WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, DOROTHY WORDSWORTH, SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
In Burns, William Wordsworth admired what seemed to him the spontaneity and the sense of a common life to which he aspired. What is second nature to Burns is cultivated by Wordsworth. His wholeness of vision is deliberated. In the old poet it evolves into a kind of rueful dogma. When real emotion intrudes, as in the “Lucy” poems lamenting the loss of an innocent and of innocence, his visual imagination blurs as if with tears; he resorts to conventional tropes. The poems are popular because they are moving; yet are they not also moving because they are sentimental?
The trajectory of Wordsworth’s work in the nineteenth century is like T. S. Eliot’s in the twentieth. He shakes the age awake with a freshness of language and vision, then changes tack; it is as though Moses led his tribe out of the eighteenth century and then turned around and tried to go back again. Tinkering with his early poems to make them more correct, writing verses of reaction and recantation, he does what Eliot does in the later essays and in Four Quartets. He abandons a new faith to embrace the old. It is no longer serviceable. He settles into a winter of “long and piteous complacency” beside an ecclesiastical Tory hearth. Hazlitt considered his later philosophic works “a departure from, a dereliction of his first principles.” Readers can choose among his several phases, but it is hard for the lover of the young Wordsworth to love the old. Hazlitt declares: “Liberty (the philosopher’s and the poet’s bride) had fallen a victim, meanwhile, to the murderous practices of the hag, Legitimacy. Proscribed by court-hirelings, too romantic for the herd of vulgar politicians, our enthusiast stood at bay, and at last turned on the pivot of a subtle casuistry to the unclean side: but his discursive reason would not let him trammel himself into a poet-laureate or stamp-distributor, and he stopped, ere he had quite passed that well-known ‘bourne from which no traveller returns’—and so has sunk into torpid, uneasy repose, tantalised by useless resources, haunted by vain imaginings, his lips idly moving, but his heart for ever still, or, as the shattered chords vibrate of themselves, making melancholy music to the ear of memory!” Hazlitt’s vehemence is that of a man disappointed in a great enthusiasm and hope.
He remembers his first visit to Alfoxden, just after the French Revolution, a time when “the mind opened, and a softness might be perceived coming over the heart of individuals, beneath ‘the scales that fence’ our self-interest.” Wordsworth is more succinct: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive...” Hazlitt recalls that “Wordsworth himself was from home, but his sister kept house, and set before us a frugal repast; and we had free access to her brother’s poems, the Lyrical Ballads, which were still in manuscript, or in the form of Sybilline Leaves. I dipped into a few of these with great satisfaction, and with the faith of a novice. I slept that night in an old room with blue hangings, and covered with the round-faced family-portraits of the age of George I, and II, and from the wooded declivity of the adjoining park that overlooked my window, at the dawn of day, could ‘—hear the loud stag speak.’ ” The novitiate was neither brief nor casual. Hazlitt grew close to Wordsworth, Coleridge and their circle, he witnessed their estrangements, how friendship turned to formal acquaintance, intimacy to legend. On first meeting, Wordsworth seemed to him “gaunt and Don Quixote–like. He was quaintly dressed (according to the costume of that unconstrained period) in a brown fustian jacket and striped pantaloons. There was something of a roll, a lounge in his gait, not unlike his own Peter Bell. There was a severe, worn pressure of thought about his temples, a fire in his eye (as if he saw something in objects more than the outward appearance), an intense high narrow forehead, a Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by strong purpose and feeling, and a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth, a good deal at variance with the solemn, stately expression of the rest of his face... He sat down and talked very naturally and freely, with a mixture of clear gushing accents in his voice, a deep guttural intonation, and a strong tincture of the northern burr, like the crust on wine.” His native Northumberland did not leave his voice.
Even at this period, in dress as in his contradictory manner and inflection, he is not quite in focus. There remained something incomplete about him, as about his radicalism: he always left a road open to the past. Robert Graves says he “even deigned to apostrophise a spade. He had been lending a hand in a neighbour’s potato patch; but though he called a spade a spade he could not bring himself to call a labourer a labourer, or a potato patch a potato patch. The title is: ‘To the Spade of a Friend (an agriculturist). Composed while we were labouring together in his Pleasure Ground.’ ” Burns had touched (albeit intensely) only the tips of his nerves. Hazlitt says “his poetry is founded on setting up an opposition (and pushing it to the utmost length) between the natural and the artificial; between the spirit of humanity, and the spirit of fashion and of the world.” He explains the political impulses behind this innovation: “The political changes of the day were the model on which he formed and conducted his poetical experiments... His Muse... is a levelling one.”
So Wordsworth’s last four decades were an aftermath: he wrote copiously and competently, but in the main dully. When he was seventy-three he became poet laureate. “Daddy Wordsworth,” the translator and poet Edward Fitzgerald called him. Rossetti’s quip was, “Good, you know, but unbearable.” For Tennyson he was (metaphorically) “thickankled.” The poems that confronted the prejudices of his age and challenge, even as they provide, some of the prejudices of ours, were for the most part written before 1807. Then he began to recognize a paralyzing truth with which his direct plainspeaking verse could not readily deal. “The deeper malady is better hid, / The world is poisoned at the heart.”
He came into the world “trailing clouds of glory” but with a hint of the winter that would overtake him, in the year of Chatterton’s death, 1770, at Cockermouth in Cumberland. His beloved sister, Dorothy, was born the next year. By the time he was thirteen he was an orphan. His feeling of isolation stemmed in part from the loss of his parents: the family is for him a recurring image of stability, security and continuity. Also, of a special kind of sadness.
Educated at Hawkshead Grammar School, he began writing verse half in, half out of the manner of Pope. At the age of sixteen he composed the lines
Calm is all nature as a resting wheel.
The kine are couched upon the dewy grass;
The horse alone, seen dimly as I pass,
Is cropping audibly his later meal.
The first two lines are literary, the latter literal. Within a conventional apprentice piece, the original mind of Wordsworth is at work on perceived nature. The poem, about memory and the image of home, isolation, and resentment at the officious care some people lavished on him, hints at themes he would explore exhaustively later.
At St. John’s College, Cambridge, he failed to distinguish himself. In 1790 he went to France and Italy, crossing the Alps on foot. The next year he returned to France and became involved with the revolutionary movement and with Annette Vallon, a Frenchwoman who bore him a daughter. He did not marry her and an unattested remorse followed from this as from the defeat of his political idealism.
His first interesting published poems appeared in 1793. “An Evening Walk” and “Descriptive Sketches” relate to some of his experiences on the Continent. The first, in couplet form, is full of Augustan abstractions and observed physical detail, with little connection between the two levels of language and perception: he renders sight and thought, not integrated vision. “Descriptive Sketches” includes excellent writing and he used it when he came to write “Cambridge and the Alps” in The Prelude. His politics are eloquent, but born of thought rather than observation:
Once, Man entirely free, alone and wild,
Was blest as free—for he was Nature’s child,
He, all superior but his God disdained,
Walked none restraining, and by none restrained:
Confessed no law but what his reason taught,
Did all he wished, and wished but what he ought.
The optimistic ideology of the time identified the reasonable—hence noble—savage, the natural man. The French Revolution declined into the Terror and its aftermath. Wordsworth’s enthusiasm died. He wrote The Borderers (1795–96), an unperformable Shakespearean tragedy replete with a rational anarchism borrowed from William Godwin, and the poem “The Convict,” in anapestic measure, in which he examined the physical and emotional nature of a man isolated and in fear.
Wordsworth met Coleridge in 1795. They became neighbors in Somerset and collaborated on Lyrical Ballads (1798). They traveled to the Continent and Wordsworth and Dorothy spent the winter together in Goslar, Germany. The poems written in Goslar are among his best. A winter landscape, the encouraging presence of his loving sister, the recent memory of his conversations with Coleridge, which clarified his own poetic processes: such factors brought him to maturity. The poems are personal and include the first book and other passages of The Prelude (written at Coleridge’s suggestion), “Nutting” and the “Lucy” poems. The verses composed in Somerset still bear—apart from the magnificent “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey”—eighteenth-century affinities. The Goslar poems belong to the nineteenth, to his own voice. In the “Lucy” poems he struck briefly a tone and manner that he never repeated and that none of his imitators or disciples, not even Arnold, approached, try as they might. It is not possible to relate the poems to specific incidents or a specific person, despite the theories that have been advanced. The loved and lamented one may be emblematic. The physicality of the devotion and the sense of loss, the mysterious courtship and hinted characterization, and most poignantly the vision of death, bring these poems closer to ballads than the literary ballads Wordsworth had composed before.
In 1799 he moved with Dorothy to Grasmere in Cumberland, where he spent most of his remaining years. He wrote his rustic short epic of hope and isolation, “Michael,” in 1800. A new, enlarged edition of Lyrical Ballads, including the brilliant and provocative “Observations,” appeared in the same year. Later he added his note on “Poetic Diction.” From this period date some of the best sonnets. Like Milton, whom he invokes in “Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour,” he uses the form most effectively for civic subjects: a call to arms, an exhortation, a concise statement of principle, a broad observation. His best-known sonnet, “Upon Westminster Bridge,” is a love poem addressed to a city.
He married Mary Hutchinson in 1802, much to Dorothy’s discomfiture. Hazlitt found Dorothy, herself a remarkable diarist and an unremarkable poet, distressing to watch. “Her eyes were not soft, as Mrs. Wordsworth’s, nor were they fierce or bold; but they were wild and startling.” Deep she seemed, but with a depth Hazlitt found repellent, as he did the monomania of her devotion to William.
Loss—his brother’s death, Coleridge’s physical decline, Dorothy’s troubles, political developments in France—sobered him. The first version of The Prelude was completed in 1805. It was not published in his lifetime but in 1850, the year of his death, by which time he had altered it significantly, not always for the better. The year 1807 marks—with the publication of “Intimations of Immortality,” “Miscellaneous Sonnets” and “Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty”—the end of Wordsworth’s most fruitful time.
He wrote on—and on—however, freed by a sinecure of £400 per annum. He traveled. In 1814 The Excursion appeared. It incorporated “The Story of Margaret” (“The Ruined Cottage”), his first major attempt at blank verse, which so impressed Coleridge in 1797. The Excursion is a poem in nine books. The Prelude was to lead into it; and it was to be succeeded by a third extended poem, the three under the general title The Recluse. Coleridge helped him map it out as a philosophical poem about man, nature and society, recounting in Table Talk his precise advice on the structure. “I think Wordsworth possessed more of the genius of a great philosophic poet than any man I ever knew, or, as I believe, has existed in England since Milton; but it seems to me that he ought never to have abandoned the contemplative position which is peculiarly—perhaps I might say exclusively—fitted for him. His proper title is Spectator ab extra.” He returns to this theme, comparing Wordsworth and the great German poet Goethe in their “peculiarity of utter non-sympathy with the subjects of their poetry. They are always, both of them... feeling for, never with, their characters.”
But Wordsworth was not Coleridge’s kind of philosopher. Coleridge—who helped his friend in many ways toward his best verse—bears some responsibility for giving Wordsworth a distorted sense of his gift. Hazlitt shows no mercy: “Mr Wordsworth’s mind is obtuse, except as it is the organ and the receptacle of accumulated feelings; it is not analytic, but synthetic; it is reflecting, rather than theoretical.” More specifically, “The personages, for the most part, were low, the fare rustic: the plan raised expectations which were not fulfilled, and the effect was like being ushered into a stately hall and invited to sit down to a splendid banquet in the company of clowns, and with nothing but successive courses of apple-dumplings served up. It was not even toujours perdrix!”
According to Wordsworth, The Recluse was to have “for its principle subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement.” The sensations were within his range, the opinions were less distinguished and less readily accommodated. In The Prelude, ideas rise out of experience; in The Excursion they are applied to it. The Excursion depends on a flimsy narrative. It tries to develop extended debates on religious faith. A pastor illustrates the effects of faith by adducing examples from the people planted in his churchyard. This is not the epitomizing spirit of Gray but the expansive moralizing of Gower. The poet draws general conclusions; the final books reflect on social themes, particularly the Industrial Revolution, its effect on the poorer classes, and the need for proper educational institutions for the children of the poor. An enormous essay, civically admirable, the verse never quite delivers the sense of right truth that we get from Pope, or from Crabbe.
Other poems take plots from legend and classical mythology. Wordsworth became enslaved to narrative and argument. A few early poems appeared in later years, “Peter Bell” (1798) and “The Waggoner” (1805) as late as 1817. But they feel out of place, their freshness dulled by context. Of the later poems, “Yarrow Revisited” is among the best, an occasional piece that draws on the experience of two earlier poems. But it is slight compared with what came before. His conversion in his later years was complete. A young radical became a tetchy foe of liberalism. Edmund Burke, the incomparably eloquent Tory, became a hero. The author of The Prelude composed Ecclesiastical Sonnets; the pensive solitary became a comfortable talker.
Coleridge kept faith with the Wordsworth he valued, the pre-Excursion poet. The earlier poems reveal, he says, a “union of deep feeling with profound thought, the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying, the objects observed; and above all the original gift”—he shares it with Spenser and Milton, incidentally—“of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew drops.” We quarrel with the word “ideal”; it introduces a Coleridgean distortion. Otherwise the account is hard to better.
Wordsworth develops his concerns simply. Nature was a first passion. He became a radical enthusiast with a social vision that the French Revolution seemed to realize but, as it happened, betrayed. From the brotherhood of man he turned to particular men, solitaries in known landscapes, and the expression of nature in relation to these men, the correspondence between a given world and the inner life—a synthesis of his earlier concerns. His development through the three phases occurred over a decade. After 1807 religious faith overcame him and was either the cause or effect of his loss of imaginative certainty. Adjusting to orthodoxy, he was no longer a discoverer.
A poem such as “Resolution and Independence” in its very title records a debt to the eighteenth century, the age of Johnson, of moral and psychological categories. Wordsworth’s poetry remains normative, not aberrant or extreme. He portrays extremity only to celebrate survival and endurance. Even the relative absence of “poetic diction” in Lyrical Ballads is a radical response to conventions of the eighteenth century, deliberate strategy, not originality in the spirit of Burns, Blake or Smart. The title Lyrical Ballads announces to readers with Augustan expectations that distinct genres, lyric and ballad, were to be fused, in disregard of the rules.
“Ballad” misleads readers as to Wordsworth’s attitude to the language of poetry. “Ballad” suggests “popular” verse in a popular idiom. But “We Are Seven” was the only Lyrical Ballad published as a broadsheet. None has an especially dramatic narrative line. Narrative of action was never one of his special talents. His language avoids off-the-peg diction; it is a language men might speak—they would hardly be likely to sing it. The poems address not the vulgar audience to which Burns appeals but the audience that read Crabbe and Cowper, the audience whose language Wordsworth, with a Cumberland accent, actually spoke. In Lyrical Ballads only Coleridge’s “The Ancient Mariner” achieves consistent balladic effects.
Wordsworth set down his intentions in the famous preface to the 1805 edition. Against the “gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers,” he proposed “to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them... in a selection of language really used by men.” He does not mean pseudo-rustic, but natural language without decoration or conventional formulas. “A selection of language” precisely defines “diction.” He chooses an alternative diction, but diction nonetheless. It may approximate at times to the language of unaffected countrymen, “because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived,” but he “purified” it of defects repugnant to reason. Arnold called it (approvingly) writing without style. For Wordsworth “voice” is the language people really use, something they share, not—as it has become—something specific to an individual, identifiable from the “voice-print” of distinctive or eccentric usage. He would have had little truck with Hopkins, none at all with Sylvia Plath.
Beyond his poetic aims he had a philosophical and psychological purpose: to trace through incidents and situations “the primary laws of our nature: chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.” The terms derive from his reading of the philosopher David Hartley, who refuted the idea of innate moral instincts and proposed theories of association and inference.
Wordsworth speaks to and of men. His solitaries achieve dignity in spite of suffering and loss, especially in “Michael” and “The Old Cumberland Beggar.” Their suffering is a part of them, much as they are a part of the landscape in which they move. He best delineates character when he concentrates on aftermath. If he seems to dwell, to the point of relishing, on the suffering of others, he is drawn to it as a purifying force, a force that isolates and defines essential integrity.
In the “Preface” he formulates his view of the poetic process. “I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity; the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins.” It is the least understood of Wordsworth’s statements. He does not say that poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquillity”: that is the point of departure. Poetry re-creates primary experience. “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (1804) reads almost as a paradigm of this belief.
The two versions (1805, 1850) of The Prelude, Wordsworth’s most remarkable work, differ. The old poet strengthened weak phrases, drew texture in more tightly, omitted some of the interjections, changed to transitive verbs many “to be” constructions. He subtly altered emphases, making the poem more literary. There is thematic change too. He plays down his early radicalism, his antagonism to Cambridge; he blames himself for his French enthusiasms; he adds fine passages, among them a tribute to Burke. Nature he regards more meekly, God becomes an orthodox figure. “Feeling”—essential in the early version—becomes contemplative, “observing,” “pondering.” For all the “literary” gains, there is a loss of immediacy.
The thirteen books (fourteen in 1850) of The Prelude trace the “Growth of a Poet’s Mind” in Hartleyan terms, from first consciousness to his disappointment with the French Revolution and his return to nature in an altered mind. The poem is dedicated to Coleridge and in its direct address has at times the candor of a verse epistle, directed to a single recipient, not a wide audience. We seem to overhear. He deploys blank verse with such freedom and spoken assurance that it is hard to decide whether to call it iambic pentameter or quantitative measure. The Prelude is philosophical rather than visionary. Wordsworth’s literal imagination required that he establish scene or incident before he could release a meaning. Blake is consistently visionary, while for Wordsworth there are “in our existence spots of time / Which with distinct pre-eminence retain / A vivifying virtue.” He requires a “real solid world / Of images.” His imagination was for the most part “Subservient strictly to the external things / With which it communed.” Nature, as we learn from the Tintern Abbey poem, he went to first “more like a man / Flying from something that he dreads than one / Who sought the thing he loved.” The first books of The Prelude provide a fuller account. Nature becomes a force with which the isolated imagination is attuned:
For I, methought, while the sweet breath of Heaven
Was blowing on my body, felt within
A corresponding mild creative breeze,
A vital breeze which travelled gently on
O’er things which it had made, and is become
A tempest, a redundant energy
Vexing its own creation.
Such energy must issue in creation.
Fear (danger) and beauty (desire) are fundamental; he exposes them in various incidents: when he waits for the horses, or sees a gibbet, or rows out on Lake Windermere; when he violates a copse. If he responds to nature destructively he feels footsteps following, or the mountain itself in pursuit. This is part of the reciprocity with nature which formed his imagination, the loss of which depleted his poetry. In Book Three the dissociation from nature begins. Cambridge, that multum in parvo of so much that repelled him, quickened his temporary alienation. But in Book Four, above Hawkshead, his consecration to poetry occurs: he triumphantly regains his sense of nature. “I made no vows, but vows / Were then made for me.” He begins to observe the inhabitants of the landscape, the old soldier for example: “a desolation, a simplicity.”
In Book Five he considers liberalism and education. Formal teaching renders youth intellectually precocious but unfeeling. He recalls himself as a boy hooting on the banks of Windermere, answered by terrifying silence. In Book Six the Winander boy, now an adult, crosses the Alps on foot and experiences definitively the permanent forms and the transitory content of nature. The heart of his vision: it is one of the most electrifying moments in English verse, not so much for what it sees as for the way in which the syntax carries the cadence deeper and deeper into the reader’s pulse:
The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of water-falls,
And every where along the hollow rent
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds, and region of the heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first and last, and midst, and without end.
Against this amazing insight with its liturgically charged climax, Book Seven, an external portrayal of the city and its corrupting powers, seems thin, a conventional contrast with what has come before. Wordsworth is seldom poetically comfortable when he goes to town. After the “Retrospect” in Book Eight, Books Nine and Ten take us to France, and Eleven and Twelve describe how reason impaired his natural sympathies and instincts. He became in his French enthusiasms more a foe of falsehood than a friend of truth. But on his return those “spots of time” from the past renew their “vivifying virtue.” His imagination is restored. In the moonlit landscape, the last book confirms this recovery:
A meditation rose in me that night
Upon the lonely Mountain when the scene
Had passed away, and it appeared to me
The perfect image of a mighty Mind,
Of one that feeds upon infinity,
That is exalted by an underpresence,
The sense of God, or whatso’er is dim
Or vast in its own being...
Often epiphanies occur when, from a great height, he surveys the world before him, and from what he sees or surmises flows a meaning he feels: in the Alps, above Tintern Abbey, and here.
“Lines Composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey” preceded the completion of the 1805 Prelude. Here he insists on natural “connection,” recurrence (“again” is used several times in the first verse paragraph), and on presence (“this” and “here”). He experiences the power of memory and of what is to come, himself set firmly in the present, among particulars. In condensed form, this poem contains the substance of The Prelude.
Most memorable of Wordsworth’s poems is “Intimations of Immortality,” an ode written between 1802 or 1803 and 1806. Technically it is a tour de force. A few readings fix it in memory: not as argument, rather as a developing mood or emotion, an apprehension, distilling as experience the wisdom of The Prelude. It is a less positive formulation, less intellectually resolute in its attempt to find “strength in what remains behind,” as though the “real world / Of images” and those “spots of time” were already losing force. And so they were, a sense of that “mighty Mind” was overcoming the sense of the particulars of its creation. Hazlitt is at our elbow with a sour comment: “Lord Byron we have called, according to the old proverb, ‘the spoiled child of fortune’: Mr Wordsworth might plead, in mitigation of some peculiarities, that he is ‘the spoiled child of disappointment.’ ” Before disappointment, by questioning poetic convention, with a powerful and original vision of nature, and by developing an inclusive personal style, Wordsworth—with Coleridge now beside, and now beyond him—extended the language and thematic range of English poetry into the new century. After the great poems and especially The Prelude, we forgive the Wordsworth who was all fresh growth and bright foliage for turning to bark and wood and winter, and we defend him against his numerous detractors who included Landor: “Dank, limber verses, stuft with lakeside sedges, / And propt with rotten stakes from broken hedges.”
Wordsworth’s poems cured Locke of terrible depression in the illness that came over him from excessive study as a youth. Arnold elegized him with a need and passion as intense as that which Wordsworth on a different occasion felt in conjuring Milton. Arnold’s father befriended Wordsworth, who supervised the building of the Arnolds’ house at Fox How while Dr. Arnold was headmastering at Rugby (“What beautiful English the old man speaks!” the Doctor declared). It is no accident, given Wordsworth’s change of political and artistic direction, that Matthew Arnold speaks of him in couplets. Couplets without the humor or wit of Pope: from Wordsworth he sucked unsmiling earnestness, sincere, moving, a little portentous.
Ah, since dark days still bring to light
Man’s prudence and man’s fiery might,
Time may restore us in his course
Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force;
But where will Europe’s latter hour
Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?
Others will teach us how to dare,
And against fear our breasts to steel;
Others will strengthen us to bear—
But who, ah! who, will make us feel?
The cloud of mortal destiny,
Others will front it fearlessly—
But who, like him, will put it by?
Well, Samuel Taylor Coleridge for one. If Wordsworth kept in his cupboard the emotional skeleton of Annette Vallon and an illegitimate child, Coleridge’s cupboard is poor in intimate skeletons (his secret sin is plagiarism). He believes in words, they have a compelling reality for him: he believes in naming more than in the objects named. He takes delight in thinking: it is a sensuous experience for him, and talk itself is one of his intensest pleasures. “The pith of my system is to make the senses out of the mind—not the mind out of the senses, as Locke did.” It’s an impulse he communicated to Wordsworth, as he recalls in Table Talk. “The present is an age of talkers,” Hazlitt says, “and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past achievements.”
Coleridge trusted friends—he did not suspect Wordsworth’s secret—and believed the best of them. “When friends failed him,” Graves remarks, he “was always lost.” And they generally failed him. At the time of his break with Wordsworth he wrote: “I have loved with enthusiastic self-oblivion those who have been well pleased that I should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills into their main stream.” Things were patched up, but Coleridge no longer trusted his friend or himself. And Robert Southey sold out to journalism. Hazlitt makes savage prose of his disillusion with the brotherhood. “If Mr Coleridge had not been the most impressive talker of his age, he would probably have been the finest writer; but he lays down his pen to make sure of an auditor, and mortgages the admiration of posterity for the stare of an idler.”
Coleridge’s life is one of the saddest in English poetry. Full of intelligence and promise, he was disappointed on every front. “[Coleridge’s] mind is (as he himself might express it) tangential. There is no subject on which he has not touched, none on which he has rested.” Hazlitt is as just as he is cruel. Coleridge hungered for new beginnings, for an impossible America and a Pantisocracy he conjured up as a young man, with friends willing to entertain the notion of a community of the elect in a new world. The image of an America of new beginning recurs long after the project collapsed. It is there in the poems of dejection and betrayal. Hazlitt gets close to the man he began by respecting and even loving above all others.
At the age of twenty he was intrigued to hear of Coleridge. “A poet and a philosopher getting up into a Unitarian pulpit to preach the Gospel, was a romance in these degenerate days, a sort of revival of the primitive spirit of Christianity, which was not to be resisted.” In 1798 he went on a vast winter walk to hear him speak. “When I got there, the organ was playing the 100th psalm, and, when it was done, Mr Coleridge rose and gave out his text. ‘And he went up into the mountain to pray, HIMSELF, ALONE.’ As he gave out his text, his voice ‘rose like a steam of rich distilled perfumes,’ and when he came to the last two words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe... The preacher then launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind.” It was a sermon—tending to pacifism—about the gap between Christian and secular visions of war. From a distance in church “there was to me a strange wilderness in his aspect, a dusky obscurity, and I thought him pitted with the small-pox.” In fact, close up, “His forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with large projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a sea with darkened lustre... His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin good-humoured and round; but his nose, the rudder of the face, the index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing—like what he has done.” That conclusion is filled with Hazlitt’s later disappointment.
Coleridge walked crooked and kept crossing Hazlitt’s path as they went along. Hazlitt walked straight and deferentially. His verbal portraiture is vivid: physiognomy and temperament illuminate each other, his first impressions unblurred by aftermath. Indeed there is piquancy in the distance he records between youthful impressions of youthful men and the transformations time and history wrought upon them—Coleridge as well as Wordsworth—when they turned to the “wrong” patrons and retreated from their first, embodied imaginings. Contrasts of voice and approach are neatly recorded. “Coleridge has told me that he himself liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel-walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption.”
It is not that Coleridge went off: he went wrong, lost direction because he lost friends. “All that he has done of moment, he had done twenty years ago: since then he may be said to have lived on the sound of his own voice.” Hazlitt portrays him at Christ’s Hospital thronged with friends, including Lamb, walking about the quad in earnest disquisition, especially on Greek tragedy. Then, infatuated with Hartley, “he busied himself for a year or two with vibrations and vibratiuncles and the great law of association that binds all things in its mystic chain, and the doctrine of Necessity (the mild teacher of Charity) and the Millennium, anticipative of a life to come—and he plunged deep into the controversy on Matter and Spirit, and, as an escape from Dr Priestley’s Materialism, where he felt himself imprisoned by the logician’s spell, like Ariel in the cloven pine-tree, he became suddenly enamoured of Bishop Berkeley’s fairy-world, and used in all companies to build the universe, like a brave poetical fiction, of fine words...” Hazlitt builds his single sentence on and on, stuffing it with Coleridge’s vast learnings for two full pages before we arrive at a full stop, “... but poetry redeemed him from this spectral philosophy, and he bathed his heart in beauty.” After the epic sentence he concludes: “Alas! ‘Frailty, thy name is Genius!’—What is become of all this mighty heap of hope, of thought, of learning, and humanity? It has ended in swallowing doses of oblivion and in writing paragraphs in the Courier.—Such, and so little is the mind of man!”
Hazlitt’s verdict on the Lake Poets is chilling: “But the poets, the creatures of sympathy, could not stand the frowns both of king and people. They did not like to be shut out when places and pensions, when the critic’s praises, and the laurel-wreath were about to be distributed. They did not stomach being sent to Coventry, and Mr Coleridge sounded a retreat for them by the help of casuistry, and a musical voice.” Fortunately, they had been young before they reached their mature accommodations, and even when accommodated there is in their dullest utterance the fascination of echo, more compelling than the indignity of self-betrayal. For Hazlitt, living with and then against them, what mattered was where their lives took the wrong turning. For us what matters is the poems they wrote and where they might lead us.
O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware
Along with Doctor Johnson, Coleridge is the great critical intelligence among English poets, but a very different kind of intelligence from the Doctor’s. His interests extend beyond poetry to society, philosophy and religion, but poetry is the heart of wider concerns with language and the power of imagination and ideas. Unlike Johnson, he had no settled opinions; he was a man in search of truth, perplexed by personal, philosophical, political and aesthetic indecisions. We find consistency of principle, uncertainty of application. His mature political thought is lucid, but he cannot—for example in On the Constitution of Church and State—bridge the gap between idea and implementation in practical, institutional forms. Yet Hazlitt is wrong: Coleridge does not indulge in casuistry to get out of an intellectual corner.
Uncertainty has aesthetic consequences. Unlike other Romantic poets, he never establishes a personal mode. He writes Augustan verse of little distinction, discursive poems, then the handful of meditations and nature poems in which he is most himself, and finally three great poems that defy classification: “Christabel,” “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Of these poems, two are ostensibly unfinished. Throughout his work there are fragments, including “The Destiny of Nations.” Other poems he worked on for years and remained dissatisfied. His “Dejection: An Ode” adopts a fragmentary form, juxtaposing verse paragraphs that are thematically but not logically sequential. Formal fragmentation reflects the theme: like a modernist, he breaks it to make it whole. He did not complete his vast projected philosophical work. His attempt to schematize transcendental philosophy distorted the ideas imagination could apply but analysis unraveled.
Self-doubt and indecision began early. Born in 1772 in Ottery St. Mary, Devon, Coleridge was the youngest son of the local vicar. His father, who understood and indulged him, died when the boy was nine. No one replaced this benign figure of authority. Coleridge’s mother did not know what to make of him; when he came to marry in 1795 he chose a woman too like his mother, setting in train the difficulties of his later years.
He attended Christ’s Hospital School in London as a bright charity boy. Charles Lamb was a junior classmate. He had excellent masters, read the classics and modern literature, grew interested in the literature of travel, and excelled in a sympathetic environment. In 1791 he went to Jesus College, Cambridge. He was too well prepared for university: the curriculum bored him, no one paid him serious intellectual attention, he grew idle, got into debt (which for one so ill provided was easy), and suddenly on impulse enlisted in the 15th Dragoons, from which his family had to rescue him. He returned to Cambridge but did not complete a degree.
He and Southey met in 1794. Both were enthusiastic about the French Revolution and Coleridge admired Southey’s poems. They became friends, planning to found what Coleridge christened a “Pantisocracy,” a commune on the banks of the Susquehanna. This pipe dream had one practical consequence: Coleridge married Southey’s sister-in-law. Already he was taking opium—to alleviate toothache.
In 1793 he had his first published poems, in the Morning Chronicle. In 1796 he started his own politically and religiously nonconformist newspaper. The Watchman ran for ten issues before it folded. By the age of twenty-four he had failed to complete his Cambridge course, contracted a disastrous marriage, and seen two cherished projects run aground. He had written unsuccessfully for the theater. But he had a new enthusiasm: Wordsworth. They first met in 1795. As with Southey, so with Wordsworth: Coleridge was immediately impressed with his work. In 1797, when Wordsworth settled near Coleridge in Somerset, they collaborated on Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge contributed “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” His poetry developed rapidly as a result of their intimacy. Between 1795 and 1802 he composed his best poems and poetic torsos, starting with “The Aeolian Harp” (1795) and including the flawed but interesting poems “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement” (1795) and “The Destiny of Nations” (1796). There followed “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1797); “Christabel” (1797, Part II 1800); “Frost at Midnight,” “Kubla Khan,” “Fears in Solitude” and his recantation “France: An Ode” (1798); the fragmentary “Hexameters” to Dorothy and William Wordsworth (1798–99); “The Keepsake” (1800)—the falling off was noticeable in those two poems; and his final masterpiece, “Dejection: An Ode” (1802). The Muse became fitful in her attentions. Coleridge’s major poetic achievement was complete: he was thirty years old.
His interest in German transcendentalist philosophy—he did much to advance the ideas of Kant and Schelling in England—grew out of his early Neoplatonist studies. In “The Destiny of Nations” he had expressed his essential vision:
For all that meets the bodily sense I deem
Symbolical, one mighty alphabet
For infant minds [...]
“Sense” in the singular defines his view of the interdependence of the senses, a fusing perception we meet in the “swimming sense” he feels before the manifold spectacle of nature; or in the line describing synesthesia, “A light in sound, a sound-like power in light”; or “to see is only a language.” In the 1796 poem we also visit Plato’s cave:
Placed with our backs to bright Reality,
That we may learn with young, unwounded ken
The substance from the shadow...
After visiting Germany in 1798–99, he returned to England and settled near Wordsworth in Cumberland to continue his studies. He fell hopelessly in love with Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, but he was already married. He wrote journalism, lectured, traveled, suffered further financial hardship and grew increasingly dependent on opium. In 1810 he quarreled openly—conflict had been brewing—with Wordsworth. It was one of the great losses of his life. They were reconciled, but the original friendship was over. His reputation grew as his powers declined. In 1817 his prose masterpiece Biographia Literaria was published. His mature political writing is the quintessence of that English Toryism rooted in Sir Robert Filmer and Richard Hooker, adhered to by Swift, Johnson and Goldsmith, and richly proclaimed by Edmund Burke. Its expression is elegiac: that moment in English history was over. Coleridge died in 1834.
He set down his poetics mainly after the poems were written. Intellectual energy and creative power he portrayed as wrestlers locked in combat. Intellectual energy won, he was a critic, and he took issue with Wordsworth. Wordsworth declared that there was no essential difference between the languages of prose and verse. The inessential difference was meter, which in verse bridles emotion, creates associations, and balances the “commonplace” with intense emotion. It protects the reader from too direct an assault by the poet’s feelings. Coleridge argues that prose and verse are languages distinct in construction and effect. Meter is not a negative force, a bridle, but part and parcel of the statement, the vehicle for emotion itself, a positive power. Each passion dictates a pulse and form of expression. Meter harmonizes by unifying the parts. Instinct or imagination elects and judges meter: “Could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry, and sink into a mechanical art.”
The instinctive and involuntary play a greater part in Coleridge’s conception of poetry (and in the best of his poems) than in the work of his predecessors. He first defines what Romanticism is and does: organic form, intuitive formulation. From these follows the essential “suspension of disbelief”: we judge a poem first by asking what it sets out to do, then by appraising how well it does it, and only then do we ask whether it was worth doing. Coleridge evolved his controversial theory of imagination, secondary imagination and fancy. The first he describes as the “living Power, Prime Agent of all human Perception”; the second as an “echo of the primary, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, differing only in degree and mode of operation”; and the third as “a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and place, blended with and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word ‘choice.’ ”
Unlike Wordsworth, he never succumbs to the power of physical objects. His early work is full of transitive verbs, while Wordsworth deploys the verb “to be” more than most great poets, assuring himself of the otherness and actual presence of objects. Coleridge explores connection: the life of imagination can be more vivid than the life of the senses themselves. In “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” with the colloquial directness of a blank verse epistle, the power (who has injured his foot and is unable to accompany his friends—notably Lamb, just down from the city—on a walk) gives them directions, then relaxes in his lime-tree bower. In imagination he sees what they will see in reality, his perception heightened by the fact that he sees through the eyes of Lamb, on release from city life. The extended syntax of the sentence describing the friends’ descent is mimetic language at its best. They see particulars and then the wider panorama. Passive in his bower, Coleridge experiences the immediate sensuous pleasure of his place, the memory of the route his friends take, their pleasure as he imagines it, and an additional, integrating sense of wholeness and well-being, despite his injury. He draws a moral:
...Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty! 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.
He concludes, “No sound is dissonant that tells of Life.” Written in the same year as “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” this poem proposes the themes of the greater poem. Nature, even in desolate circumstances, can waken the alert heart. When the Mariner understands this, his redemption begins. Perception is for Coleridge an ever-active faculty: it detects a large continuity, then assimilates the data of perception into that continuity, that organism. “I regulated my creeds by my conception, not by my sight,” he says. Images are the materials of which conception builds its edifice: he is after unity, not causal process.
In “The Aeolian Harp,” his first remarkable poem, Milton, Gray and Cowper, early mentors, stand a little off and let the young poet speak. He begins with particularity, addressing his new wife, who leans on his arm. His senses move from the cottage to the vines that deck it, then outward to the clouds; the scent of the bean fields reaches him, and the “stilly murmur of the distant sea / Tells us of silence.” All the senses are engaged. Then the Aeolian harp, placed on a casement where the breeze can draw harmonies from it, sounds. Its strain draws the poet’s mind away to a world of imaginative suggestion and romance, until his wife’s rebuke recalls him. The poem moralizes in conversational blank verse, at once gentle and joyful. The instrument is an important image, releasing imaginative energy by its harmony. Here it foreshadows the “dulcimer” in “Kubla Khan.” In form and tone it prepares the way for “Frost at Midnight” and, more remotely, for “Dejection: An Ode.”
“The Frost performs its secret ministry / Unhelped by any wind,” “Frost at Midnight” begins. With conflicting emotions of paternity, solitude and unfulfillment, the poet hears how “the owlet’s cry / Came loud—and hark, again! Loud as before.” Agitated by the stillness, to him the fluttering “film” on the grate suggests a stranger who may come. The place where he sits musing becomes an extension of his mind, the frost itself an agent, transforming nature as his imagination transforms memory. He returns to childhood, then turns to his child, contrasting his past and Hartley’s present. The poem ends with a blessing on his son. The earlier discursive poems are concerned with existence in space, with landscape and panorama. “Frost at Midnight” and “Dejection” are about time. They are nocturnal, reflective, profoundly personal and intensive rather than expansive.
In “Dejection: An Ode,” Coleridge confronts the failure of his life and vision. His marriage decays, he is hopelessly in love with someone else, he is unwell. The wry opening gives way to despair. We hear the Aeolian harp and tones of “Christabel” and “The Ancient Mariner.” A storm rages but does not now, as it would have done before, arouse imagination: only “A grief without a pang.” Stars and moon: “I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!” He echoes Wordsworth, Milton and his own earlier verse. This poem too ends with a benediction—on his beloved. Beyond grace, he could make one great poem at least of his failures.
The discursive poems cast light on his chief poetic achievement, the three “great unparaphrasables.” “Christabel,” his longest poem, is a fragment of ghostly romance which by a technique of rapt questioning and breathless images establishes dramatic tension: “Is the night chilly and dark? / The night is chilly but not dark”; “Is it the wind that moaneth bleak?” These passages prepare for Christabel’s interrogation of the mysterious Geraldine. Nothing is defined. We know it is “a month before the month of May,” and May is the month of romance. Poor Christabel will not savor its fruits. A gothic atmosphere, the eerie simplicity of the accentual form with variable rhyme scheme, delights for almost seven hundred lines. Geraldine, a supernatural creature, by a spell silences Christabel. Rendered mute, Christabel observes and suffers the beginning of Geraldine’s evil designs. Desunt nonulla. No Chapman has come along to complete what Coleridge began.
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” achieves what no other literary ballad of the period did: the tone of folk ballad. In an impersonal ballad singer’s voice, Coleridge explores in dramatic ways a theme developed in the discursive poems. The Mariner chooses one of three young men bound for a wedding feast. He tells his story: his ship, ice-bound near the pole, the albatross of good omen, his gratuitous act of slaying it, the punishment wrought on the whole crew; his individual penance and regeneration when in his heart he blessed the creatures about the becalmed ship. Released, he travels the world teaching reverence, love of God and his creatures. For six hundred and twenty-five lines Coleridge touches our deepest interests. The poem works on us like a dream: questions of belief or disbelief never arise: we attend. Passages have entered common language; the images draw back to consciousness folk elements and hermetic symbolism. Wordsworth wrote privately to the publisher urging that the poem be dropped from future editions of Lyrical Ballads as being out of key with the other poems in the book. He was uncomfortable with its dimensions and themes: Did he sense, too, how much more powerful, durable and inevitable it was than the other poems in the book?
Rudyard Kipling quoted two lines of Keats and three of Coleridge from “Kubla Khan”:
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!
“These are the pure Magic. These are the clear vision. The rest is only poetry.” It is sacrilege of sorts to “interpret” the magic. Like “Christabel,” “Kubla Khan” is, some believe, a fragment, a poem that emerged from a half-drugged dream interrupted in composition by the famous arrival of the person from Porlock. Many interpretations are possible, each partial. More valuable are the formal studies, attending closely to images and how they relate. Interesting but not very useful is the search for sources. What the poem means is inseparable from the words and rhythms it uses. Paraphrase hardly gets a toehold. It is not until the second half of the poem that the “I” appears: “A damsel with a dulcimer / In a vision once I saw...”:
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...
The first half of the poem evokes the “stately pleasure dome.” In the second half the “I” wishes to retrieve it. Could he hear the music he once heard in a vision, he could re-create in air “That sunny dome! those caves of ice!” He would be like Kubla Khan, himself sacred and exalted. The dulcimer recalls the harps we hear elsewhere in Coleridge’s work, instruments that harmonize the world of ideas and the world of the senses, and liberate imagination from the constraints of literal vision. In “Kubla Khan” the poetry achieves an intensity unprecedented in the discursive poems. The dulcimer’s sound would recreate not things perceived but imagined. Contemplation authenticates; it can even transform and generate objects of contemplation, as in “Frost at Midnight.” “Could I revive within me”: it is a conditional clause. In fact he cannot. He cannot even “complete” the poem. If he could, he could complete himself, become one with “flashing eye” and “floating hair.” Yet from its partial disclosure we can infer the vision. The poem is about desire, not the failure of desire. In this thwarted hope resides its power. It belongs near the end of his greatest creative period. His next and last major poem is about failure: “Dejection: An Ode.”