The reputation of Romantic poet, critic and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge has long been overshadowed by William Wordsworth, his friend and Lyrical Ballads co-author. Oxford professor Seamus Perry talks us through the books that showcase Coleridge's idiosyncratic brilliance.
First, I have to askâhow did you come to love Coleridge?Â
When I was a student, my main undergraduate tutor, Jonathan Wordsworth, was a Wordsworthian scholar. So, I became deeply immersed in English Romanticism, and I came to love Wordsworth very much. But I didnât want to write about him, because I thought Jonathan had written what there was to say. And Coleridge was within the Wordsworthian shadow, but not Wordsworth himselfâI suppose thatâs how I first came upon him.
Then when I started thinking about him and writing about him, I just became fascinated by his diversity and his miscellaneousness. Thatâs a kind of richness to Coleridge; it makes him perhaps a bit vulnerable and human. Heâs much less heroic than Wordsworth or Byron.
From an early age, Coleridge described himself as a boy âhaunted by spectresâ, âfretfulâ, âinordinately passionateâ. Is there a lingering sense of him as a lovable failure, in Wordsworthâs shadow?
I certainly think Coleridge thought of himself very much as a failure within the shadow of Wordsworthâs success. I think, as your question implies, the truth is a bit more complicated than that. Wordsworth is in all sorts of ways just as indebted to Coleridge as Coleridge ever was to Wordsworth.
Wordsworth wouldnât have become what he was unless he met Coleridge at that particular time in his development. And Coleridge does talk a lot about his own failure, thatâs true. I think thatâs one of the things that makes him quite an attractive figure to people outside universities as well as inside universities.
âWordsworth is in all sorts of ways just as indebted to Coleridge as Coleridge ever was to Wordsworth.â
A lot of his popularity in the world of real people, real readers, comes from those great poems like âThe Ancient Marinerâ or âKubla Khanâ or âChristabelâ that are either unfinished, otherwise fragmentary, or donât have a formal finish and polish that a more professional (if you like) poet would have given them.
Biographies like Richard Holmesâs are very good at invoking the way in which amazing, imaginative accomplishment and deep human failure and inadequacy are completely intertwined in Coleridge in a way thatâs engaging on a human level.
I think thatâs a good lead into your first book, which is an edition of Lyrical Ballads. Can you tell us a bit about the context of Lyrical Balladsâthe friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge, and its place in the Romantic period?
Sure. This is a book written when theyâre both living in Somerset. Theyâve decided they want to go visit Germany because Germany isâas it will be for a large amount of the nineteenth centuryâwhere progressive, avant-garde thoughts are being thought. If you want to be on the edge of modernity, Germany is the place to go, and German is the language you need to read. Wordsworth never learns German properly, but Coleridge does, and it totally changes his life as a thinker. He becomes totally immersed in contemporary German thought and is never the same again. (Wordsworth implies in various places that he thinks it ruined himâbut thatâs a different story.)
Anyway, there they are in Somerset; theyâre going on long walking tours every day, and theyâre loving each otherâs company. Itâs not just a diad, itâs a triad; Dorothy Wordsworth is also a part of this incredibly creative and exciting and dynamic friendship. Of course, thereâs also Mrs. Coleridge and some little Coleridges around, but they didnât really fit into the excitement of this new relationship.
By the time Lyrical Ballads is published in 1798, theyâve been in each othersâ pockets for about a year. Wordsworth hasnât written much until the spring of 1798, and then he starts again. But Coleridge has written some of the best things he ever writes, including âThe Ancient Marinerâ, the first part of âChristabelâ, âFrost at Midnightâ, and other bits and pieces.
So why Lyrical Ballads? Well, obviously, to go to Germany they needed to raise some moneyâand ballads were very voguish. So if you wrote a really good ballad, especially if it had a supernatural quality to itâsomething a bit Gothicâthen you could sell it to a magazine and make a bit of money. Thatâs how they thought they could subsidise the trip to Germany. They planned what in retrospect we can now see was âThe Ancient Marinerâ on a walk along the North Somerset coast in November 1797. Wordsworth remembers, almost half a century later, the planning of the ballad.
âHaving listened to Coleridge talk for the last six months, Wordsworth finally starts to write poetry again.â
They must have planned it in some high spirits. Wordsworth soon realises that theyâre not going to be able to collaborate on it, and he just leaves it to Coleridge to write. Coleridge writes, and writes, and writes, and after six months, âThe Ancient Marinerâ emerges, at least in its first formâand thatâs the first poem in Lyrical Ballads.
The most exciting poems by Wordsworth in that volume are written in the spring (often his most productive period). Having listened to Coleridge talk for the last six months, he finally starts to write poetry again. He writes some of his most extraordinary poems like âThe Thornâ and âGoody Blake and Harry Gilâ. But Coleridgeâs presence in Lyrical Ballads is âThe Ancient Marinerâ, which dominates the first part of the book.
The book in 1798 is published anonymously. The reason for that is no one knows who Wordsworth is anyway, says Coleridge in a letter at the timeâif he put his name on the title-page, theyâll just get into trouble, because âmy name stinks.â What he means is that Coleridge had quite a large reputation, especially in the southwest of England and London, not for poetry but for radical politics.
He was known as a sympathiser with French revolutionary ideas, which in a very qualified way he was: he didnât sympathise with French atheism, but he did sympathise with certain aspects of French republicanism. I suppose the two poets must have thought that putting his name on the title page would just be a provocation to hostile reviewers to attack his Jacobin radicalism.
How does it change in the next edition, in 1800?
One thing that changes is that Wordsworthâs name appears on the title-page, but not Coleridgeâs. It becomes a two-volume work with lots and lots of new poems, almost all of them by Wordsworth.
âThe Ancient Marinerâ, which was the opening number in the 1798 volume, gets shuffled to towards the end of volume one in the 1800 volume. Wordsworthâs taken over, reallyâI donât think in a particularly hostile way, but heâs just been extremely productive, and has written some of the poems for which heâll be remembered as long as heâs remembered.
The hidden poignant Coleridgean story for the 1800Â Lyrical Ballads is that Coleridgeâs big contribution was supposed to be âChristabelââbut it becomes clear that he canât finish it. In the end, rather than publish it as a fragment, itâs decided that they wonât publish âChristabelâ after all. This of course leaves a bit of a gap in volume two. To fill it, Wordsworth sits down and writes âMichaelâ. It must be one of Wordsworthâs greatest poems, but it arises out of Coleridgeâs inability to bring âChristabelâ to a conclusion.
Theyâre very popular quite quickly. Theyâre published all over Europe. I think itâs one of the most memorable illustrations of any poem. The nineteenth century loves illustrating poems, but âThe Ancient Marinerâ gets treated spectacularly by the standards of the illustrative nineteenth century.
Coleridge only lived to see one illustration of the poem done by Michael David Scott, and he wasnât terribly impressed by them. One of the things he said Scott got wrong was portraying the ancient mariner as an old man at the time of the storyâthe whole point, Coleridge said, was that when the events of the poem happened, he was a young man. Heâs an old man now, but a young man then.
Itâs not just a poem about terrible things that happen, itâs a poem about how you remember terrible things that happen, narrativise them, and try to make sense of them. Itâs a very powerful, extraordinarily perceptive poem about coping with trauma. How do you write a poem about making sense of experiences you canât rationalise fully?
So itâs an illustration of how the Victorians are carrying this Romantic poet forward.
Yes, thatâs a good thought. Itâs also a remarkably open poem. Itâs like a Shakespeare playâwhat makes it so compelling is the mystery or enigma at the heart of it. So itâs interpretable in all sorts of ways.
Having said that, thereâs a huge amount in The Ancient Mariner which involved the deepest, darkest and most tumultuous bits of Coleridgeâs soul, which is why he could never leave it alone. Itâs a very, very heavily revised poem, and whenever he re-prints it he goes back and changes, adds and tweaks things. If you count the versions in a very strict way, there are something like seventeen or eighteen distinct versions of the poem. Heâs still tinkering with it in the 1830s when heâs quite an old man.
Those marginal annotations in The Rime of the Ancient Marinerâhow are we supposed to encounter them?
Thatâs a very, very good question. I suppose there are two basic answers, and they might both be true. One is that the notes in the margin are genuinely meant to clarify whatâs going on in the poem, because the poem seems to have confused many of its initial readers, who didnât see a moral shape or structure to it.
When the albatross is shot, it brings down a curse upon the mariner. Then, later on in the poem, the marginal note says âThe curse is finally expiatedââso thereâs a kind of Crime and Punishment redemption structure the notes seem to emphasise and clarify.
If you pursue that line of enquiry, then the possibility arises that the marginal notes arenât written in Coleridgeâs own voice as such, but perhaps in the voice of some fictive editor. The ancient mariner pretends to be a medieval ballad, and medieval ballads in the eighteenth century often came with editorsâ notesâthe paraphernalia of the sort you get in Percyâs Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). It may be that Coleridge is doing something a little bit more like Nabokovâsomething incredibly sophisticated, with many textual layers.
It seems very much ahead of its time in that respect.
I think thatâs right. The idea the poem is partly about interpretationâhow you interpret and misinterpret thingsâis an intriguing one.
Quite a few of the marginal notes either seem to be irrelevant, or digressive. Some very beautifully: Some quite comically. Some are just wrong. I had a student once who went through and categorised all the marginal notes into those which were wrong, those which were right, and those which were ambiguous. I now canât remember what the pie-chart looked like, but a large section of the pie-chart were notes that looked erroneous.
Thatâs quite interesting, isnât it? If that floats the idea of erroneousness and misinterpretation being one of the things that the poem is interested in, it invites us to think about our own reception of the poem. Having the marginal notes is a way of dramatising, as it were, a reading of that poem just as weâre reading the poem. But also it invites us to think about the way the mariner is an interpreter, or possibly a mis-interpreter, of his own experience.
It reminds me of Byron on ColeridgeââI wish he would explain his explanationsâ. But heâs showing the way bad explanations can be wisdom and illumination of an altogether different kind.
Thatâs absolutely right. And one thing the ancient mariner is completely convinced about is that because he shot the albatross, all this terrible stuff happened. If you had to paraphrase the story, telling someone who had never read the poem what it was about, thatâs what you would say. But the more you look at it, the more it seems like after the bird is shot, the weather improves, and everyone on board the ship tells the mariner heâs done a really good thing. Then the weather turns, and everyone turns their back on him. So the causal link is actually very precarious, and itâs most entrenched in the marinerâs own mind. Itâs about the power of narratives to make sense of whatâs happened to you.
So many of Coleridgeâs poems are about just thatâthe power of memory, perception, and making sense of experience. For your next book, you picked Coleridgeâs Complete Poems. Can you take us through the hits and misses of his poetic output?
I suppose heâs famous for two sorts of poetry, which on the face of it have almost nothing to do with each other. One is what came to be called âsupernatural poemsâ: âThe Ancient Marinerâ, the unfinished âChristabelâ, and âKubla Khanâ of course. Theyâre still fairly common currency in a general readership. They are all about the sorts of things weâve been talking about in âThe Ancient Marinerâ, one way or another.
And then a completely different category of poems, some written alongside the supernatural poems, chronologically speaking, are blank verse poems. They are poems of personal voice, reflection, memory recollection, sometimes confession. Those are poems like âFrost at Midnightâ, âThis Lime-tree Bower my Prisonâ and âDejection: An Odeâ.
Both those categories of poems are extremely innovative in all sorts of ways. Particularly the second categoryâwhich come to be known as the âConversation poemsâ for their particular style and conversational qualityâhave gone on to influence many later nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets.
I always think of especially âDejection: An Odeâ, which is an absolute landmark and in some ways the last big poem he writes, in 1802. He really gets going in 1795â96, so itâs quite a truncated period. Of course he continues to write poems of one kind or another for as long as he lives, but he writes them as someone who no longer thinks of himself primarily as a poet. Theyâre written with his left hand, while his right hand is writing philosophy or journalism.
So âDejectionâ, although it doesnât mark the end of his poetic career, does mark a turning point. Itâs an extraordinary poem written out of great psychological and emotional unhappiness that he associates with the death of his own imagination. That ideaâthat you might find in the death of your imagination a way of writing imaginativelyâis an astonishing discovery, really. A load of twentieth-century writing comes from that.
Itâs also about the death of his love, right? It seems that at the moment when Coleridgeâs personal life erupts into flames, a good poem comes out of it.
I think thatâs right, but his emotional life is in flames pretty much all the time. Obviously, it is completely about emotional unhappiness. Itâs about falling in love with a woman and not being able to love her because of various constraints, like being already married.
Someone said, I canât remember who now, âYou could not have had a better argument for the efficacy of adultery than that poem.â It would have been by far the easiest way of dealing with the issue.
But the idea that you might find in the death of the imagination a route to the imagination is such an extraordinary thing, and it anticipates all sorts of modern writers like T S Eliot, Wallace Stevens and Samuel Beckett. Beckett writes an extraordinary short text called Imagination Dead Imagine (1965). Well, if you wanted to summarise âDejection: An Odeâ in three words, it would be that. Or, as Wallace Stevens said, âthe absence of imagination had itself to be imaginedâ.
One place where we see Coleridgeâs imagination come alive is the Notebooks. Why should we read them?
I think in a way the Notebooks are his masterpiece. Partly because theyâre an opportunity for him to exercise or to demonstrate his genius without any of the obligation to finish things that he found so impossible.
Somewhere the great Coleridge scholar John Beer observes that it wasnât that he lacked the industry to finish things. The problem with finishing things for Coleridge was typically that he saw two positions, or two totally different and contradictory truths. That made finishing things quite hard, because you have to choose either one or the other, or somehow try and synthesise them. Thatâs the uphill struggle in the kinds of abstract, esoteric philosophy Coleridge spends a lot of time thinking about.
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The notebooks free him from that. Thereâs something about the improvisatory, moment-to-moment, spontaneous business of a notebookâand especially that the notebooks arenât going to be published. Of course, thereâs some evidence that as time went on, he realised they might be, and they get more formal. But at least for the first several years, these are going to be read by no one, really, apart from perhaps a loved one or yourself in ten yearsâ time.
I think that freedom from the sense of a scrutinizing public eye was very enabling for Coleridge. Heâs quite a lonely man for a lot of his life. His notebooks become a kind of confidante. He wrote things in his notebook because he had nobody else to talk to.
And there are bits of his conversations tooâhe records what people say to him, what they think of him, and rehearses his own responses in his notebooks. Beautifully, heâs fictionalising his own encounters.
He was also a brilliant observer of nature: natural scenes, trees, landscapes and sunsets. Some of that gets into the poetry. I think the place where heâs at his greatest is what we would now think of as nature writing.
He writes beautifully about his young children, and satirically about the things that he finds: wonderful passages about what aspens look like when they first come out, what larch buds look like, and fantastic bits of self-portraiture as well. Here heâs talking about the way in which heâs a talkative fellow: âmy illustrations swallow up my thesisâ. These wonderful bits of self-analysis are whimsical, not always torturous (though sometimes torturous as well.)
Heâs funny, too.
Yes. He mustâve been extremely good company when he was on form. I think he got a bit more pompous as he got older, but as a young man I think he was brilliantly witty.
Your last book is Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridgeâs stab at a coherent theory of the imagination. Leslie Stephen said it was âput together with a pitchforkâ, âwithout form or proportionâ (âColeridgeâ, 1888). What does he mean by that?
The book is thrown together a bit. I suppose Leslie Stephen means like an old-fashioned hay-stack is put together with a pitchforkâyou just pile up whatever hay you find hanging around. And it is a bit of a hodge-podge. Itâs a great example of Coleridge not being able to finish something.
If you read volume one, which is the most rebarbative of the two volumes, you find yourself, after a few hundred pages or so, in the midst of some really turgid philosophical deductions. Coleridge is trying to argue that the passive philosophies of the mind that eighteenth-century Associationist psychology typically describe are wrong. He wants the mind to be intrinsically active and creative.
Passivity, inherited from an eighteenth-century philosophical tradition, is what heâs rejecting. He wants to put forward an innate, divine creativity informing not just works of art but all our perceptions. When you put it like that, it sounds straightforward, but my goodness, it becomes extremely tangled. Itâs incredibly difficult for most readers, including most Coleridgeans, to fully master it.
Then, when heâs in the thick of all this, he suddenly stops, and thereâs a letterânotionally, a letter from one of his friendsâsaying, âI think this is going to lose your readership; I donât think you want to do all this. People have bought this thinking itâs going to be your literary life and opinions! They donât want to read this philosophy stuff. Anyway, I wish you well, dear Coleridge, yours foreverâ, and so on.
And Coleridge then writes, âhaving received this letter I realised of course he was right, and Iâd better drop all thisââitâs the most extraordinary moment in a book. If you look at the letters Coleridge wrote around this time, of course there was no friend: it was Coleridge.
And he includes it?
He includes it. Coleridge writing a letter to Coleridge. Itâs an extraordinary momentâa stroke of the self-deprecating, self-ruining wit that characterises him.
After all these shenanigans, he gives very famous definitions of imagination and fancy. Then you turn a page and begin volume two, which I think is the place to start for the modern readerâhe talks about his friendship with Wordsworth, the origin of Lyrical Ballads, and he talks about Shakespeare and Milton as being kinds of poetic genius.
Then thereâs a long account of whatâs great and not so great about Wordsworthâs poetry. By this stage, theyâve fallen out. Some of that personal scratchiness gets into the literary criticism. But they remain some of the best pages of literary criticism about Wordsworth ever.
Theyâre wonderfully generous and perceptive about the things in Wordsworth that are great, and theyâre not actually wrong about the things in Wordsworth that arenât so great. Itâs just the contrast between the beauties and the shortcomings is so stark that the defects perhaps come out sounding rougher than Coleridge intended.
So you think thereâs a case to read it out of order?
Yes. The very first chapters are about his education and schooling are very approachable, and you can pick up again at chapter fourteen where he talks about getting to know Mr. Wordsworth for the first time and about the imagination.
He talks very beautifully and memorably about the imagination as the thing that works to balance and reconcile opposite and discordant qualities. Itâs a wonderful formulation that once you have in your head, you donât need to apply to just Coleridge and Wordsworthâitâs a wonderful idea of how the imagination works generally.
The book is full of extraordinarily diverse and miscellaneous things which are, admittedly in a kind of precarious and ramshackle way, being brought together into a single thing. In that respect, perhaps it does at least gesture to the acts that itâs interested in describing.
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Seamus Perry
Seamus Perry is a Fellow of Balliol College and a Professor in the English Faculty of the University of Oxford. He has published books and essays on Coleridge as well as other nineteenth and twentieth century English poets and critics. His most recent book is Rollercoasters: An Anthology of Poetry from the Romantics to the Present Day edited with David Womersley (Oxford University Press).
Seamus Perry is a Fellow of Balliol College and a Professor in the English Faculty of the University of Oxford. He has published books and essays on Coleridge as well as other nineteenth and twentieth century English poets and critics. His most recent book is Rollercoasters: An Anthology of Poetry from the Romantics to the Present Day edited with David Womersley (Oxford University Press).