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Coleridge and Wordsworth
A Lyrical Dialogue
By Paul Magnuson PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06732-2
CHAPTER 1
"Our Fears about Amalgamation":
An Introduction
Shortly after arriving in Germany in 1798, William and Dorothy Wordsworth separated from Coleridge and began a dreary trip to Goslar, where they spent the winter alone. Coleridge had written to Thomas Poole, his friend and patron, on September 28 that "Wordsworth & his Sister have determined to travel on into Saxony, to seek cheaper places" (STCL 1: 419), and Wordsworth himself had informed Poole on October 3 that "we set off this evening by the diligence for Brunswick" (LEY 230). Poole responded to Coleridge on October 8: "The Wordsworths have left you — so there is an end to our fears about amalgamation." The news of their separation was similarly received by Josiah Wedgwood, who had granted Coleridge an annuity of £150 the previous winter: "I hope that Wordsworth & he will continue separated. I am persuaded that Coleridge will derive great benefit from being thrown into mixed society" (STCL 1: 419). Charles Lamb, too, quipped to Southey: "I hear that the Two Noble Englishmen have parted no sooner than they set foot on german Earth, but I have not heard the reason — Possibly to give Moralists an handle to exclaim 'Ah! me! what things are perfect?'" (Lamb Letters 1: 152).
Lamb's play on the title of Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen implies that the relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth was one of kinship but also that it was less than an ideal fraternity. There is no evidence, however, that the Wordsworths' decision to seek less expensive lodgings was based on any other than financial considerations. There is no hint of the personal conflicts that led to Coleridge's separation from the Wordsworths on the 1803 Scottish tour, when each complained of the other's hypochondria, and that led to more serious breaks later on. The "amalgamation" must have been a poetic and intellectual one. Lyrical Ballads (1798) had just been published, and that volume was just one of the projects for joint publication that they had discussed with Joseph Cottle the previous spring.
Poole's phrase is ambiguous. One cannot be sure whom he included in the phrase "our fears." It certainly includes himself and probably Coleridge, but one cannot be sure whether it included Wordsworth or any of Coleridge's other acquaintances. In May Coleridge had written to Cottle about their proposed publications: "We deem that the volumes offered to you are to a certain degree one work, in kind tho' not in degree, as an Ode is one work — & that our different poems are as stanzas, good relatively rather than absolutely" (STCL 1: 412). If Coleridge's offer to Cottle accurately reflects Wordsworth's opinions, then Wordsworth, too, must have looked upon their poetry as "one work." Thus Poole's relief and Wedgwood's hope reflect a commonly held and openly discussed concern about the continued close relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth in 1798. In the following chapters I examine the relationships between Coleridge's and Wordsworth's texts as though they were "one work," or as though they constituted an extended lyric sequence or lyric dialogue. I will concentrate on their poems rather than their lives and personal relationship, which have been discussed in detail before.
Their personal relationship has been explained from two general points of view. The first, suggested by Coleridge himself in the Biographia Literaria, presents Wordsworth as temperamentally the poet and Coleridge as the philosopher and literary critic. Discussing his definitions of imagination and fancy, Coleridge contrasted his interests with Wordsworth's in the 1815 preface: "it is my object to investigate the seminal principle, and then from the kind to deduce the degree. My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage" (BL 1: 88). Recently, Jonathan Wordsworth, in The Music of Humanity, argued that before 1798 Coleridge's early philosophical thought, a combination of pantheism and Berkeley's idea of nature's language as divine language, provided Wordsworth with a philosophical basis for his mature nature myth. Coleridge had "evolved a philosophical belief which Wordsworth assimilated" and "had evolved the doctrine of the One Life, and had pointed the way towards Tintern Abbey." Kenneth Johnston, surveying Wordsworth's lifelong efforts to organize and complete The Recluse, describes "Wordsworth's respectful and eager attendance upon Coleridge for a set of notes or other direct indication of a philosophical outline to support his 'pictures of Nature, Man, and Society.'
A second common account of their personal relationship emphasizes Coleridge's myriad of psychological dependencies upon stronger persons and his deep need for support and affection within a circle of friends. The origin of this view is also the Biographia, in which he presents Wordsworth as the greatest modern poet, one who provided him with the insights to construct a philosophy of literature. It receives support from Coleridge's letters, in which he informs correspondents again and again that Wordsworth is the greater man. In May 1799 Coleridge wrote to Poole from Germany, just having visited with the Wordsworths on their way back to England:
I told him plainly, that you had been the man in whom first and in whom alone, I had felt an anchor! With all my other Connections I felt a dim sense of insecurity 8c uncertainty, terribly uncomfortable/ — W. was affected to tears, very much affected; but he deemed the vicinity of a Library absolutely necessary to his health, nay to his existence. It is painful to me too to think of not living near him; for he is a good and kind man, & the only one whom in all things I feel my Superior — & you will believe me, when I say, that I have few feelings more pleasurable than to find myself in intellectual Faculties an Inferior/ ... My many weaknesses are of some advantage to me; they unite me more with the great mass of my fellow-beings — but dear Wordsworth appears to me to have hurtfully segregated & isolated his Being. ... (STCL 1: 491)
John Beer presents a sensible account of their relationship and the anxieties that it contained by noting, in reaction to Harold Bloom's theories of the anxiety of influence, that "anxiety can take many forms, and in Coleridge's case it might be said that he suffered less from an anxiety of influence than an anxiety to be influenced," and that Coleridge's anxiety was a fear of having no support of influence from a stronger individual and artist. But in the years of his greatest creativity, Beer adds, Coleridge was free from such fears. A more radical view of Coleridge's dependencies in all their forms is presented in Norman Fruman's Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel, in which he notes that "Coleridge's life is punctuated by his dependence upon some older, or stronger, or more stable personality." Fruman argues that "the influence of Wordsworth on Coleridge's flowering as a great poet is vastly, perhaps incalculably, more important than has hitherto been allowed — not only as to the general contours and terracings of his poetic landscape, but in the minute texture and grain of his language." To illustrate Wordsworth's influence, Fruman cites Wordsworth's substantial contributions to "The Ancient Mariner" and his influence in the purification and simplification of Coleridge's poetic diction.s Finally, it is often argued that Coleridge's dependencies made him so weak, and Wordsworth's independence was so determined, that Coleridge was led, in a moment of depression in March 1801, to write to William Godwin that "if I die, and the Booksellers will give you any thing for my Life, be sure to say — 'Wordsworth descended on him ..., by shewing to him what true Poetry was, he made him know, that he himself was no Poet'" (STCL 2: 714). A. M. Buchan exaggerates this approach to argue that Wordsworth's egotism and Coleridge's childlike dependence upon Wordsworth killed Coleridge as a poet.
These two common ways of explaining the relationship are each limited by their pursuit of theses that do not require a full accounting of that relationship. Thomas McFarland's "The Symbiosis of Coleridge and Wordsworth" offers at once a more synthetic and a more systematic account, which recognizes the astonishing similarities of their minds while at the same time recognizing their individuality. Their relationship was "nothing less than a symbiosis, a development of attitude so dialogical and intertwined that in some instances not even the participants themselves could discern their respective contributions." The "structure of symbiosis presupposes a principle of opposition or polarity as the very condition of the urge toward submersion and oneness." McFarland suggests that the dialogue works in several ways. Collaboration, the connections of individual poems as answer and response, and the similarity of theme and language in various poems all suppose a oneness of mind and indicate that the dialogue of the poems and critical statements is based upon actual conversations. He implies that their separate poems are thus incarnations or embodiments of original conversations. Their dialogue proceeds by opposition and disagreement, particularly Coleridge's disagreements with Wordsworth's incipient pantheism and critical statements in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. McFarland concludes that "if Wordsworth ... overshadowed the formidable poetical abilities of Coleridge, the latter, for his part, possessed powers of insight and understanding no less indubitably unique than his friend's poetic gifts."
An account of the "fears about amalgamation" in 1798 and later, the concerns about poetic and intellectual resemblances, should be relatively free from speculation about the lives, moods, and experiences of the two poets. The closer one looks at biographical evidence for a mood or experience that generates poetry, the more difficult it is to be certain whether a particular emotion of either joy or anxiety precedes the writing of a particular poem. Of course, poems are written over periods of time with varying moods. What is there, after all, in any one experience of life that determines that a reaction to a powerful event or intellectual insight be expressed in poetry? Why, for instance, when Wordsworth sees an impoverished girl leading a cow along a dusty road to crop in the sparse roadside weeds does he react as a poet and not a political activist? Why does he exalt the solitary instead of the communal figure? There is nothing in any one experience of life that necessarily leads to poetry rather than picketing, philandering, or religious musings. The simple answer to these questions is that Wordsworth reacts as a poet because he is moved by poetry to be a poet; he expresses his reactions to the events of the day and his reflections upon them in the form of poetry that is provided by previous poems. And if Coleridge's poems in 1797 and 1798 convey a consistent tone, either of joy or anxiety, they do not do so because his mood in those months was consistent. Contrast, for example, his mood of April 1797, "On the Saturday, the Sunday, and the ten days after my arrival at Stowey I felt a depression too dreadful to be described ..." (STCL 1: 319), with Dorothy's description of his exuberant spirits during his visit to Racedown in June. "His conversation teems with soul, mind, and spirit. Then he is so benevolent, so good tempered and cheerful, and, like William, interests himself so much about every little trifle," and "has more of the 'poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling' than I ever witnessed" (LEY 188–89). In my account of the relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth I have avoided the temptation to account for their poetry by reference to a biography of their moods, except as they are defined in the poetry, and I have tried to look steadily at the dialogue that is conducted through their poetry.
There is a strong temptation, given the two poets' long personal association and the details of their relationship that we possess from Dorothy's journals and their letters, to locate their amalgamation and the unanimity of their spirits in their mutual conversations. Many critics suggest that these conversations stand as a kind of pretext or ur-text for their poetry. McFarland puts it this way:
In the certainty that much more was discussed between the two friends than is explicitly recorded, one is tempted to extend recognition of the symbiosis still further. An ideal understanding of the mutual interaction would have to go beyond verifiable dates and documentary backing, would be to some extent what Friedrich Schlegel called "a divinatory criticism." Such a criticism, however, would not be made up of irresponsible guesses; it would rather entail something of the same process by which an astronomer deduces the presence of a hidden astral body by interpreting variations in the behavior of a celestial object already known.
McFarland's caution about such criticism could be extended to that caution against an attempted reconstruction of the ur-dialogue from the evidence of the poetry. There is little to be gained and much to be risked in any attempt to recapture the letter of that dialogue when what is important is its moving spirit. The literal conversation is not recoverable. There are pitfalls for a reading of the poetry, as well, in attempts to recover a single moving spirit. The writings of each poet — the celestial objects that are known, with their myriad variations — are the evidence of the prime moving spirit of their dialogue, but the variations argue, in this instance, great variation in the motive itself. To try to find a single or unified spirit in a personal psychological motive or in a shared philosophy from such evidence is to generalize or abstract from the evidence itself. The result may be a set of generalizations, true in themselves and sufficient to account for a broad range of themes in poetry but in many instances inadequate to trace the significant variations and subtleties of poetic utterance and poetic form. I have not, therefore, tried to generalize about a moving spirit in their poetic dialogue. I have, rather, tried to trace the variations in apparently similar statements to account for the discontinuities by which such a dialogue generates poetry.
One of the results of such a reading is a recognition that Coleridge's poetry was the prime influence on Wordsworth's from the first days of their association until the winter of 1799–1800, when Wordsworth began to describe himself as a self-generated poet. Coleridge's influence was not only philosophic but poetic. Johnston has explained in great detail the influence that Coleridge had on The Recluse and its organization, but in the early years Coleridge's influence was wider than the suggestions that he made about the organization of Wordsworth's major poem; it came, not only from his plans for Wordsworth's poem, but also from the examples of his own poetry. Coleridge was in 1798 and 1799 a more published and more public figure. Wordsworth had published only An Evening Watt (1793) and Descriptive Sketches (1793), which displayed, as Coleridge noted, true marks of genius but which Wordsworth recognized immediately as immature and awkward, and which he began revising shortly after publication. Coleridge had not only delivered public lectures on politics and religion and started The Watchman, he had also published two volumes of poetry, in 1796 and 1797. While Wordsworth had drafted some of his best poetry, he was incapable of bringing it to a form that satisfied him. As William Heath has phrased it, "after all, in 1795 when Coleridge had written 'The Aeolian Harp' Wordsworth was still working on such poems as 'Guilt and Sorrow,' an imitation of Juvenal (Satire VII), and translations from Catullus. 'This Lime-Tree Bower,' 'Frost at Midnight' and 'The Nightingale' all preceded Tintern Abbey.'" When Wordsworth needed an opinion on "Adventures on Salisbury Plain," he had the manuscript delivered to Cottle, who, at Wordsworth's request, delivered it to Coleridge for judgment. Two years later, when Coleridge wrote to Cottle proposing joint publication, he wrote "Wordsworth's name is nothing — to a large number of persons mine stinks."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Coleridge and Wordsworth by Paul Magnuson. Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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