Every Reader's Coleridge

      This is the eighteenth in a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. Consult the Index for the current month under Blog Archive on the right.  An introduction called “Why Read Poetry?” is available at http://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2018/05/why-read-poetry.html. 

     In this series I limit my focus to the discussion, often including a close paraphrase, of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. The poems discussed are all readily available on the internet. 

 

      Samuel Taylor Coleridge is known to most readers through a few poems so widely anthologized and reprinted in textbooks that students often encounter them in classrooms.   Then, too, he has a reputation both as a poetic innovator, the founder with Wordsworth of the theory and practice of English Romanticism, and as a drug addict.  Lyrical Ballads, the ground-breaking book that proclaimed the new style in 1798 included poems by both writers.  In the introduction Wordsworth, the nature poet who was said by his friend De Quincey to be addicted not to drugs or alcohol but to hiking, declared his aim “to make the incidents of common life interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature.”  They agreed that Coleridge would adopt the complementary technique: to write about the supernatural “yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief [the first use of this term] for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”  Wordsworth meant to defamiliarize commonplace experience by seeing deeply into it, while Coleridge would indicate the symbolic relevance of the exotic and extraordinary.

     Times may have changed, but in my day at least, it was all but impossible to avoid getting “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” in school.  Its emphatic, if somewhat muddy, moral theme and its archaizing trappings (including the spelling of the title and the marginal notes) made it popular among pedagogues and its narrative ballad-like stanzas seemed more approachable than odes.  Folksong, which had been dismissed as sub-literary, was embraced by the Romantics such as Bishop Percy and Robert Burns in Britain and  Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano in Germany.  The form particularly suited Coleridge’s project because the supernatural often plays a role in English ballads, though his own story is recognizably in the "gathic" style of the late eighteenth century and has little in common with the Middle Ages. 

     This passage includes perhaps the poem’s most well-known lines (“Water, water, every where,/ Nor any drop to drink”) before indulging in horror movie scares in which “slimy things” dance about in lurid special effects.

 

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

 

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

 

The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea.

 

About, about, in reel and rout

The death-fires danced at night;

The water, like a witch's oils,

Burnt green, and blue and white. (115-130)

 

The poem invokes a kind of Calvinist divine judgement in which the mariner is punished for his violence against the albatross, though, of course, the crew also perishes in collateral damage, while the protagonist goes on to work out his cursed destiny rather like the Wandering Jew.  The moral, when it arrives, seems facile:

 

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

                                    (614-617)

 

     A careful reader is likely to find this an inadequate theme.  Surely the story suggests not only a deep love for the entire creation, hence pacifism and vegetarianism and true Christian nonresistance, but also the unknown impact of casual choices, a sort of tragic fate or ἀνάγκη..  When the mariner shoots the albatross, no motive is given.  The act is as gratuitous as Meursault’s  killing in The Stranger, yet, once done, it determines his entire destiny.  There is as much of the absurd as there is of retributive justice in the story.

     In fact the supernatural element, not the theme, is the heart of the poem’s appeal.  The “special effects” quoted above are expanded to cover a prolonged agony in which the crews’ souls go whizzing by as they die one by one, apparently having become mere aspects of the mariner’s punishment.  (The image reminds me of the skeleton sent over the heads of his audiences for showings of House on Haunted Hill [1959]).  Yet in spite of the mariner’s repentance, he must ever wander on, cautioning others to have compassion.  Very like William Castle’s modern horror movie, the creepy and mysterious thrills are the principal point. 

     The supernatural is replaced by the fabulous and exotic in “Kubla Khan,” all the more fascinating when the author notes that its origin was “a sort of Reverie brought on, by two grains of Opium.”  Here Kubla Khan’s “pleasure-dome” is not just a luxury resort with its gardens and “many an incense-bearing tree”; it is at the same time “a savage place,” “haunted” and “filled with wails,” where tumultuous movements of the earth occur.  He hears then the melody of the “Abyssinian maid” whose song, if he could but remember, would allow him to “build that dome in air,/ That sunny dome! those caves of ice!”  Yet the music is not purely pleasurable; the sublime insights of art are menacing as well, even those from the most profound source.  The fruits of divine inspiration here seem dangerous, wrought about with magical protective ritual (“Weave a circle round him thrice”).  Yet, just as in  the “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” the primary significance is not in theme at all, but rather in the creation of a tone, a mood of dramatic portent, and the writer’s providing a strange and marvelous setting, a second-hand account of an obscure passage brought to life in a drug dream.  The “person from Porlock” who interrupts his reverie is in fact oneself, the reader, for whom the poem was set down, the spectator who may experience the weird at second-hand.  Again, the poem’s primary appeal is like that of science fiction or fantasy, the appeal of the strange.

     Though “Dejection: An Ode” deals with the natural phenomenon of depression, it associates the author’s low spirits with storms and opens with an archaizing, folk prognostication of impending severe weather from a stanza of an old ballad.  In his earlier poem “The Eolian Harp” (1796) the device (a passive musical instrument like wind chimes) had produced “a soft floating witchery of sound” which suggested. to him a magnificent song of the whole creation “Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,/ At once the Soul of each, and God of all.”  Here, however, the strains of the harp “better far were mute,” since, like the ominous moon, they presage disaster and thus “better far were mute.” 

     The poem proceeds to specify the sensations of a mind sunk in depression with vivid imagery.

 

          A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,

         A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,

         Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,

                In word, or sigh, or tear—    (21-24)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

                My genial spirits fail;

                And what can these avail

To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?

                                          (39-41)

 Coleridge is very much the modern neurotic, a member of the “poor loveless ever-anxious crowd.” (52) Though he gazes at nature, it is with “how blank an eye” (30) and his mood is unrelieved.  He can only “see, not feel” (38) the charms of the creation.  He come then to realize that he “may not hope from outward forms to win/ The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.” (45-46)  The appreciation of the world is a reciprocal affair, “we receive but what we give,” (47)  In the end

 

from the soul itself must issue forth

A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud

           Enveloping the Earth—

                                        (53-55)

  

To regain access to the divine “Joy” love provides a route.  “This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,/

     This beautiful and beauty-making power” (62-63) arrives with a spiritual “wedding” (68).

 

 

  We in ourselves rejoice!

And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,

      All melodies the echoes of that voice,

All colours a suffusion from that light.

                                        (72-75)

 

 The poet finds refuge in love from the “viper thoughts, that coil around my mind/ Reality's dark dream!” (94-5), though these may arise from real conditions, the “groans” of “trampled men, with smarting wounds” that suffer “pain, and shudder with the cold.” (112-113)  He is thus able to conclude with a victorious wish for the high spirits of his beloved; in the warmth of human love he finds melancholy’s remedy.

 

           With light heart may she rise,

           Gay fancy, cheerful eyes,

      Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice;

To her may all things live, from pole to pole,

Their life the eddying of her living soul!

      O simple spirit, guided from above,

Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice,

Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice.

                                              (132-139)

 

     This conclusion in felicity is often lacking in Coleridge, a man of decidedly depressive tendencies who served an addiction for much if his life.  His somber and intellectual vision is not to everyone’s taste.  Yet Coleridge contributed to the modern style by his objections to neo-Classicism including his insistence that poetry should not stray too far from the ordinary spoken language.  His fondness for the both the quaint and the tumultuous have aged less well.  Much of his work is too philosophical for many sensibilities.  A hostile critic once accused him of over-emotionalism, labeling him a member of "the School of whining and hypochondriacal poets that haunt the Lakes," but his poetic descendants have been only more self-interested and neurotic.   

     What the reader may make of his poetry, Coleridge is undeniably a substantial critic.  Though philosophers may differ on his significance in the history of ideas, in literature his Lectures on Shakespeare, Biographica Literaria, and  other criticism offer many influential ideas, not least the concept of the "willing suspension of disbelief" and the distinction between "imagination" and "fancy."  His adaptation of Schelling’s notion of Ineinsbildung for which he devised the ungainly term "esemplastic power" exemplifies at once the somewhat opaque vulnerability of his ratiocination and its accurate reflection of the poetic mind.

     If Coleridge is quite certain to be read in the future for his role in literary history, he is surely no less certain to impress new readers every year, even some who encounter him in classrooms, with his fondness for the strange fey quality he found provided  bit of the sublime, and for his pronounced rhythms that render his work always cadenced even when irregular. 

     The curious may visit Coleridge’s grave in  St. Michael’s Church in London to read the poet’s epitaph.  The verses are at first glance entirely conventional with the request for passers-by to pray for the departed and the author’s own hopes for salvation.

 

Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God,

And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod

A poet lies, or that which once seemed he.

O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.;

That he who many a year with toil of breath

Found death in life, may here find life in death!

Mercy for praise—to be forgiven for fame

He asked, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!

 

     First of all, the reader is likely to be struck by the fact that Coleridge has here adopted the role of the Ancient Mariner, accosting others to awake them to truths more easily avoided.  Here the equivalent of the Mariner’s curse is life-long depression (“death in life”).  He expresses also a radical skepticism over his career and even his identity (“or that which once seemed he”).  The close inquirer will observe that the initials in the fourth line are not used solely for the convenient rhyme they allow.  The three English letters sound very much like the Greek word ἐστηση, “he has stood” and the same sounds echo repeatedly throughout the verses beginning with the first line (“Stop, Christian” and “Stop, child”) and continuing to the end ( “through Christ . . .same”).  The given name and the proximity to death suggest the book of Samuel in which David says (as part of the affecting story of his relationship with Jonathan) “there is but a step between me and death” (1 Samuel 20:3).  Later David laments his beloved friend, saying “How are the mighty fallen!” (II Samuel 1, 23-27).  David’s grief is ameliorated, however, by his Biblical confidence in the order of things, a certainty Coleridge may have desired, but never attained.  And so the poet elaborated his simple expression of desire, not so much for everlasting life as for a purchase on a certain truth, with elaborate flights of thought, sound patterns, word-play, and allusion, as though with art he could lift himself into the sublime.  In his weaknesses perhaps even more than in his strengths Coleridge was a harbinger of our belated age.

Notes on Recent Reading 34 (Hawthorne, Huncke, Bentley)

The House of Seven Gables (Hawthorne)

     Hawthorne took the Gothic novel toward sublimity with this Protestant New England tale in which the role the supernatural plays in the plot while essential is always secondary to the moralizing. The modern reader may find Phoebe a bit cloying in her sweetness and Judge Pyncheon too vicious, but the narrative is gripping, the roots in American history are deep and authentic, and the rhetoric is a pleasure. Hawthorne has the leisurely way of old novelists of lingering over the trees or the weather and yielding to distraction by village side scenes, but these pauses are virtually all lyrical, and they build together to an image system that reinforces the whole in a way that few novelists can achieve. Though Phoebe, Holgrave, Hepzibah enjoy a happy ending,, sweeping even Uncle Venner with them, their unmixed bliss might ring hollow after the earlier concentration on sin which has generated the curse that oppressed the Pyncheons for generations. Their suffering occurs in a context of a town regularly portrayed as venal, gossipy, and ruled by selfish hypocrites. The economic theme of the ruling class oppressing the poor governs the conflict between Pyncheon and Maule even if it is magically dissolved by marriage in the end. Hawthorne provides as good an answer as most to the question of how one may live in an irretrievably fallen world. D. H. Lawrence found a “diabolical undertone” in The Scarlet Letter, and he would doubtless have sniffed the same sulfur in the Pyncheons’ Salem, but in fact Hawthorne was neither of the devil’s party nor on the side of the institutional angels. He was caught between, a dilemma that describes most of us, and there his strength lies.


The Herbert Huncke Reader (Huncke)

     Though I have been fascinated by the possibilities in life and literature offered by the Beat writers since my adolescence, I had never read Huncke. Having just finished this sizable, anthology, I don’t feel unhappy about my long neglect. Huncke is no stylist. Ginsberg’s praise of his writing illustrates generosity to an old friend more than a literary judgement. Yet I am susceptible, as were the Beats when they met him, to his outsider charm. As junkie, thief, and sexual hustler he is as demi-mondaine as they come. And he doesn’t make it easy for his buddies, lovers, or readers; he is completely upfront about his readiness to rip off whoever was available when he needed cash without worrying about hurting friends or strangers. Still, in the life he led he accumulated countless stories and he is a decent story-teller, leaving his narratives so unembellished that they seem as though they must be true. Readers with a taste for the scene will relish these tales from a very real and genuinely dangerous edge of experience. I would not have cared to go straight through, but in small doses most of his sketches have their rewards. Those who are fascinated by the Beat scene will find a great deal here, even if much is unprocessed. I will doubtless retell such moments as Bill Burroughs’ first taste of opiates. (Huncke suspected Burroughs of being a narc and noted his Chesterfield overcoat, already fifteen years out of style.)


A Modern Tragedy (Bentley)

     Phyllis Bentley was a bestselling author in Britain (and did very well in the USA) from the thirties through the fifties. Much of her fiction was centered in her region, the West Riding of Yorkshire where the textile trade dominated the economy and the author’s father was a mill owner. This 1934 novel, basically a love story about inadequate love, is shadowed by the Depression, and Bentley, though conservative in her sympathies, reveals considerable insider detail about the manufacturing processes of the industrial firms that produced cloth and the class structure that supported the economy. Characters are clearly sorted into upper class, among which one finds “proper” operators with old-fashioned integrity and a sharp dealer who does not shrink from fraud; middle class, striving to rise while fearing a fall. The workers, who include a fiery radical union activist reminiscent of Peter Sellers’ Fred Kite in I’m All Right Jack, seem tacked on for the sake of completeness. The primary market for the book, of course, lay largely with the first two groups. While expressing distress at the suffering of the poor, for instance in Rosamond’s reaction to the hunger marchers, the novelist accepts the whole system and suggests that the left-wing Milner Schofield is an activist for reasons more psychological than political while the aged mill owner Henry Clay Crosland is morally exemplary. A few romances cross the upper and middle class lines; the workers are in this way neglected.
     I would not be as harsh as the Kirkus reviewer who, at the novel’s publication called it “weak in plot and unconvincing in characterization.” The prose is straightforward for the most part, ignoring the radical innovations in fiction that had appeared well before its publication. Bentley goes in more for moments of pathos or insight into character than for flights of rhetoric, but the story is well-designed with an opening scene that accumulates significance as the narrative proceeds. Walter’s descent into collusion with crime is quite believable, though I can’t swallow Tasker’s return to face prosecution. Not a bad read, this is the sort of book once called “middlebrow,” the sort that can still bring works of fiction to today’s market, glutted as it has become with self-help and glib celebrities.
     I suppose it is a sign of its lasting appeal that A Modern Tragedy survives in audiobooks today. Many critics seem to prefer Bentley’s earlier Inheritance.

A Note on Radcliffe’s The Italian

     The distinction between high and low art used to be largely a matter of venue and milieu. Poetry appreciated in court circles such as troubadour lyric and sonnets is easily differentiated from folk-song, and one could hardly confuse Sidney’s Arcadia with a penny dreadful title. The growth of a literate middle class, however, that accompanied the coming of capitalism led to a new market with its own demanding taste. The novel itself was regarded as an inferior literary form for years (in China as well as in Europe), often composed and consumed by women who were no longer required to spend their leisure doing needlework.
     The work of Ann Radcliffe, praised by the great Romantic poets and a best-selling author as well, illustrates characteristics of both popular and high art. Every piece of literature confirms some expectations while denying others, but popular works tend to be toward the reassuring side of that continuum while “high” art often raises contradictions and ambivalences if not outright denial of received ideas. Radcliffe’s books, like most television narratives, conclude with the happy ending that reassures the consumer that, in spite of temporary upsets, all is right with the world. Her characters are flattened and overdone: the heroes are most “manly,” possessing at once good looks, courage, and an unerring morality, while the heroines are lovely, pious, and proper to the degree that in The Italian Ellena Rosalba in The Italian is troubled by such scruples as worrying about keeping company with a male admirer while he is rescuing her from vicious persecutors. Meanwhile the villains are black-souled indeed, though Schedoni practices such titanic and self-controlled machinations that he has been compared with Milton’s Satan and considered influential in the Byronic anti-hero.
     Between these factions, Radcliffe regularly distributes retributive justice in the most predictable manner. One need fear no more than in a comedy that all might not come right in the end. The loftier social classes are uniquely capable of fine feeling, of sensibility. The fair heroine’s marriage is impeded by her presumed lower status, yet she turns out in fact to have been high-born after all and from a virtuous father, rendering irrelevant the issue about whether alliances between classes are possible. Paolo is a fair type of the lower strata. He is an exemplar of the best quality of the low-born, which is to say he is fiercely loyal to his master. His hound-like devotion is so great that he repeatedly makes a fool of himself to lighten otherwise serious scenes, and he is rewarded in the end by being allowed to sing a repeated chorus of good wishes to Vivaldi, “O! giorno felice!”
     Though there is no questioning of the old stereotypes about men and women, morality, or the order of society, Radcliffe did participate in her day’s more intellectual and aesthetic currents. The “Gothic” novel has become a popular genre little remarked by critics, but in the late eighteenth century, it was a new and ambitious orientation toward the sublime. To Edmund Burke “terror is in all cases whatsoever . . . the ruling principle of the sublime.” To him the “Astonishment” associated with the sublime is invariably accompanied by “some degree of horror.” [1]
     Mrs. Radcliffe expressed derivative notions in her posthumous essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry” [2] where she argues that “obscurity” and grandeur” combine to generate sublimity. To her this recipe holds “not only on frivolous occasions,” “but in the “most important pursuits of life.”
     For all that, to the modern reader, it is almost as though fear is used to ratchet up the story’s impact like sex in a music video. The Italian setting announced in the title is itself a somewhat sinister place smoky with Roman Catholic incense and moral corruption. The Inquisition even appears. All these thematics are as expected; what is “modern” in Radcliffe is the delectation, the self-conscious reveling in a safe, emasculated horror, whose epigone we see in the young college graduate of today who likes nothing better than to dress as a zombie or a vampire.
     The effect is similar with her descriptions of nature which may provide grandeur as well as mystery. [3] Sometimes extensive and pictorial, they remain thoroughly conventional, a code that should elicit the proper response. The topographical poets had particularized; Radcliffe is always painting variations on the same few scenes.
     Her taste is surely influenced by the Graveyard School poets, or she was a product of the same trends in taste. The enjoyment of a sweet melancholy, colored perhaps by a faint hint of the beyond, either Christian or pagan, a breath of the sublime was evidence of a person of sentiment, an aesthete. Radcliffe broadened the audience for such a vision by washing her stories with the same elements and ameliorating the edgier elements (such as Cowper’s real depression).
     Radcliffe’s reader sought a domesticated horror. Her books are filled with spooky, seemingly preternatural events, but they are virtually always explained rationally. By rational, though, I do not mean likely, for Radcliffe inherits from the Hellenistic romances a fondness for formal symmetry in plot, welcoming all-but-impossible coincidence such as the revelations of the identities first of Schedoni and then of Olivia. Far from a failure of verisimilitude, this was a clear literary code. Scott defined the romance by its “marvelous and uncommon incidents.” [4]
     She added the newer aesthetic ideas of the time, including the taste for horror and for landscape and a lugubrious sense of mortality, and attracted a mass readership as well as impressing Shelley, Byron (who called her the founder of a school) and Keats (who refers to her enthusiastically as an influence in his letters). She raised the ambitions and altered the direction of the novel genre, adding to the woman-in-distress theme of Richardson the “sublimity” of terror and of landscape, the power of meditation on mortality, and the love of the exotic (which is to say the partially understood) which made her and Mary Shelley avid travelers and original travel writers.
     Her oeuvre at once advanced the prestige and popularity of novels. Though some writers in other genres before had addressed a general audience and found critical celebrity (such as Shakespeare) and others had addressed an educated audience yet found a broader readership (such as Milton), Radcliffe mediated the levels of literature, using familiar themes dressed up in the latest aesthetic styles, and created new readership and new tastes for the form whose very name means new.




1. Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757. Burke goes on to note that “obscurity” is effective as terror will dissipate with clear vision, adding that despots are secretive to excite fear in their subjects. He does not say whether such repression can result in the sublime.

2. First published in The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, vol. 16, no. 1, 1826, 145-152

3. See Sir Uvedale Price's essay “On The Picturesque.”

4. See his “Essay on Romance.”