After The Fall of Robespierre, Coleridge did not return to the medium of formal tragedy until the composition of Osorio in 1797. Both of these plays must be considered experiments in the mode: Coleridge watched and read tragedy closely but had not studied stagecraft. He did not acquire any close, practical knowledge of how drama should be staged until Remorse went into production in December 1812, when he was present at rehearsals. The two early plays display Coleridge’s want of expertise. The Fall of Robespierre lacks stage directions entirely other than indications of when characters enter and exit the action. Coleridge does not seem to have imagined how the play would be performed before an audience. The piece was written primarily for publication, but Coleridge does not provide the means even for a reader to visualize the action fully. In the introduction to the published text of Remorse, Coleridge, still pained by the failure of the earlier version of the play, reveals that he wrote Osorio under a belief that Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816), theatre director at Drury Lane, would see the merit of his verse and add the necessary dramatic apparatus:
As an amusing anecdote, and in the wish to prepare future Authors, as young as I then was and as ignorant of the world, for the treatment they may meet with, I will add, that the Person who by a twice conveyed recommendation (in the year 1797) had urged me to write a Tragedy: who on my own objection that I was utterly ignorant of all Stage-tactics had promised that he would himself make the necessary alterations, if the Piece should be at all representable.1
Thus The Fall of Robespierre and Osorio demonstrate both an inclination towards tragedy and ignorance of how it is produced. The Fall of Robespierre can be judged a less serious attempt as Coleridge and Southey’s purpose was to raise funds by sales of the published text, but of Osorio Coleridge entertained hopes that he would attain the prestige and financial reward of being a successful playwright for a London theatre.
Sheridan rejected Osorio for production at Drury Lane. Coleridge requested that Joseph Cottle publish the play with Wordsworth’s contemporaneous tragedy The Borderers and a critical apparatus on principal characters from the plays; Cottle declined. In view of Richard Cronin’s study of Cottle’s ‘grand plan’ for a local literature of south-west England, it seems likely that a printed drama set in historical Spain was unsuited to Cottle’s project to promote provincial epic.2 The rejections discouraged Coleridge, but he had already claimed aversion to the composition of stage tragedy. In a letter to William Lisle Bowles following his completion of Osorio in 1797, Coleridge expresses his disdain for the work of playwriting:
In truth, I have fagged so long at the work, & see so many imperfections in the original & main plot, that I feel an indescribable disgust, a sickness of the very heart, at the mention of the Tragedy […]. It is done: and I would rather mend hedges & follow the plough, than write another. I could not avoid attaching a pecuniary importance to the business; and consequently, became anxious: and such anxieties humble & degrade the mind.3
There is further evidence that Coleridge could not adopt the professional mindset necessary to succeed at London’s theatres. He lacked persistence and was unable to respond to criticism positively. In a letter to Southey in 1800, Coleridge indicates that Osorio was not rejected outright by Sheridan, but that Coleridge’s reluctance to revise the play cost him the production: ‘Mr Sheridan sent thro’ the medium of Stewart […] a declaration that the failure of my piece was owing to my obstinacy in refusing any alteration.’ Coleridge expresses the same sentiment in a letter to Daniel Stuart, but adds that he lacks confidence in his ability as a playwright: ‘I am convinced, I have no Talents for so arduous a species of composition as the drama.’ To Godwin, Coleridge writes that no legitimate tragedy would succeed in the current intellectual climate. He has credible reasons for this claim and, as I argue in the next chapter, such misgivings shape Osorio and the staged version of Remorse. But in the letter to Godwin, Coleridge’s need to discount contemporary drama to salvage pride as an author is palpable:
The success of a Tragedy in the present size of the Theatres (Pizarro is a Pantomime) the success of a TRAGEDY is in my humble opinion rather improbable than probable —. What Tragedy has succeeded for the last 15 years? You will probably answer the Question by another—What Tragedy has deserved to succeed? and to that I can give no answer.
Despite the negativity that Coleridge associates with Osorio, he decides not to abandon the play entirely. In correspondence with Cottle, Coleridge expresses his desire to include two excerpts from the tragedy in Lyrical Ballads: ‘I shall print two scenes of my Tragedy, as fragments.’4 Hence, Maria’s conversation with the Foster-Mother is reproduced in Lyrical Ballads as ‘The Foster-Mother’s Tale’ (Osorio, IV.ii.3–83). Albert’s lamentation on the inhumanity of imprisonment is published as ‘The Dungeon’ (Osorio V.ii.1–30). In further correspondence with Cottle, Coleridge elaborates on his plan:
The extract from my Tragedy will have no sort of reference to my Tragedy, but is a Tale in itself, as the ancient Mariner.—The Tragedy will not be mentioned—/As to the Tragedy, when I consider it [in] reference to Shakespear’s & to one other Tragedy, it seems a poor thing; & I care little what becomes of it—when I consider [it] in comparison with modern Dramatists, it rises: & I think it too bad to be published, too good to be squandered.—I think of breaking it up; the planks are sound, & I will build a new ship of old materials.5
The main focus of this chapter is not Coleridge’s relationship with theatre, but how the rejection from Drury Lance influences him creatively. With this decision to re-use ‘The Foster-Mother’s Tale’ commences his relationship with the literary fragment. Thus Coleridge’s interaction with a form that typifies some of the major works of his canon, including ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’, originates in his failure with Osorio. In this chapter I place a special type of literary production within Coleridge’s tragic vision; the failed projects that he rehabilitates in a recurrent pattern. I examine also the ways in which Coleridge reverts to a tragic motif of crisis and redemption in diverse literary forms: thematically, as a structural principle, and as a philosophy that he applies to the publication of his own works. I argue that the tragic ‘impulse’ is common to all of these productions.
Prior to discussion of ‘The Foster-Mother’s Tale’, I want to indicate the wider cultural context for Coleridge’s construction of a new form using old parts. Consistently, modern scholars define the Romantic period as an age of change, with political, social, scientific and economic development interrelated to literary innovation. For example, Duncan Wu, who condenses the influential argument of M.H. Abrams, unites public and artistic affairs in the Romantic mindset: ‘If philosophy could generate revolution, so too could poetry.’6 ‘Reform’, one of the key terms in studies of Romantic liberal politics, bears significant implications for the practices of authorship at the time and specifically of new attitudes to how literary works might be structured. Clifford Siskin observes that writing became identifiable as ‘a kind of work’ during the eighteenth century, but that the professional boundaries between different modes of authorship were not yet established.7 Hence Mervyn and Raymond Williams introduce John Clare as the possessor of a genius whose manifestations were arbitrary; ‘a way of seeing and writing […] which is a state of being, a condition of existence, long before and after it can be formally defined.’8 This intermediate position, in which authorship is recognized as a professional occupation, while subdivisions in the practice of writing remain undefined, is crucial to comprehending the variety of Coleridge’s literary output.
Within the Romantic atmosphere of change and instability, Coleridge displays a relaxed attitude to literary forms in his critical works. As Coleridge articulates them, the differences between written forms can be minor, and one literary form can metamorphose into another easily. On Shakespeare as author of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, Coleridge comments in 1811 that ‘the impulse to the Drama was secretly working in him.’ This belief in a recurrent ‘impulse’ is important to assess Coleridge’s tendency to manifest his tragic vision in various literary forms. Coleridge invokes a similar principle when he uses catachresis deliberately in his description of Paradise Lost in an 1812 lecture. He claims that Milton has ‘acted a real poem.’ Shakespeare ‘proceeded in the same process’ as the Greek tragedians, regardless of Aristotle’s model for tragedy. Novels arise from plays with too many stage directions. In the Bible ‘all persons had been affected with a sense of their high poetic character.’9 The forms of artistic production are in flux because of their common ‘impulse’. In a lecture on tragic drama of 1808, Coleridge expands a central constituent of tragedy to claim that opposition is the ‘one great principle’ of all art:
The ever-varying Balance […] of Images, Notions, or Feelings […] conceived as in opposition to each other — […] the infinite gradations between these two from [sic.] all the Play & all the Interest of our Intellectual & Moral Being, till it lead us to a Feeling & an Object more aweful, than it seems to me compatible with even the present Subject to utter aloud.10
This anticipates John Payne Collier’s report in 1811 that Coleridge ‘had often thought that Religion […] is the Poetry of all mankind’, as each aims to broaden people’s perspective beyond their own ‘narrow sphere of action’: ‘By placing them in aweful relations [religion or poetry] merges the individual man in the whole & makes it impossible for any one man to think of his future or of his present but in reference to a future without at the same time comprizing all his fellow creatures.’11 With this comment, which equates the purposes of poetry and religion, Coleridge anticipates his definition of the Classical tragedians’ aim in Biographia Literaria:
They wished to transport the mind to a sense of its possible greatness during the temporary oblivion of the worthless ‘thing, we are’ and of the peculiar state, in which each man happens to be, suspending our individual recollections and lulling them to sleep amid the music of nobler thoughts.12
As Coleridge’s articulation of the purpose of religion, and of art in general, resembles the intentions of the Classical dramatists, he implies that a tragic sense informs all art. Nicholas Reid claims that literary form is important to Coleridge only as ‘the outcome of a transformative process’. Coleridge’s real interest, Reid argues, is in a Platonic ‘form’, an ideal state of art.13 This ideal is one of improving literature: Coleridge’s dismissal of form as ‘superficial’ in Biographia Literaria arises from his belief that form is subordinate to the poet’s chief concern; that he/she ‘brings the whole soul of man into activity’.14 This is the ‘impulse’ present in many of Coleridge’s works in diverse forms.
In this chapter I suggest that Coleridge’s poetic practices parallel his critical theories. His works in diverse literary forms are tragic, at times as a set of philosophical ideas, and at others by the formal invocation of Greek tragedy. While I argue that in some poems Coleridge introduces devices of Greek tragedy explicitly to traditionally unassociated forms such as the ballad, all of the poems analysed in this chapter are tragic in the sense that they explore the cycle of catastrophe and redemption fully or partially. Hence the thematic content of a literary work by Coleridge is not necessarily that associated traditionally with the form, but is determined by ‘impulse’ that occasions it.
I wish also to assess the role of Coleridge’s reader, who is intended to undergo an educative process in which tragic literature ‘brings the whole soul of man into activity’. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge repeats his hypothesis of Shakespeare’s dramatic ‘impulse’. He rephrases the idea as ‘the great instinct, which impelled the poet to the drama’. The consequence of this ‘instinct’ is that Shakespeare places unusually philosophical demands on the reader or spectator. The effort necessary to apprehend Shakespeare’s meaning produces a beneficial effect in the reader’s mind:
You seem to be told nothing, but to see and hear every thing. Hence it is, that from the perpetual activity of attention required on the part of the reader […that] the reader is forced into too much action to sympathize with the merely passive of our nature. As little can a mind thus roused and awakened be brooded on by mean and indistinct emotion, as the low, lazy mist can creep upon the surface of a lake, while a strong gale is driving it onward in waves and billows.15
Lucy Newlyn is correct to call attention to the manner in which Coleridge uses ‘framing devices’ to ‘foreground the reader’s role in constructing meaning.’16 These devices, such as the Preface to ‘Kubla Khan’, are but one example of the techniques Coleridge uses to encourage his reader to engage deeply with the text to derive meaning from it. From Wolfgang Iser, I suggest that Coleridge envisions the space between text and reader as an active one in which the reader, although compelled to follow the directions of the text, ‘sets the work in motion’.17
That Coleridge does not always expect the reader to enjoy his works as a passive reception of aesthetically pleasant material is communicated, for example, by the title Sibylline Leaves (1817), which Coleridge explains in the volume’s Preface as an ‘allusion to the fragmentary and widely scattered state in which [the poems] have been suffered to remain.’ The title transforms the disorganized state of Coleridge’s texts into a sort of success, a challenge to the reader’s comprehension. The constructive, interpretative role of Coleridge’s ideal reader is implied by the allusion of Sibylline Leaves to Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Helenus describes the Cumaean prophetess:
You will see the prophetess in her frenzy,
chanting deep in her rocky cavern, charting the Fates,
committing her vision to words, to signs on leaves.
[…]
But the leaves are light—if the door turns on its hinge,
the slightest breath of air will scatter them all about
and she never cares to retrieve them, flitting through her cave,
or restore them to order, join them as verses with a vision.
So visitors may depart, deprived of her advice,
and hate the Sibyl’s haunt.18
The visitor must retrieve and make sense of the leaves or, as Aeneas does, control the Sibyl’s powers of prophecy. Coleridge’s allusion to Virgil identifies him with the ancient oracles, an acknowledgment of the diverse and fragmentary nature of his works, and the arduous but beneficial task undertaken by those who read them. The reader too is flattered by the part of the questing Aeneas, and participates in role-play between author and reader that elevates the literary experience to the importance and solemnity of its ancient origins. Yet the reader’s role is not entirely free: in Sibylline Leaves Coleridge displays his keenness to steer the audience towards particular evaluations of the ‘Ancient Mariner’. In this version of the text Coleridge introduces both the Epigraph that invites the reader to consider the supernatural and the marginal gloss that, as Sally West observes, makes ‘over-tidy interpretations of the narrative’ which are more compatible with Coleridge’s Christianity at this time.19 As the heroic Aeneas is directed by the Sibyl, so too is Coleridge’s reader guided by the apparatus of gloss and Epigraph.
The diversity of literary forms used by Coleridge can often be explained by commercial motives. Coleridge and Southey wrote The Fall of Robespierre, truly a closet drama as the authors never intended its performance, for publication to fund their proposed settlement in America. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s respective tragedies The Borderers and Osorio were composed to finance their visit to Germany. When neither a theatre nor a publisher was willing to pay for the plays, the authors compiled Lyrical Ballads for the same purpose. Of Coleridge’s periodicals The Watchman (1796) and The Friend (1809–10), Lewis Patton opines that ‘journalism seemed a natural and inevitable means of expressing one’s views, marketing one’s verse, and making one’s living’, which indicates the freedom to adopt various written forms.20 Patton’s comment is corroborated by Siskin’s observation that ‘new periodicals could […] be launched and sustained with very little capital’, and that the author could glean material from other publications without fear of recrimination.21 Coleridge’s literary lectures, of which he delivered more than 100 from 1808 to 1819, attracted such luminaries as Charles Lamb, Lord Byron and John Keats, but their primary function was to serve the demands of an emergent middle-class that was keen to educate itself. A newspaper prospectus for one of Coleridge’s lecture courses in 1818 promises that the auditor will emerge capable of conversation on literature in polite society, whether ‘contributing to the entertainment of the social board’ or for ‘the amusement of the circle at the fire-side’.22 In his letters, Coleridge uses a favourite formulation repeatedly to explain his submission to financial pressure; he declares his deference to the forces of ‘Bread and Cheese’.23 Hence I think that frequently, Coleridge’s choices of literary genre are influenced simultaneously by the tragic philosophy and creative opportunism: commercial incentives work with Coleridge’s aesthetic preferences to shape his writing.
Kenneth Burke cites the possibility that any event in a sequence can be used to represent the entire sequence synecdochially: ‘if there are, let us say, seven ingredients composing a cluster, any one of them could be treated as representing the rest.’ Burke expands upon his point in reference to instances of sacrifice in the ‘Ancient Mariner’ and Remorse. He claims that these allusions to sacrifice signify Coleridge’s system of thought, which is heavily reliant on the figure of the scapegoat.24 In adherence with Burke’s model of synecdoche and its referent, the larger system of thought, I will analyse ‘The Foster-Mother’s Tale’ as a representative of Osorio as a whole and of Coleridge’s tragic aesthetic.
In the scene from Osorio that forms ‘The Foster-Mother’s Tale’, the eponym recalls a story associated with the nearby prison, of an adopted child who was raised at the expense of Lord Velez. Although he was ‘unteachable’ and ‘never learnt a prayer’, the boy became a favourite of Lord Velez (‘The Foster-Mother’s Tale’, ll. 29, 30). However, the narrator explains that reading caused the youth to entertain ‘unlawful thoughts’ and so to attract suspicion of blasphemy (44). The climax of the Foster-Mother’s story is that an earthquake, which caused the nearly fatal collapse of a wall, was attributed to the boy, who was consequently imprisoned, later to escape and flee.
Within ‘The Foster-Mother’s Tale’, all the thematic concerns of the play Osorio are represented. The alienated familial love between Velez and the youth represents the feud between Osorio and Albert, and prefigures the gradual estrangement between Maria and her foster-father, Velez, for her inability to love Osorio. The persecution of the youth for his apparent lack of faith re-enacts the subject of religious persecution that permeates the play. The imprisonment of the boy, and his piteous song, exemplifies the mode of lamentation of incarceration adopted by Alhadra and Albert elsewhere in Osorio. Finally, the collapse of the wall, like the conjuring scene of Osorio, is interpreted by its witnesses as supernatural. These events effect catastrophe and set in motion the process towards purgation in the boy’s escape and Osorio’s death respectively. I believe that the decision to extract a portion of the play as ‘a Tale in itself’ illustrates Coleridge’s compositions of the period 1797–98. It demonstrates his realization that the tragic can be articulated partially, without portrayal of the entire cycle of catastrophe and catharsis explicitly, and without the need to do so in a theatre. The reasons for such experimentation are both commercial and aesthetic.
In ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ (1798), as in ‘The Foster-Mother’s Tale’, Coleridge uses ancient tragedy as a source for plot devices – pollution, guilt and purgation are prominent themes – but also as a structural principle.25 This corroborates Stephen Maxfield Parrish’s claim that ‘at a deeper level’ than that of ‘poetic diction’ the Lyrical Ballads are ‘experiments in dramatic form’.26 Additionally, Greek tragedy extends both temporally and generically our comprehension of Coleridge’s claim to imitate ‘the elder poets’ in the Argument that precedes the poem. When he extracts ‘The Foster-Mother’s Tale’ from its source, Coleridge retains the structure of dramatic dialogue. Similarly, the balladic stanzas of the ‘Ancyent Marinere’ are presented as a dialogue, a dramatic encounter between the Mariner and the Wedding-Guest. Like the messengers reporting on battle in Seven Against Thebes and the self-mutilation in King Oedipus, the Mariner fulfils the role of katoptēs, ‘one who sees […] to convey [to others] what comes to him through his eyes and ears.’ Helen H. Bacon’s comment that this literal meaning of the katoptēs is of particular interest due to the ‘special prominence’ of the eyes in the Oedipus myth is applicable to the ‘Ancyent Marinere’ for the same reason. Both the Mariner’s eyes, and those of the undead, ‘glitter’ (‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’, ll. 3, 13, 475.17).27 Curses originate ‘in a dead man’s eye’, and the Wedding-Guest admits, ‘that, which comes out of thine eye, doth make | My body and soul to be still’ (260, 372.1.3–4). Thus Coleridge’s repeated allusions to eyes in the poem recall their significance in King Oedipus, and also indicate a source for the device of the messenger.
The use of dialogue, in which one character reacts to the other, allows Coleridge to encourage the reader’s response with emotional cues. Maria, the internalized audience of ‘The Foster-Mother’s Tale’ assists the creation of a tense atmosphere. The Foster-Mother claims that her utterance of the story is ‘perilous’, and fears that she may be overheard (17). Maria directs the reader to evaluate part of the account as ‘a sweet tale’, but does not comment on the youth’s assumed death abroad, and so leaves the reader to formulate his/her own assessment of the conclusion (68). The extraction of ‘The Foster-Mother’s Tale’ from its original context is not flawless – Maria’s initial reference to the ‘entrance’ is unintelligible from the text provided – but Coleridge refines his use of the same tragic devices in the ‘Ancyent Marinere’ (16). The Wedding-Guest, the reader’s representative within the poem, acts as tragic chorus; he comments on the Mariner’s account to dictate how the reader should respond. Like Maria, the Wedding-Guest provides emotional cues for his audience, and so adheres to the principles of fear and pity, delineated by Aristotle in the Poetics as the essential, reactive emotions of the tragic auditor. The Wedding-Guest sympathizes with the Mariner, exclaiming ‘God save thee’ (79). During the Mariner’s account the Wedding-Guest also becomes frightened (224). Finally, the ‘sadder and […] wiser’ auditor eschews the merriment he intended to enjoy in the poem’s opening sequence, and thus demonstrates the success of a tragic strategy in ‘suspending our individual recollections and lulling them to sleep amid the music of nobler thoughts’ (624). Simultaneously he presents the reader with the task of interpreting the poem’s problematic moral content.
Hermann Fischer claims that the Romantic readership was generally ‘looking for literature of a less demanding kind’ than traditional forms of tragedy and epic, and preferred the ‘naïve tone of folk tradition’.28 Coleridge’s decisions to write popular forms of narrative verse and balladry are wise commercial ventures, but his use of Classical sources enables originality within those forms. In the months surrounding the completion of the ‘Ancyent Marinere’ in 1798 Coleridge continues to experiment with the tragic in popular verse-forms, most saliently in a number of poems published later as fragments, including ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘The Three Graves’ and ‘Christabel’.
It is useful to juxtapose Coleridge’s decisions to publish poetic fragments with critical perceptions of his literary philosophy, both contemporary and modern. First, Coleridge’s consent to make public inconclusive fragments contradicts John Keats’s famous declaration in 1817 that Coleridge lacks ‘Negative Capability’:
That is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge.29
Keats exaggerates. In some critical writings Coleridge is explicitly in favour of such mystery as constitutes ‘Negative Capability’. In a marginal note of 1828, Coleridge attacks Heinrich Steffens’s tendency ‘to spoil and excuse to ridicule deep psychological Hints and Possibilities by attempting to ground them in one or two questionable and anomalous facts.’30 In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge states that the reader of a poem ‘should be carried forward, not […] by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of the mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself.’31 Second, the fragment must be evaluated in relation to Coleridge’s theory of organic growth as propounded by M.H. Abrams using an exhaustive selection of passages from Coleridge’s critical works. A poem is likened to a plant which germinates in the Imagination and matures successfully as the Imagination digests what it perceives, adapting to – and assimilating materials from – its environment.32 Abrams concludes his analysis by arrival at the plant’s ‘achieved structure’ of ‘organic unity’, and claims that ‘the existence of that whole is a necessary condition to the survival of the parts’.33 However, Coleridge’s decision to break asunder the ‘planks’ of Osorio to publish ‘The Foster-Mother’s Tale’ and ‘The Dungeon’ separately contradicts Abrams’s interpretation. Further study of Coleridge’s fragments necessitates an overview of modern scholarship on the Romantic fragment.
In Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (1981), Thomas McFarland posits that British Romanticism falls under the ‘diasparactive triad’ of ‘incompleteness, fragmentation and ruin’. For example, the orphaned and neurotic Wordsworth and Coleridge possess incomplete personalities, which necessitate creative symbiosis. They derive literary impetus from a ‘sense that life in the here-and-now is torn and broken.’34 Thus to McFarland the act of authorship is a process in which the writer is consoled or made whole. Wolfgang Iser alludes to the fragmentary nature of the Coleridgean Imagination, which sustains a flawed ‘referentiality’ to an ideal in its ‘unending repetition of nature in the human mind’.35 In adherence to Iser’s view of the Imagination, McFarland presents poetry as a type of Platonic form, of which the earthly poem is but a flawed imitation, and he quotes from Shelley’s ‘Defense of Poetry’ (1821): ‘The most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the Poet.’36 This Platonic concept, by which all poetic endeavour is doomed to failure, is comparable with the more materialistic view of Kenneth Burke, who finds also that a written work tends to be somehow incomplete due to the nature of authorship. Burke claims that the writing of any poem entails an act of sacrifice: ‘Since the symbolic transformation involves a sloughing off, you may expect to find some variant of killing in the work.’37 While he is a pragmatist rather than a Platonic idealist, Burke makes a similar observation to McFarland’s, that the effort to convert a thought into a literary work is doomed to partiality. The problem is compounded when the literary production itself has not been finished.
To McFarland, the incomplete poem is a mere part of a flawed artefact; he likens the ‘unfinished work’ to ‘the edifice decayed’.38 This comparison is problematic. Neither McFarland nor Marjorie Levinson – who writes generally of ‘The Romantic Fragment Poem’ – offers a practical distinction between a poem such as Keats’s ‘Hyperion: A Fragment’, which Keats abandoned but chose to publish in his 1820 volume, and Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’, a work interrupted in the manuscript stage by the poet’s death in 1822 and published posthumously.39 In the case of Coleridge this difference is important because he chooses to exploit a text’s incompleteness to produce a new effect that he did not intend at the time he commenced the work.
To Marjorie Levinson, ‘Christabel’ is the product of Coleridge’s combination of ‘the subjectivity, fantasy and sensationalism associated with romance and the impersonal, fatalistic severity of tragedy.’40 Like the ‘Ancyent Marinere’, ‘Christabel’ is preoccupied with tragic themes such as curse and pollution. Credibly, Levinson cites a series of conventions of Classical tragedy that occur in ‘Christabel’, and particular resemblances to Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Sophocles’ King Oedipus. According to Levinson, Sir Leoline, and not Christabel, is the ‘tragic hero’ of Coleridge’s poem. Like the houses of Atreus and Laius, the house of Leoline is under a curse. Christabel must enact the role of Orestes or Electra by expiating this curse, while the bard Bracy fulfils the prophetic role of Cassandra or Tiresias. Levinson notes the tragic love-triangles of Laius–Jocasta–Oedipus and Agamemnon–Clytaemnestra–Aegisthus and speculates upon the existence of a similar dynamic between Leoline, Christabel’s mother, and Sir Roland. Hence, she suggests the possibility that Christabel’s mother died unnaturally.41 Finally, Levinson combines thematic and structural observations to hypothesize that Coleridge, having composed two Parts of the poem, intended to resolve the curse on the household in the course of another three Parts, thus matching the five-act structure of tragedy. While the credibility of her conclusion is impeded by anachronism – the five-act structure is an Elizabethan invention and does not correspond to Classical tragedy – I agree with Levinson’s identification of parallels with ancient tragedy as the impetus for the action in ‘Christabel’.
Many of the tragic devices identified by Levinson in ‘Christabel’ are domesticated in the working-class rurality of ‘The Three Graves’. As in ‘Christabel’, the preoccupations of Coleridge’s continuation of Wordsworth’s poem include the curse, as the jealous mother utters imprecations upon the lovers and their friend, Ellen. Suspiciously, a parent is absent or deceased. The desire of Mary’s mother for her daughter’s fiancé, Edward, forms a quasi-incestuous love-triangle evocative of that in King Oedipus. The character of Ellen, whose relation to the lovers Edward and Mary is unclear, adds further amorous intrigue. Coleridge’s contribution to the poem ceases as the mother’s curse takes effect:
Then Ellen shriek’d, and forthwith burst
Into ungentle laughter;
And Mary shiver’d, where she sat,
And never she smil’d after.
(‘Continuation of “The Three Graves”’, ll. 315–18)
Levinson notes that tragedy introduces a ‘reality principle’ to counteract the excessive fantasy of romance in ‘Christabel’. However, I believe that Coleridge is unable to complete his fusion of tragedy with the popular forms of balladry and verse narrative, and primarily for this reason both ‘Christabel’ and ‘The Three Graves’ are unfinished. He introduces themes and plot devices, but fails to impose a tragic structure of resolution on the poems. Coleridge indicates the unlikelihood of completing ‘Christabel’ in a complaint that it necessitates ‘witchery by daylight’. J.C.C. Mays implies that Coleridge’s initial purpose was for the poem to act synecdochially, ‘simply to present, embody, and suggest’ rather than to enact ‘the resolution of tensions and oppositions’.42 Coleridge articulates a tragic crisis that is irresolvable, but this is incompatible with the romance genre, which requires episodic progress to resolution. Similarly, I suggest that Coleridge gives up ‘The Three Graves’ because no vision of redemption is viable; as Wordsworth complains, Coleridge ‘made it too shocking and painful’. Additionally, however, Coleridge had no obvious financial motivation to complete the poems: John Murray did not publish ‘Christabel’ until 1816. ‘The Three Graves’ appears in The Friend in 1809, but it is clear that Lyrical Ballads failed to popularize new ballads concerned with working-class society. An article in the Edinburgh Review of 1812, assessing the Tales: By the Reverend George Crabbe, demonstrates the existence of a critical climate that is uninterested in tragedies of the ‘lower orders’, because the circumstances of ‘middling life […] can only be guessed at by those who glitter in the higher walks of existence’. In this atmosphere there is no encouragement for Coleridge to complete such a poem as ‘The Three Graves’: ‘Those who do not belong to that rank of society […] can neither be half aware of the exquisite fidelity of his delineations, nor feel in their full force the better part of the emotions which he has suggested.’43
Deferring or denying the completion of ‘Christabel’ and ‘The Three Graves’, Coleridge is content to have the poems published unfinished. However, the incomplete state of some of Coleridge’s poems is transformed to positive effect in their publication. First, a fragment engages readers, as Michael Bradshaw argues: ‘it is the combined reward and frustration of a fragment poem both to invite and to thwart analysis, to appeal for interpretation and simultaneously to discredit it.’ Further, Bradshaw finds that ‘paradoxically, the whole once again becomes the primary form and focus […] we reinstate an approval of wholeness, and imagine that the text in its whole state is, in an abstract sense, originary.’44 When Bradshaw’s claim is juxtaposed with Nora Crook’s quotation from Shelley to imply that fragments ‘sharpen the wits of men’ more than other, whole texts, it becomes credible that the attempt to read Coleridge’s fragments renders them, ironically, more suited to his project of literature that edifies readers than if the poems had been completed.45 ‘Indeterminacy’, as Iser observes, causes ‘mobilization of the reader’s imagination.’46 Coleridge is explicit that readers should not avoid the challenge of thought that seems fragmentary. From a lecture of 1811 John Payne Collier reports that Coleridge derides readers who ignore certain passages of Shakespeare’s works as too difficult:
They were looked upon as hints which Philosophy could not explain: the terra incognita for future discoveries; the great ocean of unknown beings things to be afterward dis explored, or as the sacred fragments of a ruined temple, every part of which in itself was beautiful but the particular relation of which parts was unknown.47
The publication of ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ exemplifies other means by which a fragmentary work might generate success in a manner not anticipated by the author originally. Wordsworth was reluctant to publish ‘Christabel’ in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads and the poem did not appear in the volume as Coleridge had intended. This ensured that prior to publication in 1816, the poem could only be transmitted orally or by the private circulation of manuscripts. As both of these media reached mostly sympathetic audiences that enhanced the reputation of the poem, an air of mystery was created that ‘Christabel’ would not have generated had it been published previously, and was responsible for Coleridge’s brief friendship with Byron. Thus, the commercial success of the poem is attributable to Coleridge’s failure to resolve its tragic crisis, a process repeated closely in the publication of ‘Kubla Khan’, which likewise remained unpublished for some years due to its fragmentary state, but had acquired a saleable mystique by the time it was made public.
E.S. Shaffer assesses ‘Kubla Khan’ as ‘the translation of the two major classical genres, epic and drama, into their most romantic form’, and as evidence of Coleridge’s plan to write a longer work on the fall of Jerusalem and ‘the recreation of the ancient religious constitution of man in the new Jerusalem.’48 The final strophe of the extant poem marks a departure from immediate experience to articulate the poet’s sense of loss:
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she play’d,
Singing of Mount Abora.
(‘Kubla Khan or, a Vision in a Dream’, ll. 37–41)
McFarland assesses this passage as ‘banal’, ‘execrable’ and ‘appalling’.49 While McFarland’s criticism of the verse itself is understandable, the prefatory statement, ‘Of the Fragment of Kubla Khan’, which Coleridge affixes to the 1816 publication, alters the reader’s interpretation of the poem by its union of the text with a myth of its aborted creation. The description of the composition that ‘passed away’ validates the poor poetry of the closing stanza as a manifestation of Coleridge’s sense of loss; he becomes identifiable as the speaker-poet. Coleridge employs the preface ingeniously to compound the poem’s pathos of an irretrievable paradise. Comparably, Timothy Bahti observes that Coleridge allegorises the poem’s incomplete assortment of imagery with the fount of fragments:
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half–intermitted Burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail. (19–21)
Noting that the moment of the river forcing up rock fragments is transient, Bahti detects a metaphor for Coleridge’s own inability to achieve a ‘fluid continuity’ in the authorship of ‘Kubla Khan’.50 Thus the poem is an expression of the author’s failure to write it. Yet with the preface Coleridge forms a mythical pattern of a paradisiacal vision granted to him and now departed irretrievably. With the passed empire of Kubla Khan an overall tragic theme emerges; the human condition of loss.
I have argued elsewhere that Coleridge is not the author of a translation of Faust that has been published in his name.51 Yet I think that it is useful to examine some of his responses to Goethe’s play, which represent a confluence of two great tragic thinkers of the Romantic period. It is in his reluctance to undertake a project based on Faust that Coleridge communicates his sentiments on the tragedy. Coleridge’s Faust, as much as it exists at all, does so as a number of scattered comments on Goethe’s play, characteristic fragments of thought in letters and the conversazione of his final years, and perhaps also an annotated copy of the German text that is yet undiscovered. The influence of Coleridge’s poetry and criticism is evident in the translation of Faust by John Anster, one of his protégés. To introduce the text Anster analyses the supernatural content in Coleridgean, psychological terms:
The mysterious relation between our world and that of spirits has afforded in all ages a foundation for works of the highest poetical interest; no other works of fiction, indeed, have a firmer basis of reality in the depths of the human mind. They bring back to its obscure longings—they give a form to its most inward hopes and apprehensions—to the thoughts, which we scarcely dare to shape into words—and they connect the terrors and eagerness of believing childhood with the wildest and most daring speculations into which we can venture, concerning our nature and our destiny.52
In epistolary advice to Thomas Boosey, who had inquired how a partial translation of Faust might be formatted, Coleridge suggested the inclusion of critical matter to explain the reader’s intended response to the play. While Boosey did not follow Coleridge’s advice, Anster interjects with the type of commentary Coleridge recommended: ‘we transfer [Faust’s] guilt to the Satanic being by whom he is attended—we pity and forgive him.’53 Anster’s vocabulary is more particularly Coleridgean than that of Boosey’s translator: ‘reverie’, ‘spectre’, ‘loftier’, ‘motion’, ‘external nature’. Where Anster claims that Goethe’s Faust possesses a ‘charm’ found only in Coleridge amongst English poets, I believe he thanks Coleridge for advice on his translation, such advice as Coleridge had given previously on Anster’s poems in 1819.54
Among Coleridge’s countless unfulfilled projects is a plan to write a version of Faust, but a ‘better’ one. Coleridge offers blunt and compelling reasons for his reluctance to translate Goethe’s play: ‘Faust himself is dull and meaningless […]. A large part of the work to me is very flat.’ Coleridge perceives an opportunity to write a superior play, and describes a detailed synopsis of the plot in conversation:
My Faust was old Michael Scott; a much better and more likely original than Faust. He appeared in the midst of his college of devoted disciples, enthusiastic, ebullient, shedding around him bright surmises of discoveries fully perfected in after-times, and inculcating the study of nature and its secrets as the pathway to the acquisition of power. He did not love knowledge for itself—for its own exceeding great reward—but in order to be powerful. This poison-speck infected his mind from the beginning.55
What is remarkable about Coleridge’s plan for Michael Scott is the number of borrowings from his own drama. Under suspicion of blasphemy from priests, Scott is incarcerated, and escapes; as ‘to witchcraft Michael turns with all his soul’, the exploitation of magic is revealed to be folly and propels the character toward crisis; the incorruptible female character is used as an exemplary figure of virtue as the plot moves towards resolution, and by indicating the possibility of goodness she is an agent of catharsis.56 Each of these devices has an antecedent in Coleridge’s manuscript play Osorio and the revised version, the successful Remorse. To amend the defects he perceived in Goethe, Coleridge resorted to his own previous work. Coleridge was a notorious recycler of material, and the practice is acutely noticeable in his dramas. Asked to write a tragedy to open at Drury Lane, he did no more than revise the 15-year-old Osorio manuscript. This staged play, Remorse, incorporates no fewer than 10 lines from Coleridge’s translation of The Death of Wallenstein. In turn he considered revising his Wallenstein translations of 1800 ‘as an original work, & in one Play’ for the stage in 1817.57
Whatever his reasons for not fulfilling the Michael Scott project, I think from the similarities the plan bears to Remorse that it was not necessary for Coleridge to write this new version of Faust, which would inevitably have covered familiar ground. Furthermore, where Coleridge finds the philosophy of Goethe’s play unpalatable, as Paul Hamilton argues, I also find evidence of a broader struggle with the tragic in Coleridge’s later years; in my final chapter I argue that this eventually leads him to abandon the mode.58 Thus his extant responses to Faust are not synecdoches of Coleridge’s unwritten version of the play, but evidence of a greater problem he develops with tragedy itself.
Novalis (1772–1801) observes that the fragment is symptomatic of the literary innovations of his time, and represents the false starts of formal experimentation. He writes in Pollen (1798), ‘The art of writing books has not yet been invented. But it is on the point of being invented. Fragments of this sort are literary seeds. There may indeed be barren grain among them: yet if only some sprout!’59 Some of Coleridge’s unfinished works display such experimentation. At other times Coleridge raises philosophical issues in his poems which he cannot resolve, and this causes them to remain unfinished. Ironically, in the provocative nature of its irresolution, the fragment achieves one of Coleridge’s chief aims as an author; it ‘brings the whole soul of man into activity’. The partial representation of the tragic cycle in Coleridge’s fragments functions identically to the ‘Foster-Mother’s Tale’ and the ‘Ancient Mariner’, which I presented as synecdoche. While I argue broadly that Coleridge possesses a tragic philosophy, by which all catastrophe yields eventually to redemption, it is evident at a less grand level in the process of salvaging doomed literary projects: partiality assumes an air of deliberation and completeness, failures become successes. As I suggest the merit of Coleridge’s protean ability to assume various literary forms while he employs the devices of tragedy, I wish also to demonstrate the importance of contemporary theatre to him. The rejection of Osorio leads Coleridge to a crucial innovation within his body of works, yet he has not parted from the stage finally. While a rehabilitation of the modern, critical view of Coleridge’s relationship with the theatre seems to be underway, there is yet insufficient recognition that he produced some of the most successful drama of the Romantic period.
1 Quoted in PW, III.2, p. 1063.
2 Richard Cronin, ‘Joseph Cottle and West-Country Romanticism’, The Coleridge Bulletin, n.s., 28 (2006), 1–12 (p. 2).
3 CL, I, p. 356.
4 Ibid., pp. 624, 603, 653, 387.
5 Ibid., p. 412. The ‘one other Tragedy’ Coleridge alludes to is most likely to be Milton’s Samson Agonistes.
6 Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. by Duncan Wu, Blackwell Anthologies, 4th edn (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), p. xxxviii.
7 Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 5–6.
8 John Clare: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. by Mervyn and Raymond Williams (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 1.
9 LoL, I, pp. 250, 402, 201, 86, 222.
10 Ibid., p. 84.
11 Ibid., p. 325.
12 BL, II, p. 186.
13 Nicholas Reid, Coleridge, Form and Symbol: Or the Ascertaining Vision, Nineteenth Century Series (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2006), p. 32.
14 BL, II, pp. 11, 16.
15 Ibid., pp. 21–2.
16 Paradise Lost, p. 59.
17 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 275.
18 Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. by Robert Fagles (London: Penguin Classics, 2006), p. 118.
19 Sally West, Coleridge and Shelley: Textual Engagement, The Nineteenth Century Series (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), p. 131.
20 Watchman, p. xxvii.
21 The Work of Writing, p. 4.
22 LoL, II, p. 27.
23 For example CL, I, pp. 171, 222, 227, 258; III, p. 97.
24 Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 2nd edn (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), pp. 28–9.
25 All quotations from ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ in this chapter refer to the 1798 text; see PW, I.1, pp. 370–418.
26 Stephen Maxfield Parrish, ‘Dramatic Technique in the Lyrical Ballads’, PMLA, 7 (1959), 85–97 (p. 86).
27 Helen H. Bacon, ‘The Shield of Eteocles’, in Oxford Readings in Greek Tragedy, pp. 24–33 (p. 25).
28 Romantic Verse Narrative, p. 35.
29 The Letters of John Keats, I, p. 193.
30 CM, V, p. 252. Coleridge responds to Steffens’s claim that spontaneous human combustion is caused by alcoholism: ‘The recently accredited Cases of spontaneous Conflagration of Dram Drinkers do not amount to half a dozen.’
31 BL, II, p. 14.
32 M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 169–74.
33 Ibid., p. 174.
34 Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Modalities of Fragmentation (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 4–5, 10–11, 65.
35 Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 275.
36 Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, p. 23.
37 The Philosophy of Literary Form, p. 39.
38 Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, p. 14.
39 Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).
40 Ibid., p. 83.
41 Ibid., pp. 87–9.
42 PW, I.1, p. 479.
43 Edinburgh Review, XVI (1816), p. 279.
44 Michael Bradshaw, ‘Reading as Flight: Fragment Poems from Shelley’s Notebooks’, in The Unfamiliar Shelley, ed. by Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb, The Nineteenth Century Series (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009), pp. 21–40 (p. 23).
45 Nora Crook, ‘Shelley’s Late Fragmentary Plays: “Charles the First” and the “Unfinished Drama”’, in The Unfamiliar Shelley, pp. 297–311 (p. 311).
46 Prospecting, p. 27.
47 LoL, I, p. 289.
48 E.S. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 18.
49 Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, p. 233.
50 Timothy Bahti, ‘Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and the Fragment of Romanticism’, MLN, 96:5 (1981), 1035–50 (p. 1040).
51 ‘“Give it up in despair”: Coleridge and Goethe’s Faust’, Romanticism, 15:1 (2009), 1–15.
52 Quoted in Faustus: From the German of Goethe, Translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Frederick Burwick and James C. McKusick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), p. 227.
53 Ibid., p. 235.
54 Ibid., p. 228.
55 TT, I, p. 197.
56 Ibid., pp. 197–9.
57 CL, IV, p. 733.
58 Paul Hamilton, Review of Faustus: From the German of Goethe, Angermion: A Yearbook of Anglo-German Cultural Relations, 1 (2008), 175–9.
59 Novalis, ‘Aphorisms and Fragments’, trans. by Alexander Gelley, in German Romantic Criticism, ed. by A. Leslie Wilson, The German Library, 21 (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1982), pp. 62–83 (p. 67).