[Know Thyself] from Heaven; by shewing him what true Poetry was, he made him know, that he himself was no Poet” ’ (25 March 1801; STCL ii 714).Wordsworth and Coleridge
So many of Coleridge’s most fundamental poetic convictions converge on the figure of Wordsworth that, you feel, had he not existed, Coleridge would have had to invent him – which, in a manner of speaking, is what he did. Coleridge’s Wordsworth – the great philosophical poet, divinely endowed with ‘THE VISION AND THE FACULTY DIVINE’ (The Excursion i 79, as quoted by Coleridge, BL ii 60), sublimely solitary inhabitant of ‘[t]he dread Watch-Tower of man’s absolute Self’ (To William Wordsworth) – is one of the great creations of the age, one which affected the way Wordsworth’s contemporaries perceived him, and continues to influence modern criticism. More importantly for us here, this idea of the poet decisively shaped Wordsworth’s conception of himself too: it confirmed in him a colossal awareness of poetic vocation, and established in his mind the shape of that career which would testify to the vocation’s successful fulfilment. But Wordsworth, and this Coleridgean figure of Wordsworth, are not a perfect fit; and the visionary ideal to which both men subscribed became increasingly the standard by which they could assess Wordsworth’s failure, not his triumph. This sense of a discrepancy between the poet and Coleridge’s invention of the poet was personally tragic, instilling in Wordsworth a conviction that, despite some of the language’s greatest verse, his poetic life had somehow failed. At the same time, paradoxically, the sense of discrepancy proved thoroughly enabling: Wordsworth absorbed the gap between vocation and achievement and made of it some of his very greatest and most characteristic poetry – a poetry of embarrassed expectations which, if not precisely Coleridgean in its triumphs, still could hardly have achieved the kinds of triumph it did without a Coleridgean calling to frustrate. But then, to complicate the picture a little more, speaking of ‘a Coleridgean calling’ may imply too single-minded a conception of the poetic good life. For Wordsworth doesn’t turn away from Coleridge’s visionary portrait of genius into a kind of imagination that is uniquely his own: on the contrary, the alternative style of genius he then becomes is one that Coleridge himself enthusiastically celebrated from time to time, and announced excitedly as an eminent Wordsworthian virtue. So, the divisive internal life of Wordsworth’s imagination is not only a personal response to Coleridge’s ideas of poethood, but, in a way, the fullest enactment of them, in all their fertile contrariness. After an intense, but relatively brief, period of collaboration, each poet persisted in the consciousness of the other as a reminder of promises, a warning example, an ideal to emulate – no wonder, then, Wordsworth stood at the centre of Coleridge’s greatest single piece of criticism (Biographia Literaria), or that Coleridge was the addressee of Wordsworth’s greatest poem (The Prelude): for if Wordsworth’s career and ambition as a poet are simply unthinkable without Coleridge, then Coleridge’s thinking about literature and the imagination is similarly inconceivable without the provocative example of Wordsworth’s genius.
At their first acquaintance, however, in Bristol in September 1795, they met not as poet and critic, nor even as two poets exactly, but rather as two friends of liberty, caught up in the continuing ideological excitement that followed the revolution in France. Coleridge was prominent on the radical scene, delivering lectures that propounded his own highly personal mixture of Unitarianism and political activism. Wordsworth in 1795 was a member of Godwin’s circle; and Adventures on Salisbury Plain, which he worked on toward the end of the year, reproduced Godwin’s line on the evils of social inequity: it was a Godwinian Wordsworth who first met Coleridge. When, however, in the Spring of 1796, Wordsworth read Political Justice in its recent second edition, he was profoundly disappointed: in letters, he criticised the ‘barbarous’ prose style (21 March 1796), but his repugnance went much deeper, for Godwin’s confidence seemed suddenly specious, and its consequences pernicious. Wordsworth seems to have suffered some kind of mental crisis, later described in The Prelude (x 888–904), and implicitly registered at the time in The Borderers, an impracticable tragedy which he began in the Autumn. In the 1805 Prelude Wordsworth casts Coleridge as a personal saviour whose intervention corrected this post-revolutionary despair: ‘Ah, 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 904–7). But ‘about this time’ is tellingly vague, for Wordsworth is rejigging the chronology: the Godwinian crisis occurred in the spring of 1796, some six months or so after the two poets became ‘[f]irst known’, but a year or so before their full intimacy. They had certainly impressed one another at their original meeting, and it seems likely that they met again a few times more, and corresponded afterwards;1 but that was the limit of their contact, and a scrupulous Wordsworth later cut the lines. Nevertheless, they contain a broad truth: Wordsworth’s restoration was largely a matter of him becoming, at least for a time and however equivocally, a Coleridgean.
In the spring of 1797, travelling home from Bristol to Racedown in Dorset, Wordsworth dropped in on Coleridge, now living in bruised retirement in Nether Stowey in Somerset. Wordsworth was still busy with his play just as Coleridge was dallying with one of his own, so they found a new ground for friendship in poetry: they agreed on the shortcomings of Southey as a poet, which must have been cheering for them both, and their talk set Coleridge thinking about epic (see Coleridge’s letter of early April 1797; STCL i 320). Their conversations ran as well (if the re-appearance of an ‘answer to Godwin’ in Coleridge’s letters is a clue) on the shortcomings of Godwinianism: Coleridge had never sympathized much with its atheism, and his suspicions of its unconsoling rationality would have found confirming testimony in Wordsworth’s experience. When, in early June, Coleridge paid a return visit, Wordsworth was occupied with The Ruined Cottage, which he read to Coleridge at once; the next day, he read The Borderers, and Coleridge responded with what was done of his own tragedy (as Dorothy’s letter recorded, June 1797). It was a sensationally successful visit; both Wordsworths were bowled over by their charismatic friend: ‘He is a wonderful man’, wrote Dorothy. Coleridge was no less ecstatic: ‘She is a woman indeed!’ he told a friend, and of Wordsworth, ‘I feel myself a little man by his side’; ‘Wordsworth is a great man’ (c. 3 July, 8 June, and 10 June, 1797; STCL i 330; 325; 327). In a few weeks, he had transplanted the Wordsworths to Alfoxden, an ample house at a surprisingly low rent, a short way from his cottage in Stowey.
Coleridge was at first especially impressed by Wordsworth’s tragedy, whose young intellectual hero is tricked into murderous complicity by the spurious authority of a Godwinian rhetoric: an allegory of their radical generation, as it must have seemed. The wisdom that would have saved them from this, and which might save them now from despondency, rejected revolutionary rationalism for the kind of epiphanic nature-mysticism that Coleridge had been expounding in lectures and poems. His Unitarianism denied most of the normal Christian dogmas, including the Incarnation: instead of the unique Revelation of God in Christ, it described a perpetual revelation of God in nature. This renders the cosmos, not the atomistic machine envisaged by Newtonian materialism, but rather an immense organic unity, brought to divine oneness by the ubiquitously animating life of God, ‘Nature’s Essence, Mind, and Energy!’ (Religious Musings, line 55), the diffuse vitality of ‘one Life’ (as Coleridge called it in a revision of The Eolian Harp), into which the individual lives of creation, including man’s, were dissolved. The theology has an inevitable impact on the way you regard sensory experience: it ennobles nature by endowing its objects with a positively religious authority, and makes the whole tactile world immanently symbolical. ‘In Earth or Air the meadow’s purple stores, the Moons mild radiance, or the Virgins form Blooming with rosy smiles, we see pourtrayed the bright Impressions of the eternal Mind’, as Coleridge put it, a little cloyingly, to his lecture audience in 1795 (Lectures 1795, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann, 1971, p. 94). One emotive corollary of a belief in ‘the wisdom & goodness of Nature’ (10 March 1798; STCL i 396) is an enlivened pastoralism: a life led in unspoiled scenery would be necessarily improving, in a way that life amid urban scenes (such as Coleridge had experienced as a child) could never be. The position is strictly illogical: city squalor must be as much a part of the life of God as anything else; but it was under the influence of such intoxicating visions that Coleridge, his brother-in-law Southey, and others, had planned in 1795 to found a commune, ‘Pantisocracy’, in (allegedly) untouched America.
By 1797, Pantisocracy was long dead; but something of the same Utopian temper now filled the partnership with Wordsworth. They attempted to co-author a ballad, although Wordsworth soon discovered (as he later recalled) that their styles ‘would not assimilate’, and other attempts at collaboration, including the prose poem ‘The Wanderings of Cain’, similarly foundered.2 Coleridge took up the ballad on his own: it became ‘The Ancient Mariner’ (a first version was complete by November 1797), which revealingly, like much of his other great poetry of the year – ‘Kubla Khan’ and the first part of ‘Christabel’ – approached the central theme of natural piety negatively, through powerful but flawed figures (compelling solitaries, like Mortimer at the end of The Borderers), mysteriously dead to natural influence, or destructively subversive of its divine unity. More positively, other Coleridge poems from this period, like ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’, while couched in an habitual idiom of self-doubt, raised themselves to the momentary heights of a credal confidence that Wordsworth evidently found infectious:
So my friend
Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes
Spirits perceive his presence.
This intoxicating nature-vision, imagined in the solitude of Coleridge’s Lime-Tree Bower, silently corrects a Wordsworthian despondency: the misanthropic solitary of ‘Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree’, would similarly ‘gaze / On the more distant scene’, and gaze ‘till it became / Far lovelier’, but only to intensify his feelings of lofty isolation. Wordsworth’s moralizing conclusion criticizes such moping self-absorption and counsels his reader to avoid it; but Coleridge announces grounds for disapproval much more ambitiously metaphysical: ‘No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.’ As well as this message of universal fraternity, Coleridge’s meditative, blank-verse landscape poems (the ‘conversation’ poems) provided a poetic form, at once naturalistic and visionary, that Wordsworth was quickly to make his own. Set in a natural scene of observed specifics, the conversation poem enacts the process of the mind, prompted by that initial physical reality into an inward exploration of the self and its history; rising to some kind of revelatory climax; and then returning, self-educated and self-confirmed, to the external scene again, a scene of particulars that is now silently but unmistakably informed by a visionary potential which the course of the poem has discovered.
After witnessing Coleridge’s extraordinary out-pouring, and himself barely writing for six months, Wordsworth stirred again in February 1798. Wordsworth had found in Coleridge what he hadn’t found in Godwin: an emotional repertoire of hope, one which re-established the philosophical respectability of feeling, and a poetic language of optimism, which rehabilitated intimations of the numinous by rooting them in particular experience of the natural world. The new idiom is startlingly registered in the alterations made to The Ruined Cottage. The poem Coleridge heard in June 1797 was a story of personal suffering, a study in the psycho-pathology of mental decline played out against a background of engulfing political crisis, which ended with the bleakly epitaphic lines: ‘and here she died, / Last human tenant of these ruined walls’ (as Coleridge had it copied in a letter of 10 June 1797: STCL i 328). The new tenants are animals, and their presence is transgressive and terrible: non-human nature here is inhuman, the intrusive bindweed that strangles the garden, or the shockingly creaturely worm on dead Margaret’s cheek. But in the poem’s revised Coleridgean ending, written in the spring of 1798, nature assumes a quite different aspect: the invasive speargrass, which the metaphorical life of the original poem identifies as undermining and brutally disruptive, finds itself conjured into an emblem of natural religious feeling, ‘an image of tranquillity’ to ease from the meditative mind ‘what we feel of sorrow and despair / From ruin and from change’ (lines 517; 520–1). It is an extraordinary shift into a wholly different kind of world, which the verse scarcely owns up to, and that creates a curiously double-minded poem, the new Wordsworth (as it were) writing alongside the pre-Coleridgean one: such inconsistencies, the result of Wordsworth’s instinctively accretive method, characterize a good deal of his intently philosophical verse.
If Wordsworth found in Coleridge a vision and an idiom to exploit, then in Wordsworth, Coleridge found nothing less than ‘the best poet of the age’ (13 May 1796; STCL i 215); and he identified him very quickly. While still at Cambridge he had already spotted Wordsworth’s genius in Descriptive Sketches, which was certainly astute (BL i 77–8); and he had quoted a vivid phrase from An Evening Walk in one of his own poems (‘Lines written at Shurton Bars’), written about the time of their first meeting in Bristol. Now in Wordsworth’s daily company, Coleridge’s perpetual tendency to heroworship found its most irresistible (and unresisting) object; and during the spring, Coleridge’s conviction of his friend’s immense vocation gathered itself into a plan for a Wordsworthian epic, a life-work which would prove and exemplify that greatness. An enormous philosophical poem in several parts to be entitled The Recluse, this Coleridgean commission would establish Wordsworth as successor to Milton – as ‘the first & greatest philosophical Poet’ (letter, 15 January 1804; STCL ii 1034) – in a poem telling, not of man’s fall from God, but of God’s persistent and informing presence in an unfallen nature, itself always and already paradisal when viewed by a worthy eye (‘in the end / All gratulant if rightly understood’, as Wordsworth was to put it in The Prelude: xiii 384–5). Over a year later, when progress on the great work was already stalled, Coleridge reminded his friend of the historical importance of the poem, at least of that major part of it ‘addressed to those, who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind, and are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness’ (c. 10 September 1799; STCL i 527): The Recluse, then, like the failed Pantisocratic scheme, was to ‘remove the Selfish Principle from ourselves’ (13 November 1795; STCL i 163).
Coleridge had himself toyed unproductively with the idea of a philosophical epic called The Brook, a large-scale conversation poem set to combine meditative reflections and natural description, all organized by the governing trope of a river’s course from spring to sea (see BL i 196); so, The Recluse was in some measure a displacement of Coleridgean ambitions, and Coleridge continued to regard the project with an almost proprietorial interest which inevitably complicated its progress – especially as, while his own philosophical ambitions shifted over the years, he continued to look expectantly for the great epic to capture them in verse. (Coleridge explicitly makes the parallel between his own metaphysical system and the unfinished Recluse in his table talk for 21 July 1832: TT i 307–9). In the meantime, however, Wordsworth seized eagerly on a philosophical optimism beside which the most vehement apostles of imminent political revolution must have seemed hesitant:
There is an active principle alive in all things;
In all things, in all natures, in the flowers
And in the trees, in every pebbly stone
That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks,
The moving waters and the invisible air.
(see LB 309–10)
Not the least appeal of such emotive monism was its connective inclusiveness: ‘My object is to give pictures of Nature, Man, and Society’, Wordsworth wrote, ‘Indeed I know not any thing which will not come within the scope of my plan’ (6 March 1798). The sense of comprehensiveness was also, in the short term at least, practically enabling: it meant that existing works, however apparently incongruous their meanings, could be conscripted within the emergent masterpiece in good faith (no sound is dissonant which tells of life); and this is what happened to The Ruined Cottage, to which Wordsworth now returned, making (as we’ve seen) alterations to the main narrative, and also adding a lengthy biographical account of the poem’s visionary Pedlar, whose instinctive expertise in the One Life empowers him to discern the encompassing natural piety symbolized by the speargrass. This shift of attention – from an epiphanic awareness of natural religion, to the quality of mind necessary to experience such epiphanies – is a crucial Wordsworthian variation on Coleridgean doctrine, a subjective turn of the imagination which was to determine the nature of the Wordsworthian epic which, as by default, began to emerge from beneath the shadow of the doomed Recluse.
But that puts things too starkly, as discussions of the relationship which speak of its ‘conversation’ or ‘dialogue’ often do: for, in fact, this ‘Wordsworthian’ turn to the self was already anticipated by important elements in Coleridge’s thinking. The most obvious implication of the One Life theology was the reduction of the self’s independence to merely devoted passivity; but the self’s intrinsic interest dies hard in Coleridge (and in the end became his major theme). In a lecture on the slave trade in 1795, for instance, he had spoken eloquently of the God-given imagination; and his conversation poems, in practice, throw quite as much weight on the vividly lived experience of the individual self, moving towards illumination and returning to solitariness, as they do on the blissful dissolution of identity that spiritual success is meant to entail. A second look at the lines from ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’ that I quoted earlier emphasizes the point: the spiritual climax in that poem (as contrasted with, say, ‘Frost at Midnight’) involves a transcending of nature’s sensory specifics, brought about by the quality of the perceiver’s ‘gaze’. This sense of the mind’s elevation above its worldly circumstances features importantly in many of Coleridge’s descriptions of the spiritual life – even though the emphasis which such neo-Platonic transcendence throws upon the disembodied self is quite at odds with the ideas of natural ‘oneness’ that otherwise excited him, in which the self is abnegated for the whole. As we shall presently see, a good deal of Coleridge’s most pointed criticism would arise when he saw Wordsworth replicating this formative irresolution of his own, between the rival claims of spirit and nature.
But, in the heady spring of 1798, any sense of undermining intellectual discrepancy was quite subdued, with no thoughts of anything except complete success. As a sign of this long-term confidence, perhaps, short-term energies were largely directed to a different project: a co-authored volume of verse, primarily intended to cash in on the vogue for balladry. Coleridge already had ‘The Ancient Mariner’; and now, beginning in March 1798, Wordsworth completed new poems at an extraordinary pace – ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, ‘The Idiot Boy’, ‘The Thorn’, and others – in a way which ominously anticipated the imaginative fertility that would repeatedly arise when The Recluse was put to one side. Wordsworth’s ballads were written in a colloquial vernacular that was subsequently announced (in the ‘Advertisement’ to Lyrical Ballads (1798)) as the programme for both men, although, actually, it hadn’t much in common with the zealously cultivated historicism of Coleridge’s pseudo-medieval ‘Mariner’. Several of Wordsworth’s spring ballads bear obvious Coleridgean credentials of a different kind – rather too obvious, perhaps, when their lyrical statement of doctrine teeters on the merely sing-song: ‘One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach you more of man; / Of moral evil and of good, / Than all the sages can’ (‘The Tables Turned’). But the most powerful of the ballads are much more tangential to the putative Recluse-wisdom, and some even covertly parody the symbolical potential which the two poets attributed to natural objects. The narrator of ‘The Thorn’, for instance, scrutinizes objects with obsessional interest, not to detect God’s presence, but to persuade himself of his leering fantasies of infanticide; and in ‘The Idiot Boy’, Johnny Foy, whose surname might promise a person of natural faith, certainly responds to nature’s influences spontaneously enough, but within a story of gabbling comedy that hardly grants him a solemn authority. Many of the most striking of these Wordsworthian ballads are dramatic: the speaker of ‘The Thorn’ anticipates the poisonous, self-deluding narrators of Browning’s monologues; and the lasting effect of such poems is to stress, not a loss of individuality in the common life of the universe, but rather the recalcitrant individuality of the point of view – the ego’s insistent creation of its own experience, rising to the extreme cases of monomania and psychosomatic disease. Hazlitt, who encountered the two poets at the peak of their annus mirabilis, recalled Coleridge criticising Wordsworth’s scepticism about local superstitions;3 and a fundamentally ‘enlightenment’ impulse to psychologize supposedly supernatural experience underlies many of Wordsworth’s ballads. ‘The Ancient Mariner’, while not positively insisting on the objective reality of its supernatural events, nevertheless allows them to exceed the likelihood of a strictly rational explanation; Wordsworth’s Peter Bell, by contrast, while replaying Coleridge’s plot of a crime against nature and subsequent redemption, makes no bones about the self-created character of Peter’s salvation. (A more general equivocation over the strict objectivity of religious feeling also crops up in compulsive ‘or’s of the philosophical verse – ‘I saw them feel, / Or linked them to some feeling’ (Prel.1805 iii 126–7) – so foreshadowing the fruitful disregard for conceptual exactitude that Coleridge, keen for a vicarious systematic rigour, came to regard as slippery incoherence.) Wordsworth can hardly have been aware of the counter-voice the best of his ballads raised against the prophetic universalism of his planned epic: the sprightly individuality that underwrites the 1798 ballads is doubtless simply evidence of good spirits and ease, Wordsworth’s especially (one imagines) after so fraught and unsettled a time. Later critics, however, have seen in the diversity of Wordsworth’s voices – the Wordsworth of the ‘ordinary language’ ballads, and the vatic Wordsworth of the philosophic mind – the symptom of a fundamental and (as far as The Recluse was concerned anyway) disabling heterogeneity. (Coleridge certainly came to think so, as we shall see presently.)
Having deposited Lyrical Ballads with the publisher, Wordsworth and Dorothy went on to tour the Wye valley, in the course of which he composed ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, holding it in his head until they reached Bristol and a pen and paper. It is the high-water mark of Wordsworth’s Coleridgean nature-vision, a poem which could never have existed without Coleridge’s Unitarian enthusiasm, yet a poem which subtly revises that theological perspective, as Wordsworth’s winding verse discovers an alternative poetic mythology: himself. In ‘Frost at Midnight’, Coleridge had lamented his own city-bound childhood, and wished tenderly for his baby son the rural upbringing appropriate for an apprenticeship in the One Life; in ‘Tintern Abbey’, Wordsworth claimed such a childhood as his own, reworking the religious language of Coleridgean revelation into a description of psychological experience:
I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused . . .
‘Interfused’ is a quasi-technical term from Coleridge’s Religious Musings (line 423), where it appears in a passage describing God’s presence in the objects of nature; Wordsworth gratefully accepts the rhetoric, but uses it as a metaphor to describe an internal ‘sense’, and replaces the doctrinal assertiveness of Coleridge’s God (‘’tis God / Diffused through all, that doth make all one whole’: lines 139–40; my italics), with his own brand of the numinously non-specific (‘something’), exchanging religious claim for psychological implication. Religion was always the point at which the poets’ common cause silently unravelled: they seem to have avoided the subject (‘we found our data dissimilar, & never renewed the subject’, Coleridge explained stiffly: 18 May 1798; STCL i 410). Coleridge had long recognized Wordsworth to be ‘at least a Semi-atheist’ (13 May 1796; STCL i 216), and even that was probably hedging: Wordsworth once announced himself free of the need for a redeemer, a thoroughly anti-Coleridgean sentiment;4 and even when, in later life, Wordsworth embraced a solid form of Anglicanism, Coleridge remained unimpressed by his theological subtlety (8 August 1820; STCL v 95).
With Lyrical Ballads in press, the group travelled to Germany, where they separated, the Wordsworths settling in the small town of Goslar. Wordsworth’s Coleridgean project was very clear, but progress stalled, apparently at once; and instead of The Recluse appeared the first uncertain lines of what would later become ‘The Poem to Coleridge’, or (posthumously) The Prelude. The poem seems originally to have been an exercise in confidencebuilding, a summoning of memories of the rural childhood that Coleridgean theory had recently been insisting made him uniquely suited for the task ahead. The contours of a One Life childhood were well-established: Coleridge had described them, wishfully, in ‘Frost at Midnight’, even placing little Hartley in a mock-up of Cumbria (‘thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze / By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags / Of ancient mountain’). But instead, in the ‘spots of time’ Wordsworth discovered the formative powers of individualizing pain: childhood trauma, guilt, self-reproach. Like the most striking of his ballads, the ‘spots of time’ are exemplary episodes of creative misapprehension, though now told in the first person; and their impact does not feel part of nature’s providential education, but more like evidence of the singular mind’s awful capacity to create its own private realities. The poem discovers alternative sources of power, that is to say: internal ones; and they are associated with suffering and disquiet. A few slightly strained transitional passages acknowledge the discrepancy between Wordsworthian material and Coleridgean occasion, while trying to manage it: introducing, at length, the ‘quiet powers, / Retired, and seldom recognized, yet kind’, and wholly appropriate to a nurturing natural benevolence, Wordsworth is forced to concede other powers, ‘who use, / Yet haply aiming at the self-same end, / Severer interventions,’ and to confess himself rather one of their school (Prel.1799 i 74–5; 77–9). So, a counter-voice to Coleridge’s optimistic determinism immediately makes itself felt, and that places at the very origins of the poem one of its greatest strengths: an openness to disruptive details that spoil a Coleridgean thesis. (The rural idyll required by the stucture of the argument in Home at Grasmere (1800), a fragment of The Recluse, is similarly checked by insistent intimations of death and destruction.)
Coleridge belatedly followed the Wordsworths back to England in July 1799; in October he travelled with them in the Lake District, finally initiated into Wordsworthian territory. Learning that he was the dedicatee of The Recluse, Coleridge wrote encouragingly (STCL i 538); but Wordsworth’s energies were devoted to a second edition of Lyrical Ballads, which Coleridge saw through the press in late 1800. The addition to the book which would eventually cause the greatest controversy was in prose: the lengthy ‘Preface’, which Coleridge pressed upon Wordsworth. Coleridge later called it ‘half a child of my own Brain’, and claimed at the time that it contained ‘our joint opinions on poetry’ (29 July 1802, c. 30 September 1800; STCL ii 830; i 627), which there seems no reason to doubt: a conviction of a division in their opinions only arose later. The ‘Preface’ is not a One Life manifesto, but it does celebrate, like that theology, the criterion of ‘naturalness’, while distrusting urbanity, mannerism, and artifice. The position is not without its paradoxes; but its emotive bias – toward the pastoral (‘[l]ow and rustic life’) and truth to nature (‘I hope that there is in these Poems little falsehood of description’), against the intrusions of the poetic ego (‘[the] incongruity which would shock the intelligent Reader, should the Poet interweave any foreign splendour of his own’), and for a minute attentiveness toward the world (‘I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subject’) – is eminently clear. The ‘Preface’ seems to confirm that it was Wordsworth’s excellence as a poet of nature (as in Descriptive Sketches) that first appealed to Coleridge; his other early enthusiasm for Bowles and Cowper, who offered ‘natural thoughts with natural diction’ (BL i 25), bear out the point; and some of his own early verses similarly seek to shrug off artistic afflatus for a ‘natural’ idiom (one early poem was subtitled, ‘A Poem which affects not to be Poetry’).5
Besides the new ‘Preface’, the book was greatly changed, and the alterations all imply Wordsworth’s new dominance in their creative partnership: where the first edition had been anonymous, the new title page carried Wordsworth’s name alone; a second volume consisted entirely of new poems by Wordsworth (very few showing much trace of the philosophical enthusiasms of 1797–8); ‘The Ancient Mariner’, first in the 1798 text, was now tucked into a quiet corner just before ‘Tintern Abbey’ at the end of volume one, in a revised version that muted its medievalisms (Wordsworth thought their prominent eccentricity had damaged sales, as he explained to the publisher: 24 June 1799); and a bizarre note to ‘The Ancient Mariner’, by Wordsworth, listed its comparative virtues and several faults. Perhaps the most significant element of the 1800 collection from Coleridge’s point of view was, to most readers, invisible: ‘Christabel’, meant for the new volume two, but never completed, was dropped at the last minute – largely, it seems, at the instigation of Wordsworth, who replaced it with ‘Michael’. Biographers have often seen the abandonment of ‘Christabel’ as marking the end of Coleridge the poet, though there actually isn’t much sign of humiliation in the contemporary records that survive. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that, for whatever reason, Coleridge began to see his future less in poetry, and more in philosophy, especially when he compared himself with his one-time collaborator: ‘He is a great, a true Poet’, he wrote in December 1800, ‘I am only a kind of Metaphysician’ (19 December 1800; STCL i 658). In fact, Coleridge continued to write verses all his life; but the task of epic greatness was now, unequivocally, Wordsworth’s to fulfil: ‘If I die’, Coleridge wrote self-dramatizingly, ‘and the Booksellers will give you any thing for my Life, be sure to say – “Wordsworth descended on him, like the [Know Thyself] from Heaven; by shewing him what true Poetry was, he made him know, that he himself was no Poet” ’ (25 March 1801; STCL ii 714).
Wordsworth’s descent from heaven there is comic and rueful, but taps into a perfectly serious aspect of Coleridge’s literary theory: that the poet emulates, in a small way, the creative activity of God; and this conception gathered strength as Coleridge’s thought began to redirect itself in the first years of the century. As I have already mentioned, one important element in his religious sensibility was always disposed to value the mind or spirit as a sovereign power above the contingencies of the natural world, stressing the transcendence of the divine rather than its immanence; and now this side of his thought came increasingly to overshadow its One Life alternative. Where once the creativity of God was innate in things at large, and the appearance of the individual mind happily subsumed into it, now Coleridge came more and more consistently to attribute that creativity to the independent mind, which did not partake of a generally ubiquitous vitality but projected one onto the world about it. This seems a complete turn-about, as indeed it is; but the two positions have an odd kind of interchangeability: if you detect divinity in everything you see, this may well be because you are truly discerning the divine lurking in everything; but then it may equally be because divinity somehow lurks inherently within the act of you seeing. This second position makes the mind something like God in Genesis, gathering the sensory provisions of nature, and creating imaginative order out of their given incoherence. We can see this doctrine of creation beginning to stir most vividly in Coleridge’s own verse in ‘Dejection: an Ode’, in which our erstwhile One-Lifer hero turns away in despair from the puzzlingly unconsoling beauties of nature, and relocates the Godly power of life instead in the individual self: ‘I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within’. Those same ‘outward Forms’ were what, in the 1799 Prelude, Wordsworth had found charged with deity: ‘bliss ineffable . . . of being spread / O’er all that moves, and all that seemeth still’ (ii 449; 450–1); now the position was quite inverted. Coleridge later reminded himself
[t]o write to the Recluse that he may insert something concerning Ego / its metaphysical Sublimity – & intimate Synthesis with the principle of Co-adunation – without it every where all things were a waste – nothing, &c.
(Nbks ii, 2057)
‘Co-adunation’ is the synthesizing activity of the ‘I’ – the imagination, which was now set to displace nature as the principal subject for Wordsworth’s philosophizing verse to celebrate. It is present in every act of perception, but self-consciously manifest in poetry, where it reveals itself as the power that ‘diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each’ (BL ii 16). The overriding sense of unity is still the same, but now it is subjectively achieved, its source not an interfused deity but the God-like mind: ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am’ (BL i 304), as Coleridge put it in a famous passage. Such God-like poethood was later exemplified in Coleridge’s aesthetics by the idealizing genius of Milton, who ‘attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal’ (BL ii 27–8): Wordsworth’s sublime egotism made him Milton’s heir apparent.
Wordsworth, as we have seen, was already stirred by the creative mind as a poetic subject, though often in the form of diseased or neurotic misapprehension. Coleridge was evidently haunted by the lines from the dramatic monologue of the ‘Mad Mother’, whose deranged egocentrism pathetically attributes a benevolent influence to nature which it does not properly have: ‘The breeze I see is in the tree! / It comes to cool my babe and me’ (BL i 150–1). His developing theology of the imagination redeemed such self-centring creativity, instilling the figure of the poet with divine awe; and, as he revised The Prelude in the first few years of the century, Wordsworth eagerly seized upon this new source of sublimity, and took its opportunity for religiose selfaggrandisement: ‘Of genius, power, / Creation, and divinity itself, / I have been speaking, for my theme has been / What passed within me’ (iii 171–4). Lines added to the ‘spots of time’ passage describe how imagination
Among those passages of life in which
We have had deepest feeling that the mind
Is lord and master, and that outward sense
Is but the obedient servant of her will.
(xi 268–72)
And that seems emphatic enough (although the mind’s shifting gender might imply a subconscious uncertainty of purpose). But in the same poem, Wordsworth tells us, ‘in all things / I saw one life, and felt that it was joy’ (ii 429–30) – lines appropriated from his account of the One Life Pedlar. Nearing its end, the poem announces Wordsworth and Coleridge ‘Prophets of Nature’, yet its very last lines describe ‘the mind of man’ exalted above nature and ‘itself / Of substance and of fabric more divine’ (xiii 442; 451–2). This kind of contradictoriness, and the resultant uncertainty about the place of Wordsworth’s innate ‘plastic power’ (ii 381), characterizes the poem at large. The ambiguous portrayal of Coleridge in the poem enforces much the same indecision: at times, he is pitied for enduring the ‘self-created sustenance of a mind / Debarred from Nature’s living images’ (vi 312–13), while at other times he is celebrated as ‘one / The most intense of Nature’s worshippers’ (ii 476–7). This sort of double-focus, while hardly what Coleridge could have wanted, is what makes the poem so eminently Coleridgean an achievement; and, despite Wordsworth’s attempts, in Home at Grasmere, to tie together the alternative agencies of mind and nature in the hopeful metaphor of a marriage (lines 1006–14), such inconsistency didn’t promise to ease progress. When, sick of opium and unhappiness, Coleridge sailed for Malta in 1804, and seemed likely never to return, Wordsworth wrote frantically asking for notes on The Recluse (29 March 1804), eloquently implying the fatal uncertainty of purpose that took over the poem as its Coleridgean milieu shifted.
‘The history of Wordsworth’s later philosophical poetry’, Jonathan Wordsworth justly remarks, ‘is one of declining belief in the One Life, bolstered by greater and greater claims made for the Imagination and “the Mind of Man” ’.6 That places it in approximate parallel to Coleridge’s own career. Coleridge’s One Life inclinations had once worked to ensure ‘the World our Home’ (‘Lines Written in the Album at Elbingerode, in the Hartz Forest’, line 39), and Wordsworth instinctively responded to this noble resignation of other-worldliness, celebrating in The Prelude ‘the very world which is the world / Of all of us, the place in which, in the end, / We find our happiness, or not at all’ (x 725–7). But, at the same time, a developing anti-sensuousness in Wordsworth lamented (in the words of a sonnet of 1802–4) that ‘The world is too much with us’; and, in the explicitly Platonic ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, in part an answer to Coleridge’s ‘Dejection’, the world of sensory nature, to which Coleridge had forlornly turned in his poem, is refigured as a ‘prison-house’, the shadows of which close remorselessly upon the sadly embodied human. In the poem he wrote after hearing The Prelude, Coleridge praised Wordsworth for his depiction of moments when ‘Power stream’d from thee, and thy soul received / The light reflected, as a light bestow’d’ (lines 19–20) – a triumphant restatement of the idealist position he had announced in ‘Dejection’, and would later repeat as a philosophical fundamental: ‘We behold our own light reflected from the object as light bestowed by it’ (12 August 1829; STCL vi 813).
The sublime self-dependence of Wordsworth’s imagination became a recurrent object of Coleridge’s wonder (‘the dread Watch-Tower of man’s absolute Self’), and Wordsworth’s own extraordinary emphasis upon the authority of the self (a theme that much modern criticism has also dwelt upon) clearly satisfied much in the new Coleridgean dispensation. But it was also – especially alongside his experience of Wordsworth as a person – the subject of some powerfully mixed feelings. These doubts about ‘Self -ness’ (Nbks iii 4243) would find their fullest expression in the criticisms of Biographia Literaria (published in 1817), an autobiography-cum-philosophical-treatise, on which Coleridge had begun to meditate in 1803 (Nbks i 1515), very possibly on the model of The Prelude. Coleridge had nursed reservations about the direction Wordsworth’s genius was taking as early as 1802, when he wrote a series of letters worrying about the implications of Wordsworth’s latest poems: little poems, as Coleridge complained, not the unified magnificence of The Recluse. Coleridge’s unease about them – they include ‘Resolution and Independence’, ‘To a Daisy’, and others – rests on what kind of relationship poetry should maintain with natural truth; and Wordsworth’s failings, as Coleridge sees them, are revealingly diverse. On the one hand, Wordsworth is guilty of ‘a daring Humbleness of Language & Versification, and a strict adherence to matter of fact, even to prolixity’ (29 July 1802; STCL ii 830) – the charge of ‘prosaisms’ that Wordsworth had nervously defended himself against in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, and which would reappear in Biographia, illustrated there by passages from Wordsworth like ‘I’ve measured it from side to side; / ’Tis three feet long, and two feet wide’ (BL ii 79; 50n.). Such poetry, it seems, fulfils a ‘natural’ aesthetic all too completely, isn’t imaginative enough: Wordsworth’s vehemently naturalistic axioms in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads came under sustained attack in Biographia (quite disguising the fact that Coleridge himself had once subscribed to them) and the whole project was dismissed as a false start. But that aspect of Wordsworth’s genius lingered tenaciously, alongside the more visionary excellences, which is the complaint Coleridge makes about ‘Resolution and Independence’, where the prosaic descriptions of the leechgather are juxtaposed unforgivingly with the properly imaginative vision of that magnificent figure as he appears to Wordsworth’s ‘mind’s eye’ (BL ii 125).
But, on the other hand, several of the small poems Coleridge criticizes in the Summer of 1802 exemplify quite another kind of failing, which he is beginning to diagnose as ‘but Fancy, or the aggregating Faculty of the mind’ (10 September 1802; STCL ii 865), a fault that Biographia will call ‘mental bombast’, and characterize by its imposition of ‘thoughts and images too great for the subject’ (BL ii 136). Not, that is, keeping one’s eye steadily on the subject, but flying off into the mind’s private associations: ‘A Nun demure of lowly port, / Or sprightly Maiden of Love’s Court’, for instance, as Wordsworth addressed a daisy. Resolution and Independence, too, might as well be read (if we were to take the leechgatherer as its hero, rather than the poet) as exemplifying the mind’s excessively appropriative ambitions: Wordsworth conjures the raw material of the actual man into haunting vision, but he politely, yet tenaciously, resists his idealization into Wordsworth’s mind – ‘He with a smile did then his words repeat’ (line 127). The appropriative creativity the leechgatherer there resists amounts to a kind of egotism, and, by 1802, Coleridge had begun to suspect that Wordsworth’s egotistic self-reliance might be as much a limitation as an empowering autonomy: ‘I trembled, lest a Film should rise, and thicken on his moral Eye’ – the magnificence of the sublime ego now tipping into the humane shortcomings of ‘self-involution’ (14 October 1803; STCL ii 1013). Coleridge certainly came to feel that his treatment by Wordsworth exemplified a failure of sympathy or love (although he would have proved a taxing enough friend for anyone); and this personal conviction corresponds to a voice in the literary criticism opposed to Wordsworth’s otherwise splendid egotism, in which Coleridge repeatedly insists on the objective pleasures of nature all over again, against the broadly idealist temper of his thought. When the limitations of that kind of egotistic creativity are contrasted (in a letter of 1802, as later they are in Biographia) with full imagination, ‘the modifying, and co-adunating Faculty’, the theological origins of the superior activity become immediately recognizable: ‘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’ (10 September 1802; STCL ii 866; 864).
Coleridge would continue to attribute Wordsworth’s genius, at times, to his ‘Community with nature . . . the Eye & Heart intuitive of all living yet One Life in all’, while distrusting his excessive ‘self-concentration’ (Nbks iii 4243) as an obstacle to that imagination’s free expression. But then again, at other times, scorning Wordsworth’s lingering pantheist regard for nature in her own right (‘Nature-worship’: 8 August 1820; STCL v 95), it is the inadequacy of his idealizing imagination that causes the problem: prosaic blots on his poems, at which ‘we seem to sink most abruptly, not to say burlesquely, and almost as in a medly’ (BL ii 137). To speak of a ‘medly’, or to find an ‘incongruity’ at the heart of ‘Resolution and Independence’, is to discern in Wordsworth a deep-seated heterogeneity; but while this is recurrently the subject of attack, it is, at some of the most glowing moments of Biographia, reconceived as a triumphant reconcilation of opposites within the one genius. Then we meet a more notional Wordsworth, the very idea of genius, uniting the idealizing power of the sublime ego with the steady eye of a nature poet; and so exemplifying
the 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 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.
(BL i 80)
But such balancing acts are a tall order: you feel the praise occasionally lavished on Wordsworth in Biographia was at least as uncomfortable for its subject as the protracted fault-finding. (Wordsworth implies as much; but he took the book enough to heart to revise several of his poems in response to Coleridge’s account.)7 Wordsworth, the ultimate poet, is meant to combine what Coleridge calls the ‘two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination’ (BL ii 5); and Biographia sporadically announces his success while, sometimes subtly, sometimes harshly, tracing his inability to do so. The twin ‘points of poetry’ appear again, in chapter fifteen of Biographia, as the division of labour originally intended in Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth’s poetry is to reawaken his readers to the ‘inexhaustible treasure’ of the ordinary things of nature, Coleridge’s to treat the imagination’s more ‘romantic’ subjects. Together, this belated scheme of perfect collaboration implies, they would have been capable of reconciling the diverse types of poetry into a single work, at once natural and idealizing – what Wordsworth on his own has subsequently proved sadly unable to pull off. But Coleridge’s contributions (he says) came to seem a clog on the enterprise, and so he withdrew (BL ii 6; 8). It is almost certainly untrue as an historical account of the book;8 but it has the profundity of a Coleridgean myth of genius, and its failure, focused upon Wordsworth in a way at once poignant and reproachful.
The differences animating Biographia were personal as well as literary, for the poets’ intimacy had waned by the time of its writing:9 the unhappy biographical details lie beyond the scope of this essay, but the change in their personal relationship is worth noticing because it helps explain the occasionally unforgiving sharpness of tone in Biographia. The friendship was patched up, but never returned to its original intensity; and mutual disappointment replaced expectation as its main emotion. When The Excursion, a book of narrative relief from the philosophical rigours of the unwritten Recluse, appeared in 1814, Coleridge wrote at length expressing his immense disappointment that Wordsworth had still not managed to synthesize the recalcitrant ingredients of his philosophy (30 May 1815; STCL iv 574–5). Wordsworth, meanwhile, came increasingly to lament Coleridge’s abstracted absorption in those same metaphysical concerns: ‘He is now too often dreamy’, he told Coleridge’s nephew, ‘he rarely comes into contact with popular feelings & modes of thought’ (15 October 1829; TT i 546). One has the sad sense of two minds, once deeply congenial, becoming increasingly alien. ‘[D]id you understand it?’ the poet Rogers asked Wordsworth after Coleridge had talked philosophy at them for two hours. ‘ “Not one syllable of it”, was Wordsworth’s reply.’10
Yet traces of the old admiration persisted, poignantly. In conversation in 1828, Crabb Robinson called Coleridge ‘Southey’ by mistake: ‘ “Pray do not make such a blunder again”’, Coleridge responded, adding, ‘ “I should have no objection to your doing it with him.” (Pointing to Wordsworth)’;11 and when Coleridge died, prematurely aged in 1834, Wordsworth found himself drawn to the same epithet that Dorothy had used almost forty years before: ‘He . . . called him the most wonderful man that he had ever known’, as though involuntarily returning in memory to the first hopeful days of their partnership.12 His public monument was some lines elegizing ‘the rapt One, of the godlike forehead’ in ‘Extempore Effusion Upon the Death of James Hogg’. Privately, Wordsworth’s sense of continuity with an earlier self, and a sense too perhaps of his indebtedness to Coleridgean gifts, manifested itself in his lasting kindness towards Hartley Coleridge, who dissipated his unmistakeable genius in a wandering, dissolute life amid the Cumbrian mountains, as if in a cruel parody of the idealized Wordsworthian destiny his father had envisaged for him in ‘Frost at Midnight’. When Hartley died in 1849, he was buried in the Wordsworth plot in Grasmere churchyard.
NOTES
1 See Robert Woof, ‘Wordsworth and Coleridge: Some Early Matters’, in Jonathan Wordsworth (ed.), Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies (Ithaca, ny: 1970), pp. 76–91.
2 Quoted in Michael Mason (ed.), Lyrical Ballads (London, 1992), p. 367. The failure of ‘The Wanderings of Cain’ is described in Coleridge’s preface of 1828: Beer, p. 172.
3 ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, in Howe, P. P. (ed.), The Complete Works of William Hazlitt (London, 1930–4), xvii, p. 117.
4 Edith J. Morley (ed.), Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers (3 vols.; London, 1938), i, p. 158.
5 Complete Poetical Works, ed. E. H. Coleridge (2 vols.; Oxford, 1912), i, 106n.
6 Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity (1969), p. 212.
7 ‘The praise is extravagant and the censure inconsiderate’ (Crabb Robinson, i: 213). For Wordsworth’s revisions, see Eric C. Walker, ‘Biographia Literaria and Wordsworth’s Revisions’, Studies in English Literature, 28 (1988), 569–88.
8 See Mark L. Reed, ‘Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the “Plan” of the Lyrical Ballads’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 34 (1964–5), 238–53.
9 See Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford, 1989), pp. 288–9.
10 Richard W. Armour and Raymond F. Howes (eds.), Coleridge the Talker. A Series of Contemporary Descriptions and Comments (Ithaca, ny, 1940), p. 336.
11 Crabb Robinson, i, p. 360.
12 Armour and Howes, Coleridge, p. 378.