My two favourite poets are the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the early Romantic movement, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Wordsworth was undoubtedly the greater poet - in fact, the greatest poet the English language has produced: ...And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Lofty thoughts, difficult concepts, the melding of the personal and the cosmic, handled with language and images of breath-catching beauty that banish any hint of self-serving posturing, all present in that astonishing poem: Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.
But for all his genius, I wouldn’t have particularly looked forward to spending an evening with the chap. Outwardly quite stiff and stuffy - somewhat aloof, controlled, self-conscious: not, by all accounts, a fun guy or much of a talker.
Now, Coleridge, who was a crucial, self-effacing spur to Wordworth’s development as a poet - his muse, almost - didn’t have a fraction of his friend’s creative stamina or fixity of purpose: for instance, it’s impossible to imagine Coleridge creating anything remotely as sustained as that mighty work, The Prelude. He was more of a philosopher and a thinker than Wordsworth - in fact one of the greatest philosophers and critics of his day - but his poetic inspiration was more fleeting. Wordsworth had a programme and an agenda, while Coleridge was endlessly diverted from any fixed course by passing interests, obsessions and, notoriously, his destructive addiction to laudanum and brandy.
To put it crudely, Coleridge spent large portions of his life off his tits on drugs and booze – usually in tandem.
But, by God, I’d love to have spent time in his huge, noisy, magical presence. There wouldn’t have been much by the way of conversation: by all accounts, Coleridge entered a room talking loudly and left it, hours later, having mesmerized onlookers with an endless stream of conjecture, anecdote, and instruction, shifting ineluctably from one subject to another, never repeating himself, until he either passed out, or swept out on his way to another engagement, still talking.
Coleridge’s life was dissolute, in the sense that he was almost certain not to deliver anything on time or, in most cases, at all; but he was by no means a wicked man. He was rarely, if ever, cruel – in fact, when not utterly pole-axed by mood-altering substances, he was almost unerringly kind and helpful and generous. He made a bad marriage – out of a misplaced sense of duty – but never shirked his financial responsibilities, no matter what a mess he was in, and tried to do the very best for his beloved son, Hartley. He fell in love with another woman quite early on, but was never unfaithful.
Much of his poetry was shot through with horrors and weirdness, but he was a Christian thinker and apologist all his life. He started as an enthusiast for the French Revolution, but, sickened by its horrors, became increasingly conservative (as did Wordsworth). He managed to sustain for several years a government job on Malta, and published and wrote most of The Friend, a periodical which limped through 28 editions, so he was not incapable of sustained effort.
His drug addiction drove many of his friends to distraction, but when he and Wordsworth fell out, it was almost entirely Wordsworth’s fault, and Coleridge was generally a loyal friend. And there was something in him that made decent people only too willing to help him out: a respected physician provided Coleridge with a room within his family home for many years during the period when the poet and philosopher became known as “The Sage of Hampstead”.
Coleridge is best known for the long narrative poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and that extraordinary romantic masterpiece, Kubla Khan (which remained deliberately unpublished for many years until the author showed it to Byron, who insisted that any poem containing the line “woman wailing for her demon lover” simply had to see the light of day).
But here I want to recommend Coleridge’s “Conversation Poems” – a sub-genre which he practically invented. They’re the poems I reread most often, and they’re the real reason I should like to have spent time in his presence (as long as I wasn’t expected to administer the horribly painful enemas his prodigious intake of laudanum regularly necessitated).
Briefly, a Conversation Poem starts with a domestic scene, involving his friends, his “cot” (cottage), or his wife, or child, moves onto loftier matters, then returns to the domestic arena, now viewed through the prism of his cosmic musings. Eight of his poems are generally classified as Conversation Poems (there are a few other contenders): “The Eolian Harp”, “The Nightingale”, “Frost at Midnight”, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”, “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement”, “Fears in Solitude”, “Dejection” and “To William Wordsworth”.
The voice of the poems is distinct and personal: Coleridge is very much himself here. The domestic scenes are among the most charming and affecting in all of literature, and they make the poet lovable in a way that none of Wordsworth’s poems do for their creator. At the same time, Coleridge isn’t striving for lovability: this is just how he is.
Here is Coleridge, near the end of “The Nightingale” recounting an episode involving his infant son, Hartley:
“… and once, when he awoke
In most distressful mood (some inward pain
Had made up that strange thing, an infant's dream)
I hurried with him to our orchard-plot,
And he beheld the moon, and, hushed at once,
Suspends his sobs, and laughs most silently,
While his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears,
Did glitter in the yellow moon-beam! Well!
It is a father's tale…”
“Charming” is too dismissive an adjective: Coleridge’s pride and tenderness are deeply moving – the panicky ”hurrying” to relieve the boy’s anxiety is something every parent will recognise. His poet’s attention to detail – the moon-beam glittering in the child’s tear-filled eyes – bring the scene vividly alive. And the terribly human aside – “Well! It is a father’s tale” - captures perfectly those moments when we parents realize we’ve been banging on a bit too eagerly about our little darlings. All this makes it easy for us to connect with Coleridge as a fellow human being rather than as The Great Creative Genius with “floating hair” and “flashing eyes” whose power we ordinary mortals must “beware!” in “Kubla Khan”. In the Conversation Poems, Coleridge is very much one of us.
Here, in “The Eolian Harp” the poet, having described the wind creating “a soft floating witchery of sound” as it blows across the harp lying in an open casement window of his cottage, likens this to nature acting like the wind upon his own thoughts:
And thus, my Love! as on the midway slope
Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon,
Whilst thro' my half-clos'd eye-lids I behold
The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main,
And tranquil muse upon tranquility ;
Full many a thought uncall'd and undetain'd,
And many idle flitting phantasies,
Traverse my indolent and passive brain,
As wild and various, as the random gales
That swell and flutter on this subject Lute !
And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversly fram'd,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all ?
In the sublime “Frost at Midnight”, having described the extraordinary stillness of his surroundings as he watches over his sleeping child, Coleridge returns – as he so often did - to the affinity between our mental processes and Nature:
… the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.
This passage contains most of the elements that make up Coleridge’s distinct genius: the particularity of the visual description, the immediacy of the poet’s personal presence within the scene, the instant familiarity of the mental processes described, the evocation of mood and atmosphere, and the use of all these elements to introduce a metaphysical concept – in this case, the notion that the natural world is, in some deep, mysterious way, connected to our inner life.
In “Dejection: An Ode” Coleridge makes explicit what is probably the central theme of all his work - we are not passive imbibers of Nature’s glories: Man is born with a “shaping spirit of imagination” with which to perceive - and, to an extent, create - the beauty of the natural world:
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth--
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!
It’s an exciting message. After all, if our ability to appreciate nature is merely passive, then it’s a bit tough on those of us who lack the capacity to respond to it emotionally. Coleridge’s view is that we all born with this capacity, which means that, given the right circumstances, we can all enjoy what is, apart from loving and receiving love from another human being, possibly the greatest of all life’s consolations.
Much of Coleridge’s fraught, messy, stop-start life was spent trying to recapture that “shaping spirit” - often resorting to unsuitable and destructive stimuli. During those periods when he managed to revive it, when his “light” and “glory” “enveloped the Earth”, he produced some of the greatest poetry ever written. For that, I - and many others - are profoundly grateful.
But I’d still love to have spent an evening with this most human and engaging of geniuses.
“Well! It is an admirer’s tale...”
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