*The loss of Coleridge’s version of Faust, which would surely have been spectacular, had a curiously suspending effect on Goethe’s reputation in Victorian England. Shelley (who said that only Coleridge could do it justice) translated fragments of the drama in 1822 in Italy, which were published by Leigh Hunt in The Liberal; and Coleridge in turn said he admired these “very much” (see Table Talk, I, p. 574). But full translations did not appear until the late 1820s, by which time it was heavily bowdlerized. By 1833 even Coleridge claimed he had turned it down as “vulgar, licentious and most blasphemous”. (Table Talk, I, p. 343) Gérard de Nerval translated it magnificently in France (1828), but no major poet attempted Faust in England until Louis MacNeice (1951). Instead there were somewhat guarded essays by Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, and a fine humorous biography by George Eliot’s sprightly “husband”, G. H. Lewes (1855).
*Coleridge kept this address secret for some time, and his exact place of residence has not been previously identified. It is perhaps coincidental that in the 1990s the area round Calne and Avebury became famous for its mysterious “crop-circles”.
*Because Coleridge made the distinction famous in Romantic criticism, it is sometimes thought he invented it. On the contrary, it was a popular battle-ground among 18th century poets and philosophers, and can be found in Shaftesbury’s Characteristics (1711), Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), James Beattie’s Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783), Maass’s Einbildungskraft (1792), Kant’s Anthropologie (1800), and not least in Wordsworth’s Preface to his Poems (1815). Scholars have shown that Coleridge knew and annotated all these sources – most are mentioned by name in the Biographia – and his originality lay in the particular psychological and ultimately religious weight he gave to the terms.
*The image of the “waterboatman” insect is marvellously original, and seems to expand on a simile from the philosopher David Hume. In the Treatise of Human Nature, (1739–40) Book I, Section 4, Hume remarks on the intrinsic energy of the Imagination, which “is apt to continue, even when its object fails it, and like a galley put in motion by the oars, carries on its course without any new impulse.” Coleridge’s image was passed on in turn to W. B. Yeats, a master of the poetic “trance”, who used it superbly in his poem “The Long-Legged Fly” from Last Poems (1939), which ends:
There on that scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
*This much was first identified in Sara Coleridge’s 1847 edition of the Biographia, and has been meticulously clarified by the most modern edition (1983) which prints every possible parallel passage from German authors – Maass, Jacobi, Kant, and Schelling most notably – in its footnotes, frequently, and symbolically, threatening to overwhelm the main text with its sources. The editors even print a percentage summary of “Direct Unacknowledged Translations” compared to original materials: overall about 13% in the exclusively philosophical sections. However, taking Chapters 5 to 13 entire, a text of about 45,000 words, on the most rigorous showing only about 4,000 words are indisputable plagiarism. One wonders what Coleridge would have made of such literary mathematics. See Biographia, II, Appendix A.
*Coleridge’s water-images also connect with those of flight, as with the famous flock of starlings, “thickening, deepening, blackening”, he had glimpsed from a coach window in November 1799. All these express problems of imaginative freedom balanced against artistic and moral control, and are linked with Coleridge’s analysis of nightmares and visions. (See Early Visions, pp. 253–4.) Perhaps they could be described as his poetry of “psychological fluid-mechanics”. It is no coincidence that Edgar Allan Poe, an alcoholic and great admirer of Coleridge’s poetry and prose, used many such images as the key to his stories of entrapment, obsession and addiction, notably “The Maelstrom” in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, (1840).
*The limits of scientific “materialism” and “determinism” still engage us in the largest possible way. After a long period of eclipse in the nineteenth century, apparently overwhelmed by the “hard” sciences of physics, chemistry and mathematics, Coleridge’s view of a mysterious, dynamic universe of “powers” and energies, of “uncertainty principles” and continual “process” (which he shared with the German Naturphilosophie) is returning to confront us in new forms of speculative science. (See John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age, 1996.) Following a fine contemporary re-assessment of Kant and Schelling, Bryan Magee writes: “After the two great revolutions of twentieth-century physical science – relativity theory and quantam physics – we know that matter cannot be, as had previously been believed by so many people, the ultimate constituent of the universe, because elementary particles consist of energy. We also have exceedingly powerful grounds for believing that the universe is not deterministic.” (Confessions of a Philosopher, 1997, p. 355.)
*For the original circumstances of composition, see Early Visions, pp.162–8; and the discussion in Selected Poems, pp.336–7. This reading has been humorously explored in a poem by Stevie Smith, “Thoughts on the Person from Porlock”:
Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in? –
He could have hid in the house.
It was not right of Coleridge, in fact it was wrong
(But often we all do wrong)
As the truth is I think he was already stuck
With Kubla Khan.
He was weeping and wailing: I am finished, finished,
I shall never write another word of it;
Then along comes the person from Porlock
And takes the blame for it…
(Collected Poems of Stevie Smith, Allen Lane, 1975)
The idea that poetry or visionary prose might be composed in sleep, dreams, or drug-induced “revery” became increasingly influential after the publication of “Kubla Khan”, and reached an apogee in De Quincey’s dream-sequences in Suspira De Profundis (1849). These were later imitated by Theophile Gautier, Baudelaire and Cocteau in France; and the “automatic writing” of the Surrealists. Coleridge’s Preface appears to claim that poetry could be the direct product of the unconscious, without artistic intervention. Yet despite the lack of “any sensation or consciousness of effort” in such composition, Coleridge felt that the Imagination, the “esemplastic” or shaping power, must still be at work in the artist’s mind if the result was not to be mere “phantasmagoria” or delirium. “A poem may in one sense be a dream, but it must be a waking dream.” (Literary Remains, 1836, I. p.36.) For an alternative view of “unconscious processing” in “Kubla Khan”, see the fascinating comparison with the supposed dream-discoveries of scientists, analysed by Lewis Wolpert: “Creativity” in The Unnatural Nature of Science, 1992.
*Shortly after his death, when Shelley’s reputation was still almost universally reviled in England except among extreme radicals, Coleridge expressed a characteristically warm and avuncular opinion. “Shelley was a man of great power as a poet, and could he only have had some notion of order, could you only have given him some plane whereon to stand, and look down upon his own mind, he would have succeeded. There are flashes of the true spirit to be met with in his work…He went to Keswick on purpose to see me and unfortunately fell in with Southey instead…Southey had no understanding or toleration of such principles as Shelley’s. I should have laughed at his Atheism. I could have sympathized with him and shown him that I had once been in the same state myself, and I could have guided him through it. I have often bitterly regretted in my heart of hearts that I never did meet with Shelley.” (Table Talk, I. p. 574.)
*This is close to the philosophy of historicism, and the theory of recurring “Epochs”, advocated by Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) whom
Coleridge had read in Italy. (See Coleridge in Italy, by Edoardo Zuccato, 1996, pp. 138–44.) Isaiah Berlin described the imaginative leap across time and customs which Vico advocated. “Unless we are able to escape from the ideological prisons of class or nation or doctrine, we shall not be able to avoid seeing alien institutions or customs as either too strange to make any sense to us; or as tissues of error, lying inventions of unscrupulous priests. The doors which, according to Vico, myth and fable and language open to us will remain romantic delusions.” (The Crooked Timber of Humanity, 1992, p. 86.) The same power of imaginative identification, (or indeed “suspension of disbelief”) was seen as central to Coleridge’s approach to historical truth by the philosopher J. S. Mill, in a key passage from his essays On Bentham and Coleridge (1840). “By Bentham, beyond all others, men have been led to ask themselves, in regard to any ancient or received opinion, Is it true? And by Coleridge, What is the meaning of it? The one took his stand outside the received opinion, and surveyed it as an entire stranger to it; the other looked at it from within, and endeavoured to see it with the eyes of a believer in it…” For an illuminating discussion, see Charles De Paolo, Coleridge: Historian of Ideas, 1992.
*The enigma of Hazlitt’s sustained animosity towards Coleridge, rooted in both personal and ideological disappointment with a hero-figure, is broached in Early Visions, pp.178–80. But it must also be remembered that Hazlitt (a fine and aggressive fives-player) always wrote best when on the offensive. “I crawl about the Fives-Court like a cripple till I get the racket in my hand, when I start up as if I was possessed by a devil.” (“A Farewell to Essay-Writing”, 1828.) Other admired figures like Edmund Burke, Byron and Shelley, also received such brilliant and sustained bastinadoes. (See his revealing essay, “On the Pleasures of Hating”, 1826.) Lamb said Hazlitt’s articles on Coleridge were “like saluting a man: ‘Sir, you are the greatest man I ever saw,’ and then pulling him by the nose.” While Keats observed cheerfully: “Hazlitt is your only good damner, and if ever I am damned – damn me, if I shouldn’t like to him to damn me.” Moreover nothing could be finer, or in its own way more tender, than Hazlitt’s unforgettable evocation of young Coleridge and Wordsworth in “My First Acquaintance with Poets”, 1823. (See the shrewd discussion, in terms of a war of intellectual styles, by Tom Paulin: “Coleridge the Aeronaut”, in The Day-Star of Liberty, 1998.)
*Andrew Motion, Keats, 1997, is especially valuable on this growing awareness among writers.
*Looking back after nearly twenty years, J. S. Mill saw the creation of an intelligentsia very much as Coleridge had hoped: “…The peculiarity of the Germano-Coleridgean school is, that they saw beyond the immediate controversy, to the fundamental principles involved in all such controversies. They were the first (except a solitary thinker here and there) who inquired with any comprehensiveness or depth, into the inductive laws of the existence and growth of human society…They were the first who pursued, philosophically and in the spirit of Baconian investigation…not a piece of party advocacy, but a philosophy of society…a contribution, the largest made by any class of thinkers, towards the philosophy of human culture.” “On Coleridge”, London Review, March 1840.
*The pilgrims, some more pious than others, would include among many celebrities, Thomas Carlyle, Edward Irving (preacher), Charles Mathews (comic actor), Gabriel Rossetti (poet), John Sterling (writer), John Stuart Mill (philosopher), Philarete Chasles (French historian), Charles Cowden Clarke (critic and biographer of Keats), James Fenimore Cooper (American novelist), Ralph Waldo Emerson (American writer and sage), John Frere (Cambridge Apostle), Sir William Hamilton Rowan (Irish astronomer), Julius Hare (Cambridge Apostle and preacher), Thomas Hood (poet), and Harriet Martineau (educationalist). Their accounts, ranging from the enchanted to the exacerbated, are collected in a splendid echo-chamber of memoirs, Coleridge the Talker, edited by Richard W. Armour and Raymond F. Howes, 1940.
*Coleridge (perhaps thinking of Goethe) would later sum this up in a famous formula. “Every man is born an Aristotelian, or a Platonist…They are the two classes of men, besides which it is next to impossible to conceive a third.” (July 1830, Table Talk, II, pp.111–12.) Charles Lamb was so delighted with this suggestion that he parodied it in a brilliant Elia essay, “Two Classes of Men”, those who borrowed books or money and those who lent them; while F. D. Maurice added that “all little children were Platonists”, but sadly “grew up” to be Aristotelians. Later Matthew Arnold used the idea to divide the world between enlightened Hellenists and barbarian Philistines (Culture and Anarchy, 1869, which owes much else to Coleridge’s idea of education); and later still W. S. Gilbert sang that “every boy and every gal,/ That’s born into the world alive” was either “a little Liberal,/ Or else a little Conservative!” (Iolanthe, 1882.) This declension of a seminal concept through several generations, including its shift between serious and comic applications, is a characteristic example of Coleridge’s subtle, bifurcating bequest of ideas to posterity. The tradition has been cleverly explored by David Newsome in Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English Romantic Thought, 1974. Modern neurological theory now seems to find the same division between the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
*Coleridge continued to philosophize about love until the end of his life. In a Notebook of 1829, he can be found speculating on the way each gender contains elements of the opposite sex, in a way very close to Carl Jung’s theory of Animus and Anima (see Man and his Symbols, 1964). “In the best and greatest of men, most eminently…there is a feminine ingredient. – There is the Woman in the Man – though not perhaps the Man in the Woman – Adam therefore loved Eve – and it is the Feminine in us even now, that makes every Adam love his Eve, and crave for an Eve. – Why, I have inserted the dubious ‘perhaps’ – why, it should be less accordant with truth to say, that in every good Woman there is the man as an Under-song, than to say that in every true and manly Man there is a translucent Under-tint of the Woman – would furnish matter for a very interesting little Essay on sexual Psychology.” (See Heather Jackson, “Coleridge’s Women”, in Studies in Romanticism, No.32, 1993.) The whole subject of dissolving sexual identities (and once again, Wordsworth’s fear of those Coleridgean “monsters”) is explored with sensational gusto (“his dream poems are an alchemic bath of swirling Dionysian liquidity”) by Camille Paglia, “The Daemon and Lesbian Vampire: Coleridge”, in Sexual Personae, 1991.
*One such cavern still exists at Dumpton Gap, exactly as Coleridge describes, the white chalk walls stained pantomime green with seaweed, like a decorated gothic niche for a baroque Triton. When I hunched there, one freezing afternoon in late spring, exactly ten years after crawling into Coleridge’s childhood cave at Ottery (see Early Visions, p. 12) I knew that one version of Coleridge’s story certainly ended here – the child and the old man perfectly reconciled in a Platonic cave of visions and memories. But then the cold North Sea flooded in, with its thousand inflexions and crying seagulls, and drove us on to a different conclusion. (See Leon Edel, “Narratives”, in Writing Lives: Principia Biographica, 1984.)
*There are few stranger examples of Coleridge’s liberating influence whispering down the years than Charles Dodgson. As a young man, troubled by scientific attacks on the Bible, he drew profound comfort from Coleridge’s prose work. Influenced by “Christabel”, he also plucked up courage to write his only overt account of his suppressed sexual obsession with young girls, in a virtually forgotten ballad-poem, “Stolen Waters” (1862). He was then free to write Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in which the proud and eccentric old Caterpillar, ensconced on his high mushroom with his hookah pipe (of opium?), may seem faintly familiar. (See Morton N. Cohen, Lewis Carroll, 1995.)
*With lifelong dedication, Sara Coleridge re-edited the two volumes of the Biographia (1847); three volumes of Essays on his Own Times (1850); and (with Derwent) a revised edition of The Poems (1852), completed on her own deathbed. What this cost her is hinted at in a late poem, “To My
Father”, which opens: “Father, no amaranths e’er shall wreathe my brow, / Enough that round thy grave they flourish now…”, an echo that will become poignantly clear in a moment. (See Bradford Keyes Mudge, Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter, 1989.) Henry Nelson Coleridge edited four volumes of the Literary Remains (1836–9); and the Table Talk (1835) before his own premature death in 1843. The latter, despite some fine entries, is too respectful and desultory to form a living portrait. Leslie Stephen reflected: “a Life of Coleridge may still be put together by some judicious writer, who should take Boswell rather than the ‘Acta Sanctorum’ for his model, which would be as interesting as the great “Confessions”; which should in turn remind us of Augustine, of Montaigne, and of Rousseau, and sometimes, too, of the inimitable Pepys;…which should show the blending of many elements of a most complex character and most opulent intellect; and defy the skill of a psychologist to define.” (Hours in a Library, 3, 1888.)
*The idea that biological “selfishness” and relentless competition are the driving mechanism of evolutionary “ascent”, can be traced from Bernard Mandeville’s poem The Fable of the Bees (1714) through Darwin to Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976). Coleridge belongs to an alternative intellectual tradition which observes the same phenomena in terms of an emerging “altruism”, which may be traced from the German Naturphilosophien to Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (1888) to Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue, 1996. But Coleridge’s evolutionary thinking is always fundamentally religious, and he held what many scientist would currently dismiss as the “teleological heresy”: that evolution has a purpose beyond survival and adaptation. To the end he mocked the “Boa Constrictor of Materialism” (to J. H. Green, May 1828, Letters, VI, p. 737).
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