 5 ;
Christabel, 1. 662. PW, I, p p . 166, 284, 2 3 5 .
61
It bears a pencilled note, 'Sent by Mr. Southey, as an autograph of Col-
eridge'. J. Shelton, loc. cit., p. 33.
62
See h e r a c c o u n t in Memoirs of the Late Mrs Robinson, Written by Herself (ISO 1),
262 J O H N BEER

II, pp. 129-32. 'One night after bathing. . . she swallowed . . . near eighty
drops of laudanum. Having slept for some hours, she awoke and, calling
her daughter, desired her to take a pen and write what she should dictate
. . . she repeated, throughout, the admirable poem of The Maniac, much
faster than it could be committed to paper.' Quoted Elisabeth Schneider,
Coleridge, Opium and 'Kubla Khan \ p. 86. Coleridge knew Mrs Robinson dur-
ing the winter of 1799-1800.
63
T h e p o e m is in The Poetical Works of the late Mrs Mary Robinson (1806), I I , p p .
298-303.
64
F . Alford, Life,Journals and Letters of Henry Alford (1873), p . 6 2 .
65
Letter to Coleridge, 24-7 Dec. 1799. EY, pp. 279-80. Schneider, Coleridge,
Opium and 'Kubla Khan\ pp. 184-5, 208.
66
Minnow among Tritons: Mrs S. T Coleridge's Letters to Thomas Poole, ed. S. P o t -
ter (1934), p. 13.
67
The Examiner, 2 J u n e 1816, p p . 3 4 8 - 9 . , r e p t d Coleridge, the Critical Heritage,
ed. J. R, de J.Jackson (1970) (hereafter CH), pp. 205-8.
68
July 1816,1, pp. 632-6, reptd CH, pp. 217-21.
69
TheExaminer, 21 October 1821, pp. 664-7, reptd CH, pp. 417-9.
70
Westminster Review, January 1830, XII, pp. i-31, reptd CH, pp. 525-56.
71
C. Patmore 'The Contract', in The Unknown Eros (1877), p. 21. See also my
Coleridge the Visionary, pp. 292 ff.
 Notes on the contributors

J. ROBERT BARTH, S J . , is Professor of English at the University

of Missouri-Columbia, and like most of the contributors to this
volume is a regular participant in the Wordsworth Summer Con-
ference held annually at Dove Cottage, Grasmere. His publications
include Coleridge and Christian Doctrine (1969) and The Symbolic Imagina-
tion: Coleridge and the Romantic Traditional!). He is currently working
on an extended study of the theme of love in Coleridge.
J O H N BEER is Reader in English Literature at the University of
Cambridge and a Fellow of Peterhouse. His books include Coleridge
the Visionary, The Achievement ofE. M. Forster, Blake's Humanism, Blake's
Visionary Universe, Coleridge's Poetic Intelligence, Wordsworth and the
Human Heart and Wordsworth in Time. During 1975 he was a visiting
professor at the University of Virginia.
KRISTINE DUGAS, Assistant Professor of English and Women's
Studies at Ohio State University, received her B. A. from the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin in 1977 and her Ph.D. from Cornell University in
1984. She is editing The White Doe of Rylstone, volume 13 of the Cor-
nell Wordsworth series.
DAVID V. ERDMAN teaches Romantic Literature at SUNY Stony
Brook, and edits the Bulletin of Research in the Humanities for the
New York Public Library. The author of Blake: Prophet Against Em-
pire, and editor of numerous volumes of the works of Blake, he has
also edited Coleridge's Essays on his Times for the Collected Coleridge,
and is coordinating editor of the annual Romantic Movement
Bibliography.
NORMAN FRUMAN, who is Professor of English at the University
of Minnesota, studied at Columbia University and the Sorbonne,
and did his first teaching as a prisoner of war. He has published on
a wide variety of subjects, and is best known for his Coleridge, The
Damaged Archangel (1972). His latest work is a new edition ofBiographia
Literaria.
RICHARD GRAVIL teaches at the College of St Mark & St John,
Plymouth, part of which - St Mark's - had Derwent Coleridge as
its principal. His publications include casebooks on The Prelude and
263
264 Notes on the contributors

Gulliver's Travels, and essays on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Swift,

Lawrence, Conrad, and contemporary British poets. He has taught
at the University of Victoria and the University of Lodz.
* ANTHONY J O H N HARDING studied at Manchester and Cam-
bridge before going to Canada in 1974 to teach at the University of
Saskatchewan, where he is now Associate Professor of English. His
publications include Coleridge and the Idea of Love (1974), Biblical and
Poetic Inspiration in Coleridge and His Tradition (1984), and essays on
Thoreau, James Marsh and John Sterling.
* PETER LARKIN has been, since 1970, Assistant Librarian
(Humanities) in the University of Warwick Library. He has pub-
lished articles on Hardy and Wordsworth, and presented papers at
the Wordsworth Summer Conferences. A sequence of his prose
poetry was published in 1983, and a selection from more recent work
in 1984.
* MOLLY LEFEBURE's study of the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A
Bondage of Opium (1974), was informed by a close working knowledge
of drug addiction and its pathology. She is the author of 'high-brow
childrens' novels', and of two works on the history, topography and
culture of the Lake District, CumberlandHeritage (19/'0) and Cumbrian
Discovery (1977). She is soon to publish a biography of Mrs Coleridge,
together with unpublished letters.
* THOMAS McFARLAND is Murray Professor of English
Literature at Princeton University. His work on Coleridge includes
Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (1969), Romanticism and the Forms of
Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Modalities ofFragmentation (1981), and
Originality and Imagination (1985). Among his forthcoming works are
Shapes of Culture and Romantic Cruxes: the English Essayists and the Spirit
of the Age. He is currently editing Coleridge's Opus Maximum for the
Collected Coleridge.
* LUCY NEWLYN is a lecturer in English at St Edmund Hall, Ox-
ford. Since completing her D.Phil, thesis in 1983 she has held Lec-
tureships at Mansfield College and Christ Church. She has published
articles in a number ofjournals and her book, Coleridge, Wordsworth
and the Language ofAllusion is being published by O.U.P.
* STEPHEN PARRISH is Professor of English at Cornell Universi-
ty. He edited The Prelude, 1798-1799 for the Cornell Wordsworth
Series, of which he is General Editor. His many publications include
The Art of the Lyrical Ballads (1973), and Keats and the Bostonians (with
Hyder Rollins). He is also editor of the Cornell Concordances.
* NIC HOLAS ROE is Lecturer in English at the Queen' s Universi-
 Notes on the contributors 265
ty, Belfast. He read English at Trinity College, Oxford, and remain-
ed there to write his D.Phil, thesis on Wordsworth, Coleridge and
the French Revolution. He has published a number of articles on the
political activities of these poets in the 1790s, and a full length study
of these topics in relation to their poetry is in course of publication.
WILLIAM RUDDICK lectures at the University of Manchester.
His publications include an edition of Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk by
J. G. Lockhart, articles on Milton, Scott, Byron and Lamb, and (as
co-editor) exhibition catalogues on Joseph Farington and Kate
Greenaway. He is preparing a book on the early Tours and Guides
to the Lake District, up to and including Wordsworth's Guide.
JONATHAN WORDSWORTH is a Fellow of St Catherine's Col-
lege, Oxford, and University Lecturer in Romantic Studies. He is
also Chairman of the Dove Cottage Trust, Grasmere. Publications
include The Music of Humanity (1969), Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies
(1970) (as editor and contributor), and The Borders of Vision (1983).
Editions of Wordsworth to date: Selections (1974), The Prelude 1799,
1805, 1850 (1979, with collaboration from M. H. Abrams and
Stephen Gill), The Ruined Cottage, The Brothers and Michael (1984) and
The Pedlar, Tintern Abbey and Two-Part Prelude (1984). H e is at present
working on a three-volume Cambridge Wordsworth and a book on
Romantic imagination from Coleridge to Stevens.
 Index
Abinger, Lord, 178n Bacchus, 242, 251
Abrams, M. H., 191 Baker, James Volant, 50n
Abyssinia, 241, 256-7; symbolic ballad, the, 106-15, 119; see
association of, for C , 223, 242 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads
Abyssinian Maid, 4, 186-7, 219-20, Barbauld, Mrs Anna Laetitia, 160
223, 250, 257 Barfield, Owen, 57, 67n, 196, 206n
Adair, P., 26In Baroque, the, 243
Adam, 5, 38, 215, 222, 240-1 Barth, J. Robert, S. J., 3-4, 47, 52n,
Addison, Joseph, 28 127n, 179-92, 263n
Aeschylus, 6 Bartholomew Fair, 171
aesthetics, 56, 90, 100, 187, 243 Bartlett, F. C , 260n
Airey Force, 91 Bartram, William, Travels, 104
Akenside, Mark, Pleasures of Imagination, Bassenthwaite, 94
28-9, 51n, 227, 229-30, 232, Bate, Walter Jackson, 24-5, 50n, 105,
243-4, 260n 116n
Alford, F., 262n Beaufort Buildings, 164
Alfoxden, 35; see Nether Stowey Bedford, Charles Grosvenor, 79, 82, 85
allegory, 2, 107, 116, 125, 155, 207 Bedford, Horace, 166
Allen, G. W., and Clark, H. H., 77n Beer, John, 4, 78n, 96, lOln, 110,
allusion, 134, 141n, 143-8, 179, 182-3, 116n, 141n, 180, 190, 218-62, 263n
221, 225-59, 264n; see Beik, P., 178n
Coleridge/Wordsworth relations Belgium, 166
Alpers, Paul, 14 Berkeley, Bishop, 29-31, 33-4, 43,
Alpheus, 223, 250 50n, 139, 259n
Amphion, 257 Bible, the, 211, 226, 239; see God,
Anglicanism, 138 Scriptures
Anti Jacobin, The, 258 Binns, John, 171
Apocalypse, 32, 156, 199 Bion, Death of Adonis, 7
Apollo, 223 Blackwood's Magazine, 74
Appleyard, J. A., 52n Blake, William, 10, 40, 50, 52n, 78n,
Arabian Nights, The, 226 214, 216, 217n, 226, 239, 260n,
Arcadia, 8, 11-12, 250 26In; Jerusalem, 34; Marriage of
archaism, 112-13 see Elizabethanism Heaven and Hell, The, 32-3; Milton,
Arethusa, 257 33; Visions of the Daughters of Albion,
art, 26-7, 44-5, 47, 50n, 76, 186-7; see The, 4, 208, 213
imagination blessing, 49, 77, 92, 112, 149, 181-2,
Ascherson, N., 178n 185-6, 188-9
Ash Farm, 222, 259n Bloom, Harold, 10, 191n
associationism, 25, 30, 66, 86, 103, Boehme, Jacob, 22, 27, 44, 49, 50n,
121-2, 124, 212, 220; see fancy, 51n, 226
imagination, memory Bornstein, George, 217
astronomy, 244 Borrowdale (Borrodale), vii, 95, 97
atheism, 29, 41, 51n, 74, 78n, 171, Botany Bay, 173
174; Wordsworth as 'semi-atheist', Bouchard, Donald F., 206n
132; see Godwin Bouslog, Charles, 181, 190n
Bower of Bliss, 248
Baader, Franz, 77n Bowles, William Lisle, 120-1, 123,

267
268 INDEX

125-6, 243 cities, 5, 9, 17, 18, 20, 75, 146, 240

Bowring, John, 258 Clarkson, Thomas, 140
Brackman, W., 260n Classical, the, 6, 13, 33
Brazil, 82 Claude Gelee, dit Le Lorrain, 90-1
Brett, R. L., 259 Coburn, Kathleen, 54, 67, 88n, 94-5,
Brinkley, R. L., 77n 154, 208, 217n
Bristol, 240; Bristol Channel, the, 221; Coleridge, Derwent, 84, 87n, 97, 115,
see Coleridge in Bristol 208
British Critic, The, 151 Coleridge, Francis, 77n
Brocken Spectre, the, 104 Coleridge, George, 131
Broughton, Leslie, 14 Coleridge, Hartley, 82, 84, 87n
broughton, Panthea Reid, 191n Coleridge, Henry Nelson, 23, 5In
Brown, Capability, 245 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: and birth of
Browne, Sir Thomas, Religio Medici, son, Derwent, 97, 115; and
78n celibacy, 75; and death of brother
Bruno, Giordano, 46-7, 52n, 138 Francis, 77n; and despair, 57,
Bryant, Jacob, 259n 60-2, 64, 66-7, 115, 181, 183-5,
Budworth, Joseph, A Fortnight's Ramble, 233, 254; and first visit to Lake
89 District, 89; and love for Sara
Buonaparte, Napoleon, 156, 160n Hutchinson, 73, 75, 97, 183, 189,
Burger, Gottfried, 107, 109-10 255; and opium, 75, 97-8, 115,
Burke, Kenneth, 14, 199 26In, 262n; and tour of the Lake
Burns, Robert, 143 District (1799), 92; annus mirabilis,
Butler, Marilyn, 131 71, 78, 105-6, 109; at Coleorton,
Butterdale, 97 211; at Highgate, 2, 75; exclusion
Buttermere, 95 of from Wordsworth circle, 64;
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 253, family of at Greta Hall, 2, 79-80,
257; Don Juan, 7; Heaven and Earth, 93-6, 98, 150; in Bristol, 113,
257 151, 168; in Cambridge, 226; in
Hanover, 39; in London, 1; in
Cain, 222-4 Malta, 104, 210; in Nether
Calfhow Pike, 95 Stowey, 71, 75, 131; in West
Caligula, 3, 174 Country (1793), 226; later years
Calvert, Raisley, 79 of, 75; leaves his wife, 75; on his
Calvert, Mrs William, 83 way to Malta, 209, 254; voluteers
Cambuscan, 258 for the army, 233
Carey, John, 178n Aids to Reflection, 203
Carroll, Lewis, 81, 85 Ancient Mariner, The, 50n, 77, 78n,
Cassirer, Ernst, 15 92, 102, 105-6, 109-13, 115-16,
Castaly, 257 130, 156-8, 160n, 185, 199, 208,
character, 106-7, 110-11, 113-14, 130, 211, 234, 253-4, 256
136 Biographia Literaria, 3, 22, 55, 76-7,
Chateaubriand, Vicomte Francois-Rene 104, 106, 117-18, 122, 124, 127,
de 14, 18 127n, 129, 131, 138, 141n, 194,
Chatterton, Thomas, 143, 148 197, 202, 234-5
Chayes, Irene H., 187, 191n Brook, The, 130-1, 140
childhood and children, 15, 56, 64, 71, Christabel, 3, 78n, 94-7, 100, 109,
81-2, 84, 136, 143, 148, 155, 114, 116, 130, 150-2, 156-7,
163-4, 183, 187, 197, 209, 215, 160n, 207-8, 253-4, 261n
226, 254 Condones ad Populum, 164-5, 168,
Christ, Jesus, 32, 43, 125, 137, 174, 177
139-40, 175, 247 Constancy to an Ideal Object, 131
Christianity, 31, 34, 43, 72, 125, 132, Church and State, On the, 74
140, 156, 171, 226; see Bible, God, Dejection: an Ode, 3, 4, 60, 64, 66,
pantheism, Scriptures, 70-1, 98, 100, 143, 147-8, 154-5,
Unitarianism 179, 190, 193, 199
 Index 269
Destiny of Nations, The, 31-3, 41, 48, 51n, 173, 199, 237
51n Shakespeare Criticism, 76
Eolian Harp, The, 51, 52n, 136, 186, Songs of the Pixies, 229
240 'Spots in the Sun', 153
Essays on his Times, 69 Stateman's Manual, The, 32, 37, 43,
Fall of Robespierre, The, 166-8, 174, 47, 51n, 73-4, 76, 127n, 204,
176 Sybilline Leaves, 52n, 66, 108, 122,
Fears in Solitude, 70-1, 74 143, 190n
Fragment, The Body, 65 Table Talk, 133, 141
France: an Ode, 72 Theory of Life, 134
Friend, The, 32, 38, 51n, 52n, 57, 74, This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, 1,
107 16, 19-21, 33, 51n, 71, 78n, 93,
Frost at Midnight, 33, 71, 74, 122-3, 185
129, 208, 244 Three Graves, The, 107-9, 130, 234,
Hymn Before Sunrise in the Vale of 261n
Chamouny, 128n, 155 To Nature, 65
Kubla Khan, 4, 71, 96, 156-8, 160, To William Wordsworth, 70, 133-7,
206, 208, 218-19 141n, 211
Lay Sermons, 5In Treatise on Method, A, 134, 142n
Lectures on Revealed Religion, 41, 178n Wanderings of Cain, The, 107, 221-2,
Lecture on the Slave Trade, 28-9, 36, 234
41, 172-3, 177 Watchman, The, 148, 177
Letter to Sara Hutchinson, The, 4, 35-6, What is Life?, 65
60-2, 66, 98-9, 117, 136, 147, 'When they did greet me father', 211
155, 190, 193 Coleridge, Mrs Samuel Taylor (nee
Limbo, 65 Sara Fricker), 70, 79-80, 94, 179,
Lines written in the Album at 189, 240, 262n
Elbingerode, 71-2 Coleridge, Sara (daughter), 23, 75, 86,
Mad Monk, The, 143-6, 150, 152-3, 257
159n, 179 Coleridge/Wordsworth relations, 10,
Marginalia, 44 15, 33-5, 48, 64, 69, 79, 82, 89,
Monody on the Death of Chatterton, 238 94, 99-100, 105-60, 179, 201-2,
Moral & Political Lecture, 168 211, 234-9, 255-7; collaboration:
Miscellaneous Criticism, 76 107-10, 110, 112-13, 147, 150-2,
'Nehemiah Higginbottom' sonnets, 234; conflict: 2-3, 106, 112, 114,
150 130-1, 137; difference: 33, 61,
Ne Plus Ultra, 65 74-5, 95, 107, 109, 112-16,
Nightingale, The, 196, 254, 261n 117-27, 135-6, 162, 172, 180;
Notebooks, 2, 43, 72-4, 78n, 85, 88, influence: 3, 7, 40-1, 90, 108,
92, 103, 115, 138, 149, 182, 199, 112, 129, 133, 138, 158, 164, 169,
201, 210, 213-14, 220, 249, 251, 172-3, 176, 178, 187, 231, 234
260n likeness: 17, 28-9, 36-7, 34, 62;
Ode to the Departing Year, 210, 254, rivalry: 129-30, 132, 150-1, 155;
261n symbiosis: 129, 138, 141n, 143,
Ode to Tranquillity, 72 150, 160, 179, 234
On Poesy or Art, 27, 76 Collins, William, 143, 157, 226,
Opus Maximus, 140 229-31, 239, 260n
Osorio, 70, 237 Comates, 257
Pains of Sleep, 209, 211, 213, 258 Committee of Public Safety, 166
Philosophical Lectures, 51n, 69, 72-4, common-sense, 52n
78n, 205 Como, 257
Piccolomini, 26In conscience, 69
Poems (1796), 149; Preface to, 182 consubstantiality, 47, 5In
Reflections on having left a Place of conversation poems, 54, 78, 105, 181,
Retirement, 240 208, 244, 246; see titles under
Religious Musings, 30-4, 39, 41, 50n, separate entries: Coleridge
270 INDEX

Cooper, Joan, 259n emblem, 228

Cowper, William, 4, 243-6, 261n emotion, 59-60, 64, 69, 75, 88, 93,
Croce, benedetto, 77n 122-4, 135-6, 139-40, 145, 155-6,
Crummock Water, 92 184, 186, 191, 212, 217n, 230,
Cudworth, Ralph, True Intellectual System 253; see feeling, passion
of the Universe, The, 41-2 Empedocles, 132-3
Culbone, 222 Empiricism, 23, 39
Culler, Jonathan, 204 Empson, William, 6
Cumbrian dialect, 84-5 energy, 31, 44, 92, 100, 173, 232, 238,
Curry, K., 87n, 178n 246
Curtis, Jared, 178n Engell, James, 22, 24, 26-7, 37, 44-5,
Cybele, 224, 242, 249-50, 259n 47, 49
Ennerdale, 95, 97
daemonic, the, 224 entelechy, see monad
Darwin, Erasmus, 71, 226-7, 244, 245, epic, 6, 160n, 239
260n Erdman, David V., 3, 143-60, 236
Davies, Sir John, 251, 253, 26In Eskdale, 99
Davy, Humphry, 39, 105, 113, 115, Ethiopia, 228
150, 152 Etna, 246
deism, 34 Euphrosyne, 228
Dekker, George, 143-4, 147-8, 155, Evans, M., 261n
158, 159n Eve, 214-15, 241
Delilah, 241 Evert, Walter H., 207, 217n
De Man, Paul, 9 evil, 72, 75, 208, 210, 212-13, 215-16,
Demaria, Robert, 203 217n
De Quincey, Thomas, 7, 13, 15, 44 Examiner, The, 262n
Derrida, Jacques, 206n excremental, the, 77
Derwentwater, 00, 89
Descartes, Rene, 66 Fairfield, 91
De Selincourt, Ernest, 116n Fall, the, 4, 137, 167, 201, 207,
desynonymization, 195, 197-8 213-16, 217n, 222, 240-1, 261,
Devil, the, 78n 261n; fallen man, 34, 70, 72-3
Diana, 250 family, the, 75, 79-80, 210-11
diction, 13, 106-10, 116, 124, 159, fancy, 3-4, 22, 25-6, 30, 32-6, 48, 91,
193-4, 196-7, 238, 243-6, 263; see 103-4, 121-7, 130, 147, 158,
archaism, language 194-6, 198, 230, 243; see
Diderot, Denis, 15 associationism, imagination,
domestic affections, 13 memory
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, The Brothers feeling, 11, 35, 57, 62-6, 69-71, 73,
Karamazov, 18 75, 78n, 88, 118, 120, 132, 141,
Dove Cottage, vii, 151 144, 156; see emotion, passion
dramatic monologue, the 107 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 17, 36, 46-7
Dramin, Edward, 217n Field, Barron, 109
dreams, 58, 100, 213, 217, 249; Fielding, Henry, Tom Jones, 259n
dream-work, 220, 252; see Fields, Beverly, 181, 190n
unconscious, Freud Fleissner, R. F., 259n
Dryads, 12, 33, 123 Flower, Benjamin, 167
Dryden, John, 143, 231, 260n Foakes, R. A., 78n
Dugas, Kristine, 1-2, 53-68, 263n Fogle, R. H., 191
Dumouriez, General, 166 Foucault, Michel, 206n
duty, 44, 134-5 Fowler, Alastair, 178n
Dyer, George, 167 Fox, Charles James, 13, 17, 130
France, 72, 164, 166-70, 175; see
Easedale, 93 Revolution, French
egotism, 19, 182 freedom, see liberty
Elizabethanism, 247-51 Frend, William, 171, 226
 Index 271
Freud, Sigmund, 104, 252 Great End, 00
Fruman, Norman, 22, 50N, 69-78, Greece, 220, 223
112, 116n, 260n, 261n, 263n Green, J. H., 22
Fry, Paul, 196, 198, 204, 206n, 216, Gregory, G., 260n
217n Grosart, A. G., 160n
Guarini, Giambattista, 13
Garber, Frederick, 6 guilt, 75, 209-10, 215, 240, 243, 253,
genial spirits, 64, 98, 143, 150, 155-6 255
genius, 76-8, 102, 104, 115, 136, 143, Gutmann, James, 142n
158, 200, 204, 220, 223-4, 226-7,
230, 232-5, 239, 244, 246, 253, Habeas Corpus 162, 164
256, 257; absolute, 234, 236; Haliwell, Mother Goose's Nursery Rhymes,
commanding, 156, 234, 236; 81
definition of W.'s by Hazlitt, 235 Hamilton, Paul, 52n
George, A. G., 17 Hanson, Lawrence, 260n
Gerald, Joseph, 173 Harding, Anthony, 4, 207-17, 264n
Gerber, Richard, 224, 242, 248, 259n Hardraw Force, 255
German metaphysics, 1, 22-3, 26-8, Hardy, Thomas, 162
30, 33, 39, 42, 44, 46-7, 49, 50n, Hardy, Thomas (novelist), 234
51n, 57, 72, 76-7, 83; C.'s Harper, George McLean, 153
reading of, 28, 33; see names Harrex, S. C , 260n
under separate entries Hartley, David, 29-30, 51
Gill, Stephen, 178n Hartman, Geoffrey, 9-10, 203, 206n
Gillman, Jaames, 208 Hassan Assar, 232
Gilpin, William, 89, 90, 92 Haweswater, 90
Gisborne, John, 6 Hayden, John O., 159n
Glanvill, Joseph, 217n Hayter, Alethea, 209, 217n
God, 1-2, 9, 14-15, 18, 31, 45-6, Hazlitt, William, 5-6, 45, 213, 235,
48-9, 71-2, 75-6, 96, 139, 140-1, 257, 261n
146-7, 156, 172, 174, 210, 217, Hebrew poetry, 34, 123, 125-6; see
230, 240, 244, 245-6, 251; and imagination, the Sublime
imagination, 1, 22-52, 72; and Hellenism, 12
Nature, 73-4, 78n, 96-7, 108; and Helvellyn, 89-91, 93, 95-7
self-naming, 24, 27, 31, 42-3, Herodotus, 6
48-9; see atheism, Christianity, Hesiod, 6, 13
pantheism, Trinitarianism, Hill, John Spencer, 193, 206n
Unitarianism Hitler, Adolf, 3
Godwin, William, 2-3, 29, 72, 105, Holcroft, Thomas, 164
115, 130, 161-4, 169-72, 174-8, Holderlin, Friedrich, 11
178n Holland, 166
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 5, 57; Holwell, William, 259
Werther9, 14, 17 Homer, 6, 125-6
Golden Age, 13 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 100
Goldsmith, Oliver, 260n House, Humphry, 180, 26In
Gothic, the, 4, 112-13, 144, 207, 217n, Hunt, Leigh, 258
259 Hutchinson, Sara, 73, 75, 97, 119,
Gowdrell Crag, 91 127n, 149, 153-5, 183, 189, 255;
grace, 75; see Fall Letter to 35-6, 60-2, 66, 98-9, 148,
Grains Ghyll, vii 157
Grasmere, 75, 90-1, 95, 112, 146, 155, Hutchinson, Thomas, 190n
157 Hutchinson, William, History of the
Graves, Robert, 81, 87n County of Cumberland, 98
Gravil, Richard, 3, 129-42, 263-4n
Gray, Thomas, 89, 226, 229, 239, 241, idealism, 22, 24-5, 73-4, 76-7, 78n,
260n 131, 138, 194, 198
Great Dod, 95 identity, 16-17
272 INDEX

imagination, 1-6, 8, 10, 12, 20, 22-52, Jacobi, 38

58, 61, 71, 73, 76-7, 86, 92-3, Jacobins, 131
96, 99100, 102-7, 116, 122, 127, Jacobus, Mary, 141n
129, 134, 138, 140-1, 150-1, 156, Jaspers, Karl, 135
158, 161, 167, 171-4, 177, 179, Jehovah, 31, 45, 48-9, 140
181-2, 186-9, 193-6, 200-5, Jerusalem, 191
206n, 215-16, 221, 226, 235, 239, Johnson, Samuel, 107-8, 145, 230
243, 246, 248, 256, 258-9, 260n; Jordan, Frank, 190n
and Ascents of Being, 28-30, joy, 3, 11, 17, 35, 38, 44, 52, 60-1,
37-8, 42, 44, 48-50, 92-3, 172; 64-5, 73, 88, 95, 100-1, 134, 136,
and English tradition, 28-30, 145-7, 149-50, 180-1, 183-9,
36-9, 41; and fancy, 22, 25, 30, 191n, 195, 227
32-6, 48, 103-4, 122-5, 130,
194-7; and German philosophy, 1, Kaarfalt, D. H., 259n
26-9, 37, 39, 45-6; and God, Kant, Immanuel, 23, 26, 36-7, 39, 46,
24-5, 27, 28, 29-34, 36, 38-50 51n, 57, 72, 76, 77n, 78n, 83
passim, 52n, 200; and God's self- Kearsley, 167
naming, 24, 27, 31, 42, 43, 48-9; Keats, John, 11, 45, 78n; Endymion,
and Nature, 8-12, 31, 33-4, 43-7; 258; Hyperion, 179; I stood tiptoe,
and reason, 30, 36-9, 44, 48; and 12; Sleep and Poetry, 9, 11
self, 16-21, 27, 30, 32, 38, 42, 44, Keswick, vii, 2, 75, 89, 94-5, 150
46, 48-9, 50n, 52n, 198, 216; and Kierkegaard, Soren, 135
sense-perception, 23, 26-7, 30, Knight, G. Wilson, 102
47-8; and Symbol, 29, 43, 47, 49, Knights, L. C., 68n
52n; early definitions of, by C.,
28-36, 41, 172, 174; loss of, 54, Laertius, 6
56, 60-4, 67, 75, 97, 100, 105, Lake District, the, 2, 75, 88-101; book
113, 129, 146-7, 157, 175, 180-2, on, projected by C., 99
193-4, 199, 205, 212; Lamb, Charles, 20, 51n, 78n, 114,
misapplication of, 172-3; 116n, 130, 141n, 185, 257
Primary/Secondary, definitions of, Lambert, Ellen Zetzel, 12
1, 22-3, 33, 42, 44-50, 104; Langbaum, Robert, 16
Primary/Secondary, distinctions language, 2, 4, 11, 18, 29-30, 33, 43,
between, 1, 23-7, 49-31; 52, 58, 71, 73, 75, 92-4, 118,
transcendental, 22-3, 29, 32, 130, 138, 143, 145, 193, 196-8,
35-6, 44, 195, 200; Wordsworth 203, 205, 220-59; of conversation,
on, 36 111, 118, 138, 212, 215; of
imitation, 6-7, 33, 163 ordinary life, 106, 117-26; Sara's
incest, 153, 159 private language, 2, 81-7; see
incident, 110-11 allusion, diction, symbol
India, 220, 222 Larkin, Peter, 3, 193-206, 264n
influence, poetic, 4, 112, 144, 225; see Latona, 250
allusion, Coleridge/Wordsworth Latrigg, 94
relations Laver, Peter, vii, 88
inspiration, 33, 86, 221, 226-7, 233, Law, William, 5In
236, 238, 244, 254 Leach, Edward, 210
instincts, 69-70, 73 Lear, Edward, 87
intellect, 73, 75, 120, 123, 141, 176-7, Lefebure, Molly, 2, 79-87, 89, 94,
235 264n
intuition, 37, 78n, 235 Legouis, Emile, 153
Isaiah, 126, 171, 191n, 239 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 36,
Isis, 223, 241 39-42, 48, 51n
Isle of Wight, 234 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 204
Israelites, 94 Leven Sands, 161
Lewis, Matthew, 4, 208-9
Jackson, J. R. d e j . , 217n, 262n liberty, 6, 14, 32, 135, 168, 174, 176
 Index 273
Lindenberger, Herbert, 14 Christiana, 39, 5In; L'Allegro, 247;
Locke, John, 36, 39, 47, 203, 247 On Education, 239; On The Morning
Lockridge, Lawrence, 54, 67n of Christ's Nativity, 26In; Paradise
logic, 55 Lost, 28, 37-8, 51n, 125, 167, 215,
London, 85, 162-3, 165 217n, 240-3, 247, 249, 262, 261n
London Corresponding Society, 162, monads, 40-2, 43-4, 51n
171 Monet, Claude, 94
Losh, James, 177 Mont Blanc, 155
love, 3, 10-11, 18, 30-1, 38, 44, 49, Monthly Magazine, The, 109-10
70, 72, 111, 135, 140, 149, 173, Monthly Review, The, 150
183, 184, 187, 189, 190n, 204, Moore, Thomas, 7
208, 210-12, 227, 230, 235, 241, Moorman, Mary, 150, 152, 160
244, 249-51, 255; mother-love Morley, E. J., 78n
207, 210, 213; see blessing, God, Morning Chronicle, The, 162
imagination Morning Post, The, 66, 98, 144-5, 153,
Lovell, Mary, 80 155, 179, 190n
Lovell, Robert, 107 Moschus, Death of Bion, The, 7
Lowes, Livingston, The Road to Xanadu, Moses, 31, 45-6
102, 104-5, 108, 116, 225, 231, Moss Force, 97
260n Muir, Thomas, 173
Lowth, Robert, 239, 260n Murray, John, 7
Lucian, 6 Myer, Michael Grosvenor, 260n
Luther, Martin, 27 mysticism, 30
Lyulph's Tower, 93 myth, 2, 4, 16, 22, 116, 140, 187, 189,
202, 207-8, 210, 213, 221, 223-4,
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 168 226, 259n; see allegory, romance,
madness, 16, 145, 150 symbol
Magnuson, Paul, 160n, 181, 190n
Malthus, Thomas Robert, 17
Marcel, Gabriel, 135 naming 193, 202-3, 205; see
Margarot, Maurice, 173 imagination
marriage, 72, 113, 140, 153-5, 180, National Convention, 166, 168
183, 189 natural man, the, 2, 4, 61-2, 69-78,
materialism, 69 186, 197, 214, 216, 2147; see
Mathews, William, 170, 176 Nature
matter-of-factness, 119-20, 126, 138, Nature, 1-2, 4, 33, 44, 57, 61, 64,
140, 235 69-78, 83, 88, 92-5, 98-9, 105,
Matthew, 175 122, 134, 179, 181, 186, 188-9,
McFarland, Thomas, 1, 5-21, 26, 40, 197-8, 208, 214, 216, 217n, 223,
42, 46, 50n, 52n, 57, 67n, 138, 227, 246-7, 250-1, 256; and God,
140, 141n, 159, 200, 264n 31, 39, 71, 73, 227; and
medievalism, 8 imagination, 8-12, 31, 33-4, 36,
memory, 30, 33-4, 50, 69, 102-4, 122, 71, 120, 123, 125, 187, 184-6,
124, 196, 202, 237 197-8, 220, 227; and pantheism
meta-figure, 201 44, 46-7, 71; and pastoral 5-8,
metalanguage, 203 12-14, 19-21; and science 227,
Methodism, 250 247; and solitude 14-21; C.'s
Miall, David S., 217n rejection of 65, 73-7
Mileur, Jean Pierre, 197, 207, 217n necrophilia, 210
millenarianism, 29, 171 Neerwinden, 166
Milton, John, 4, 12, 16, 31, 38-9, Nelson, Jane A., 210, 217n
48-9, 51n, 76, 125, 128n, 131, Neo-classicism, 9
138, 143, 167, 176, 178n, 215, Nesbitt, Fanny, 229
230, 233, 239, 244, 2146, 248, Nethermost Pike, 96
253, 258, 260n; Arcades, 230; Newgate Jail, 162
Comus, 125, 240, 261n; De Doctrina Newlands Hause, 97
274 INDEX

Newlyn, Lucy, 2-3, 117-28, 141n, Penrith Beacon, 139

178n, 264n Percy, Thomas, Reliques, 107
Newton, Isaac, 34, 47, 232, 244, 247 Phillips, M., 260n
Nicholson, Norman, 97, lOln picturesque, the, 2, 90, 94, 97, 99
Nile, the, 223, 241 Piper, H. W., 208, 214, 217n
nonsense, 81-2, 86, 258 Pistorius, Hermann, 30
Pitt, William, 132, 161, 163, 165, 168,
Oken, 57 170, 172
Old Bailey, the, 165 Place, Francis, 171
'One Life', 34-6, 52, 92-3, 120-1, plagiarism, 22, 45, 5In
123, 126, 169, 172, 181, 186, 189 Plato, 40, 42, 251; Platonism, 51n,
organic sensibility, 73, 78n; organicism 52n, 93, 125, 138, 247, 257 .
8 pleasure, 63, 136, 182, 229, 232, 239,
originality, 5-6 244, 249, 256, 260n, 261
Osborn, Robert, 178n Plotinus, 49, 51n
Osiris, 241 Plutarch, 6
Otway, Thomas, 3, 143-60; The Poggioli, Renato, 11
Orphan, 159n; The Poet's Complaint of polarity, 57, 67, 134
His Muse, 144 Polybius, 8
Ovid, 13 Poole, Thomas, 36, 79, 86, 87n, 126,
Ower, John, 229, 260n 130, 132, 148-50, 153, 239, 260n,
262n
Palmer, Thomas Fysshe, 173 Pope, Alexander, 16, 77n; A Discourse
Pan, 8, 12 on Pastoral Poetry, 13
Pandaemonium, 242 Porlock, 221
pantheism, 30, 34-5, 38-40, 44, 46-8, post-structuralism, 102
51n, 52n, 71, 74, 78n, 140, 148; power, 40, 57, 96, 176, 196
C.'s later rejection of, 22, 33, Powers, Sharon, 217n
42-3, 74; in Biographia, 22, 33, prayer, 136, 211-12, 215-16, 217n,
42-3, 74; see Christianity, God, 244; Essay on, 213-14
Nature, 'One Life', Unitarianism Prickett, Stephen, 104, 116n
Pantisocracy, 148 Priestly, Joseph, 30, 42-3, 51n
Papageorge, Julia Di Stephano, 144 Promised Land, 94
Paradise, 12, 62, 221-3, 229, 231, 233, prophecy, 3, 10, 33, 122, 134, 211,
240, 242, 244-6, 252, 255-6, 258 216
Paris, 139, 163, 165 Psalms, 211, 213
Parker, Reeve, 143, 145, 149, 154, psychoanalysis, 181, 213
156, 180-2, 190 psychology, 32, 56, 61, 66, 100, 107,
parody, 144, 150, 159, 174, 217 112, 209, 243, 255
Parrish, Stephen, 2, 102-116, 141m, psychomachy, 214
159, 264n Purchas, Samuel, 157, 233, 248, 259n,
passion, 11, 73, 76, 106, 118-22, 124, 260n
130, 175, 177, 210, 234, 239
passiveness, 36, 52, 144, 191, 202, 215, Quantocks, the, 75
237, 246, 254 Quennell, Peter, 79, 87n
pastoral, the, 1, 8, 107, 150; and quest-romance, see romance
Nature, 8, 12-14; and
Romanticism, 5-8; and solitude, rabinnical tradition, 241
14-21; see Wordsworth: Michael Racedown, 178
and The Brothers Radcliffe, Ann, 4, 99, 144, 159n, 208
Patmore, Coventry, 258, 262n Raj an, Tillotama, 195
Patterdale, 95 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 248
Paul, St, 126 Rapin, Rene, 13
Peace of Amiens, 153 rationalism, 161, 175, 177; rationality,
Pegasus, 9 78n; see reason
Pennant, Thomas, 89 realism, 207
 Index 275
reason, 10, 30, 37-9, 44, 51n, 52, 58, Segal, Charles, 16, 20
70, 169, 174, 204; see God, self-consciousness, 15-19, 27, 32, 45,
Godwin, imagination, intellect 48-9, 50n, 52n, 53-68, 92, 122,
redemption, 77, 137, 141 196-7; see imagination
Reiman, Donald, 217n Selkirk, Alexander, 26In
Renaissance, the, 247, 250; see also senses, the 11, 23, 26-7, 30-2, 38, 40,
Elizabethanism 48, 58, 70, 72-6, 78n, 88-9, 97,
repression, 199 100, 137, 186, 237-8, 242-3, 253,
Revelation, 19 In 259; sensuality, 59, 72-4, 76, 77n,
Revolutionary Tribunal, 166 214, 233
Revolution: French, 1, 3, 5, 131, September Massacres, 163, 176
162-78, 235; Industrial, 17; poetic, sexual equality, 84; C.'s denial of, 70
2, 5, 6, 11, 106; see Romanticism Shakespeare, William, 13, 75-6, 78n,
Richards, I. A., 23-4, 27, 50n, 103, 131, 138, 179, 226, 230, 249;
116n Hamlet, 76; Measure for Measure,
Ridley, James, 232, 260n 261n; Merchant of Venice, The, 261n;
Robespierre, 161, 163-9, 173-8 Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 26In;
Robinson, Henry Crabb, 78n, 131, Richard II, 26In; Tempest, The, 76
260n Sharp, Richard, 132
Robinson, Mary, 255, 261n, 262n Shawcross, J., 23
Roe, Nicholas, 3, 161-78, 264-5n Shedd, W. G., 78n, 190n
romance, 207, 209, 226, 232; quest- Shelley, Mary, 6, 10, 19, 45;
romance, 10 Frankenstein, 17
Romanticism, 1, 5-21, 58, 61, 67, 173, Shelley, Percy Bysse, 6, 11, 17, 67;
216, 251 Adonais, 8, 11; Alastor, 1, 16-17,
Ronsard, Pierre de, 13 19; Defence of Poetry, The, 187,
Rosa, Salvator, 89-91, 96 191n, 217n; Hymn to Pan, 7; Mont
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 7, 12, Blanc, 7; Poet of Nature, 10;
15-16 Prometheus Unbound, 4, 208
Ruddick, William, 2, 88-101, 265n Shelton, John, 259n, 261n
Ruskin, John, 100 Sicily, 8, 223, 244, 246, 257
Siegel, Robert, 188, 191n
Saddleback, 92, 96 signfied/signifier, 203
sadomasochism, 181 Simon, Sherry, 206n
St Petersburg, 245 Simonides, 133
Salisbury Plain, 139, 234 Simplon Pass, 139
Samson, 241 sin, 140, 157, 215; Original 72; see Fall
Sannazaro, Jacopo, 7 Skeat, T. C., 259n
Satan, 167, 215, 241, 248 Skiddaw, vii, 89, 95
Scafell, vii, 99-100; Scafell Pike, 00 Smith, Fred Manning, 190
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Snell, Bruno, 8
von, 22, 26-8, 30, 36, 42, 44-9, Snowdon, 139
50n, 57, 77n, 140, 142 Snyder, Alice D., 142n
Schiller, Friedrich, 77-8n, 230 Society for Constitutional Information,
Schneider, Elizabeth, 255, 262n 162
Schultz, Max, 181, 190n Society of Gentlemen, 226
Schwartz, Kathleen M., 214, 217n Socinianism, 250
Schwartz, Robert, 217n solipsism, 122-3, 184; see
science, 16, 53, 55-6, 61, 118, 131, self-consciousness
227, 244, 247 solitude, 1, 14-21, 32; see imagination,
Scott, John, 154 the pastoral, Nature
Scott, Sir Walter, 72, 107, 260n Solomon, 38, 233, 260n
Scotus Erigena, 74 Song of Songs, 233
Scriptures, 25, 55, 125 Sotheby, William, 177-20, 123, 125,
Seathwaite, 00 143, 148, 158, 190n
Seat Sandal, 96 Southey, C. C , 87n, 178n
276 INDEX

Southey, Robert, 2, 72, 79-80, 82, 84, Theocritus, 1, 5-6, 8, 12-14, 16, 20-1
87n, 100, 107, 117, 119, 124, 130, theory, 193, 196-9, 200-4
161, 166-7, 254, 260n, 261n; Thomson, James, 227
Doctor, The, 80-1, M, Joan of Arc, Thoreau, Henry David, 14
31, 49 Threlkeld, 95
Spatz, Jonas, 217n Thucydides, 6
Spenser, Edmund, 4, 143, 158, 209, Tieck, Ludwig, 14, 17
214, 242, 247-51, 253, 258, 261n time, 58, 134-5, 146, 197
Spinoza, Baruch, 39, 41, 57, 139 Tooke, Home, 162
spontaneity, 6-8, 23, 25, 73, 76, 92 tourism, 89-91
Stalin, 3 Tower, the, 162, 167
Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy, 2, transcendentalism, 22, 29, 42, 45; see
79, 81, 87n imagination
Stevenson, Warren, 157, 160n transitory, the, 56, 59, 62-6
Stybarrow Dod, 95 treason trials, 162-3, 173
subjectivism, 8 Tribune, The, 164, 178n
Sublime, the, 32-3, 36, 38, 42, 48-9, Trickett, Rachel, 187, 191n
71, 77, 89, 96, 99, 125, 128n, Trinity, the, 29, 34, 43, 47, 140;
239, 244, 246, 256 Trinitarianism, 43
suffering, 71, 109, 182, 187 Tubalcain, 222
suicide, 16, 145, 148 Tulk, C. A., 22
sun-worship, 223-4, 227 Typhon, 223
supernatural, the, 74, 78n, 105-6, tyranny, 6, 169, 174, 215; of the eye,
109-10, 112-13, 130, 217, 253, 90-1
259n, 260n; see ballad,
Coleridge/Wordsworth relations, Ullswater 91, 93, 95
Gothic unconscious, the 50n, 85, 102-4, 111,
superstition 197 116, 157-8, 212, 221, 223, 233,
Suther, Marshall, 191 253, 255, 26In; see dreams, Freud
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 109, Unitarianism, 30, 33-4, 41-4, 51; see
116n God, pantheism
symbiosis: of Coleridge with Upper Stowey, 104
Wordsworth, see
Coleridge/Wordswrth relations; of Valley of the Rocks, 221-2, 244
mind with Nature, 216 Valley of Stones, 221
symbol, 3, 29, 43, 47, 49, 52, 65, Vallon, Annette, 153
72-3, 77, 104, 116, 122-3, 125, Virgil, 6-8, 13, 125-6
128, 138-9, 144, 156-8, 160n,
191n, 199, 202, 208, 216, 220-1, Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, 8
224, 226, 256, 258; see God, Walden Pond, 14
imagination, language Wales, 221
Synesius, Bishop, 39, 48 Wallow Crag, 90-1
Wandering Jew, the, 17
tabula rasa, 40, 70 war against France, 66, 170
Tartarian Tales, The, 226 Warter, J. W., 87n
Tasso, 13, 16 Wasdale, 95, 97
Taylor, William, 107, 110, 116n, 162 Watson, George, 118, 127n, 180, 190
Terror, the, 165-6, 169, 171, 173-4, wedding, 35, 70, 98-9, 179, 186,
176 188-9, 191-2; see marriage
Tetens, Johann Nicolas, 30, 36, 42, Wedgwood, Josiah, 36, 39, 203
346, 48; Philosophische Versuche Wedgwood, Thomas, 92, 118, 127n
(1767), 26 West, Thomas, Guide, 89-90
Thames, the, 248 Westminster Review, The, 262n
Thelwall, Citizen John, 51n, 71, 125, Whalley, George, 44, 68n, 78n, 205,
161-2, 164, 166-8, 171-3, 178n, 206n
230 Wheeler, Kathleen M., 50n
 Index 277
will, the 24-5, 31, 49-50, 72, 78n, Nutting, 153, 208
121, 124, 134-5, 156, 214; failures Old Cumberland Beggar, The, 16
of, 60, 65, 67, 259; free, 70; see Pedlar, The, 9, 11, 35, 151, 173
imagination, unconscious Peter Bell, 256
Wilson, Richard, 90 Philanthropist, The (projected journal),
Windermere, 89, 91 170-1
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 84, 183 Piel Castle, 138
Wordsworth, Caroline, 153 Power of Sound, The, 257
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 16, 62, 86, 89, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), 106,
92, 100, 113, 127n, 136, 148-52, 111, 113, 117-18, 124
154, 157, 175, 183, 221; Journals, Preface to Poems in Two Volumes, 1815,
93, lOln, 120, 151-3 121
Wordsworth, John, 90 Prelude, The, 1799, 11; 1805, 3, 10,
Wordsworth, Jonathan, 1, 22-52, 14-15, 17, 36, 61, 70, 90, 105,
216n, 260n, 265n 122-3, 129, 132-5, 137-40, 155,
Wordsworth, Mary, 79, 136, 153-4, 161-3, 165, 169, 174-7, 178n,
157-8 189, 201, 211, 217n, 236, 256-7,
Wordsworth, Richard, 216n 260n; 1850, 140, 156, 256
Wordsworth, William, 9, 28, 33-4, Prospectus to The Recluse, 29, 137, 171
44-5, 48, 56, 61-2, 69, 74-5, 78n, Recluse, The, 39, 42, 126, 127n, 132,
79, 82, 89-90, 93-4, 98-100, 102, 137, 140, 150, 155, 171
104-5, 107, 179, 201-2 Resolution and Independence, 119, 127n,
Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads (1798), 144, 159n
111, 113, 124 Ruined Cottage, The, 151, 173
Affliction of Margaret, The, 119 Ruth, 114, 152
Alice Fell, 119 Sailor's Mother, The, 19
Barberry Tree, The, 119 Salisbury Plain, 138, 143, 170, 178
Beggars, 119-20 School Exercise, 231
Borderers, The, 159n, 169, 174, 177, 'She dwelt among the untrodden
178n, 234, 260n ways', 153
Brothers, The, 7, 13-14, 19, 114, 151 'A slumber did my spirit seal', 153
Character of the Happy Warrior, The, Solitary Reaper, The, 257
156 Sparrow's Nest, The, 149
Descriptive Sketches,236-7 'Strange Fits of Passion', 153
'Duddon' Sonnets, The, 130 Thorn, The, 33, 108-9, 114, 127n
Essays on Epitaphs, 127n Tinker, The, 119-20
Evening Walk, An, 236-7 Tintern Abbey, 11, 40, 46, 49, 62, 70,
Excursion, The, 3, 79, 126, 130-3, 75, 113, 129, 146, 208, 234
137-8, 140, 141n 'Tis said that some have died for
Guide to the Lakes, A, 90 love', 153
Guilt and Sorrow, 237 To A Butterfly, 121, 149
Hartleap Well, 256 To A Daisy, 121
Home at Grasmere, 50n, 141n To A Skylark, 119-20
Idiot Boy, The, 110, 127n To H C, 178n
Intimations of Immortality from Vale of Esthwaite, The, 112, 116n, 158
Recollections in Early Childhood, Vaudracour and Julia, 19
143-4, 147-8, 155-6, 164, 178n, 'The world is too much with us', 9
179, 190n Wrangham, Francis, 151
'In Storm and Tempest', 18 Wright, B. A., 217n
Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew Tree, Wye Valley, 234
19
Lucy Gray, 143, 182, 187-9 Xanadu, 219, 243, 248
Lyrical Ballads (1798), 2, 33, 94, 97,
102-16, 118n, 130, 150, 173, 208 Young, Edward, Night Thoughts, 70
Lyrical Ballads (1800), 152-3
Michael, 6, 13, 19, 114-15