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.

Scandals of the Romantic Poets

 

     This, like my piece on “The Hazardous Lives of the Sonneteers,” is meant to be more semi-journalistic and descriptive than scholarly.  This time, though, I did not suppress the endnotes.

 

      Artists today are often expected to be to some extent counter-cultural, displaying bohemian behavior and radical opinions, but this assumption is largely a recent one in the last two hundred years.  In Great Britain and in Europe, writers associated with the Romantic movement adopted a combative attitude toward their own societies, leading to the use of the term, originally military, avant-garde.  [1]  This general characterization of artists as rebels, often compounded of a mixture of reactionary philistine prejudice and accurate observation, though never encompassing all writers and painters, has been critical in the arts since. 

    In their own day the British Romantic poets were accused of every sort of immorality and, though it has no bearing on the evaluation of their writing, there was a good deal of substance to many of the charges against them. [2]  Many did seek to challenge the received ideas of their day, and these views, along with personal irregularities which may occur among all classes (but are perhaps more highlighted among artists) led to their condemnation by the guardians of propriety.  Drug abuse, irreligious views, and political radicalism, as well as lurid sexual irregularities were all alleged of the writers associated with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Byron.  Without inquiry into why many of the principal poets of the day behaved, at least in youth, in ways that strayed so considerably from the norm, an assemblage of some of the data exploited by their critics looks hardly less sensational than stories from the National Enquirer. 

     In the Romantic era, the non-medical use of psychotropic drugs lacked a good deal of the cultural significance it has since acquired.  Opium and cannabis were not associated with artists; they were not even illegal and were soon to be ubiquitous in the formulation of panaceas.  Then as now, many addicts began with a doctor’s prescription.  Yet semi-recreational use existed as well.  Southey and Coleridge joined in “experiments” at the Pneumatic Institute inhaling nitrous oxide with such prominent scientists as Humphry Davy, Thomas Beddoes, and James Watt. [3]   

     With the conquest of India by Great Britain, opium became widely available and closely followed alcohol as the chief active ingredient of patent medicines.  Though consumed throughout English society, the medicinal preparation called laudanum was popular among the poets to such an extent that a number of books have focused on their use. [4]  Coleridge attributed “Kubla Khan” to an opium dream, and the poet’s lifelong use of the drug and his attempts to control, if not to cease, his consumption are documented in letters and memoirs.  Even more notorious was his friend, the essayist Thomas De Quincy, whose Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was a sensation in 1821.  Shelley took to carrying laudanum on his person to take against anxiety.  Crabbe, Jane Austen’s favorite poet and admired in his day by Byron and Scott, took opium for forty years.  Keats’ use of the drug is certain, but his degree of use is not. 

     Scholars continue to debate to what extent opium use influenced poetry.  Though opium’s effects are primarily soporific, many writers reported psychedelic effects on sensation and imagination, perhaps using the drug to justify flights of fancy and sublimity they would have experienced in any event.  Very like the drug users among the Beats, the Romantics drug use both to an expansion of vision and to a view of the artist as transgressive.  Whereas most earlier writers had striven either to cultivate connections with the power structure in the interests of patronage or, by the eighteenth century, to appeal to a bourgeois readership, this group considered themselves a counter-culture, and the subjective heavens and hells of opiate use doubtless intensified their belief in the primacy of the imagination. 

     Though opium consumption was no crime, admitting to unorthodox religious views not only attracted the strongest social opprobrium but was illegal as well. [5]  Shelley was expelled from Oxford for publishing The Necessity  of Atheism. [6]  He developed a sort of pantheism, claiming that “the universe is God” and arguing that Deism was reasonable and Christianity supported only by emotion.  He must “war against [the Christian god] for the sake of truth.” [7]  Wordsworth in his early work sounds very like a pantheist and Coleridge described him approvingly as “at least” “a semi-atheist,” [8] though both came to defend the Established Church later in life. 

     Coleridge himself had become a free-thinker upon reading Voltaire as a schoolboy, before slowly drifting back through Unitarianism to orthodoxy.   Often labeled an atheist, Byron throughout his life expressed an ambivalence about Christianity.  In his preface to his Vision of Judgement, an encomium praising George III, Southey (who had been in political and religious questions as radical as other Romantics) attacks the “Satanic school” of poets as “men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and hating that revealed religion which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve.”  [9]  Conservative forces claimed that Byron’s clubfoot indicated his diabolism. [10]  In his youth Southey had been known as an atheist, though he was always willing to acknowledge “an intelligent first cause.” [11]  To the public the poets’ behavior considered along with such literary projections as Byron’s Manfred and Cain and Shelley’s Prometheus to leave little doubt that the whole group were rebels against heaven. 
     In politics virtually all the Romantics were originally supporters of the French Revolution, a view which made them radicals in their day.  Wordsworth made two trips to revolutionary France where he attended meetings of the Jacobin Club and the National Assembly and composed his “Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff” who had criticized the revolutionary regime.  He rapidly turned conservative in politics as well as religion, by 1818 advocating what he called a “softened feudalism” [12]

     Shelley, on the other hand, maintained a consistently revolutionary view.  His “Song to the Men of England” could hardly be plainer:

 

The seed ye sow, another reaps;

The wealth ye find, another keeps;

The robes ye weave, another wears;

The arms ye forge, another bears.

 

And there is perhaps no more bitter line of political poetry in English literature that the first of Shelley’s “England in 1819” which calls George III “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King,”  The poem concludes with a hopeful prospect of a glorious Phantom” which “may burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.”  Indeed Marx’s daughter was proud to claim him as a socialist.  [13] 

     Likewise supporters of France, Coleridge and Southey planned an egalitarian commune in America, to be governed by the principles of "pantisocracy," meaning rule by all and “aspheterism” or the collective ownership of all property.  Unsurprisingly, the project was never far advanced.   The two collaborated on The Fall of Robespierre commenting on the events in France.  In 1796 Coleridge published a short-lived newspaper The Watchman in Bristol which argued for the universal suffrage and the abolition of the slave trade.

     Leigh Hunt, though less read now than his friends Keats and Shelley, was a political influence on the Romantic circle.  In a series of journals beginning with The Examiner he published articles critical of the British government and, in particular, of the Prince Regent, later George IV.  Charles Lamb’s “The Triumph of the Whale” ridiculed the “Prince of Whale’s” corpulence and dissipation.  Hunt’s own piece “The Prince on St. Patrick’s Day” (with epigrams by Lamb) in which the prince is denounced as “a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who had just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country, or the respect of posterity." [14]  This language was sufficient to get Hunt and his brother (the printer) arrested for libel.  Though the Hunts had before been charged with libel, English juries had refused to convict them.  This time, however, the two were found guiltyand sentenced to two years in prison.  Something of a cause célèbre, Hunt took advantage of the corrupt practices of the day to make his accommodations in Surrey County Gaol a comfortable two-room private suite in the infirmary.  There he decorated his living space, concealing the bars behind Venetian blinds, papering the walls with floral prints, painting the ceiling with a cloudy sky, and importing flowers, books, and a piano, as well as comfortable couches.  According to Lamb, “there was no other such room, except in fairy tale.”  Attended by a servant, he there received a stream of visitors including Lamb, Byron and Thomas Moore. [15]  After he had served his term, when he went to Italy at Shelley’s invitation, the motive was in part to publish ta political paper not subject to British censorship. 

     It is a measure of the degree to which ideas of radical reform permeated the poetic scene of the day that even Keats, far less an activist partisan than others, left nevertheless no question of what side he was on in the contradiction between the wealthy and the working class.  His sonnet “Written On The Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison” attracted an attack from Blackwood’s Magazine.  Perhaps the best statement of his political views is contained in a long letter from September 1819 in which he laments that the French Revolution stimulated a reaction which “spread a horrid superstition against all inovation and improvement – The present struggle in England of the people is to destroy this superstition. What has rous’d them to do it is their distresses – Perpaps on this account the pres’ent distresses of this nation are a fortunate thing – tho so horrid in the[i]r experience.”  To Keats “This is no contest beetween whig and tory – but between right and wrong.” [16]  The primary thrust of the aggressive ridicule of Keats in the conservative journals was his class origin.  The term “the Cockney school” [17] focused with unashamed class prejudice on the “plebian origins and education” of Keats and others.

     Byron defended the Luddites in the House of Lords where he had associated himself closely with radical reform.  For instance, in a stirring speech in 1812 he declared that Luddite demonstrators dismissed as a mob were in fact nothing but the country’s working people.

 

it is the mob that labour in your fields and in your houses – that man your navy and recruit your army – that have enabled you to defy all the world and can also defy you when neglect and calamity have driven them to despair. You may call the people a mob but not forget that a mob too often speaks the sentiments of the people.   [18]

 

 

Byron wrote for the radical British publication The Liberal and joined a secret society of Italian nationalists, and ultimately, of course, he died in service to what might be called an anti-colonial struggle. 

     While drug use and transgressive religious and political beliefs might offend many Britons, they surely took an even greater interest in the writers’ sexual lives.  Wordsworth had had a child with Annette Vallon in revolutionary France, and others of the Romantics had turbulent personal lives, but the real scandals concerned Shelley and Byron, who were accused of immorality based on behavior that, even today, would be condemned by most. [19] 

     Shelley had said of marriage in Queen Mab of marriage that "a system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness.”  Still, he eloped and married Harriet Westbrook, daughter of the owner of a thriving coffee house and schoolmate of his younger sister, in 1811 just after her sixteenth and his nineteenth birthdays.  Though they had two children, they had all but separated by the summer of 1814, when he eloped once more with Mary Godwin, herself sixteen at the time.  Her illegitimate step-sister Claire Clairmont accompanied them to Europe and remained with the ménage becoming Byron’s lover and mother of his child Allegra. 

     The complexities of life among these free-thinkers is suggested by the fact that some biographers think that, while socializing with Godwin’s family, Shelley had also been a lover of Fanny Imlay,  (daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and an American businessman) in 1814.  She committed suicide two years later as did Harriet Shelley, who was five months pregnant (there is debate about who the father may have been).  Meanwhile, Harriet’s sister Eliza had moved in with the couple and Shelley had conceived a passion (apparently unconsummated) for Elizabeth Hitchener, an unmarried schoolteacher, and suggested that she join the household, sharing all property. [20]  T. J. Hogg, the co-publisher with Shelley of The Necessity of Atheism, flirted with Harriet only -for Shelley to assure him he could not be jealous.  Later, he may well have encouraged Hogg and Mary to sleep together. [21]  During Shelley’s residence abroad, he fathered a child in Naples (falsely claiming when registering the birth that his wife was the mother).  He was involved as well in romantic attachments with Jane Williams, who lived with her lover in the same building as the Shelleys, as well as Sophia Stacey, who was staying at the same pension in Italy, and Teresa (Emilia) Viviani, teen-age daughter of the governor of Pisa and the muse of Epipsychidion.

     If providing even a brief summary of Shelley’s erotic involvements is difficult, to do the same for Lord Byron is impossible.  He was constantly pursuing both men and women.  His gay liaisons began the Trinity College choirboy John Edleston during his college days, and included his servant William Fletcher who attended Byron from 1804 until his death.  When he traveled to Greece, he felt much freer about homoerotic relationships and took numerous lovers including the fourteen-year-old Nicolas Giraud.  He indefatigably pursued his teenaged Greek page, Lukas Chalandritsanos, and, finding him uncooperative, managed to locate many who were more complaisant, reporting to his gay friends in England that he had managed over two hundred "pl and opt Cs,” a code for sexual indulgence derived from the phrase "coitum plenum et optabilem" in Petronius's Satyricon.

     He had as well an extraordinary number of heterosexual affairs, becoming perhaps the leading sex symbol of his time.  Most notoriously, he had an affair for years with his half-sister Augusta Leigh and very likely had a child with her.  In his “Epistle to Augusta” he imagines the joy of “a home with thee” and declares sentimentally, “The tie which bound the first endures the last!”

     In the interest of both cash and respectability he married Annabella Milbanke in 1815, but, following the birth of their daughter Ada the following December, she found his constant philandering (during this period he was linked to actress Charlotte Mardyn and Lady Caroline Lamb among many others) and she concluded that she could not live with him and sued for divorce. 

     The combination of his infamy and his debts caused him to go abroad in April 1816.  Though his reputation for sexual misdeeds was known to all, he was doubtless fleeing exposure for his gay lovers.   He was attacked in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in an article describing him as diabolical.  “It appears, in short, as if this miserable man, having exhausted every species of sensual gratification, -having drained the cup of sin even to its bitterest dregs, — were resolved to show us that he is no longer a human being even in his frailties, but a cool, unconcerned fiend, laughing with detestable glee over the whole of the better and worse elements of which human life is composed.”  As a result, Byron complains "I was advised not to go to the theatres, lest I should be hissed, nor to my duty in parliament, lest I should be insulted by the way; even on the day of my departure my most intimate friend told me afterwards that he was under apprehension of violence from the people who might be assembled at the door of the carriage." [22]  In Europe he cultivated an affair with a married woman Marianna Segati in whose house he was staying, then with another married woman, Margarita Cogni.  When he broke up with this last lover, she committed suicide.  He turned then to the Countess Teresa Guiccioli with whom he lived for several years.  At the time of his death he was lavishly patronizing a nine-year-old Turkish Muslim girl. 

     So the bill of particulars one wishing to condemn the Romantic poets might compile is varied, lengthy, and, in large part, well-substantiated.  Since then the actions of the poètes maudits, the Lost Generation, denizens of Greenwich Village, and the Beats have likewise been condemned.  Whatever the ethical lapses in the lives of the poets in any age, their behavior can have no relation to the evaluation of their work.  As much as the perceived contrast in beliefs and lifestyles between unconventional artists and those exemplifying the status quo may reveal about the social codes of their times and our own, such data have nothing to do with the reason we remember these men at all: their work.  In the evaluation of art terms such as immorality or blasphemy, sedition or dissipation can carry no weight.

     Yet the partial displacement of the arts from the central power structures of society has made a difference in both themes and styles.  It may be that a lineage of creative types stretching back to archaic semi-psychotic shamans, through wandering Old English scops like Widsith, gypsy goliards, minstrels and showpeople has long tended to act and think in somewhat more independent fashion than the local masters who, for all their wealth, were obliged to accept the assumptions of their time.  The bourgeois may have envied as well as condemned the free-thinker and free-liver, but it was not until the time of the Romantics that it came to be expected that artists often live by different rules than others. 

.

 

 

1.  The term was first used to describe art by was first used in the cultural sphere in 1825 by the Saint Simonian mathematician Olinde Rodrigues in his essay, “L’artiste, le savant et l’industriel.”

2.  Similar claims have been made concerning virtually every avant-garde movement since, often, as in the originating example, with some reason.  The attacks on Keats and Hunt focused more on their supposed “plebeian origin and education” to quote the letter from Z. (John Gibson Lockhart) in Blackwood’s for May 1818 now so8und thoroughly out of date.

3.  Laughing gas remained a subject of interest.  In the late nineteenth century William James and his associates used it in an attempt to experience mystical states.  See lectures XVI and XVIOI of Varieties of Religious Experience (1901).  James had earlier written an anonymous article on “The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy” in The Atlantic Monthly as well as an 1898 piece in the Psychological Review on “Consciousness Under Nitrous Oxide.”

4. The classic study is still M. H. Abrams The Milk of Paradise (1971), but see also the earlier Opium and the Romantic Imagination by Alethea Hayter (1968) and Elizabeth Schneider’s Coleridge, Opium, and Kubla Khan (1983).  Nicholas Roe claims in his John Keats: A New Life (2012) that Keats, too, was a regular user. 

5.  Britain’s blasphemy laws were not abolished until 2008 in England and Wales and 2021 in Scotland.  A similar law remains in effect in Northern Ireland.  The last conviction in England in 1977 involved a gay publication so doubtless homophobia played a role in that case.

6.  In  1834 a proposal to allow attendance by Dissenters was defeated in Parliament.  Until 1854 in order to matriculate at Oxford a student needed to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Anglican faith.  In Cambridge the requirement lasted two years further and only in 1871 were non-Anglicans allowed to teach in those institutions. 

7.  Letter to Elizabeth Hitchener, June 20, 1822.

8.  Letter from Coleridge to John Thelwall May 13, 1796.

9.  Byron was then inspired to write his own Vision of Judgment in response and in his own preface he aggressively denounces Southey for rushing in “where he had no business” and accusing him of being a traitor to the progressive views he had once held. 

10.  One example is The Dorchester Guide; or, a house that Jack Built (1819), a satirical pamphlet of 1819.  The anonymous publication warns that “the mind is corrupted” by Byron’s “sweet and harmonious” poetry and says his real identity is revealed to those who “look at his feet,” a reference to his club-foot, for proof of his association with the devil.

11.  Letter of Robert Southey to John Prior Estlin, 9 April 1797.

12.  See his “Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland.”  He had accepted the patronage of Lord Lonsdale since 1813.

13.  Edward and Eleanor Marx-Aveling, “Shelley and Socialism,” To-Day, April 1888.

14.  The Examiner, 22 March 1812.

15.  See Leigh Hunt, Autobiography.

16.  To George & Georgiana Keats, September 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 1819.

17.  The term, referring primarily to Keats, Hunt, and Hazlitt, originated in a series of eight hostile reviews in Blackwood's Magazine in 1817 and 1818.

18.  George Gordon Byron, The Works of Lord Byron including the suppressed poems complete in one volume (Paris, A. and W. Galignani, 1828), p. 555.

19.  While far greater latitude in lifestyle had been accepted through the twentieth century, the last few decades have seen a renewed wave of condemnation of certain artists and politicians on the basis of what is deemed by their critics unacceptable sexual behavior.

20.  Bieri, James (2008). Percy Bysshe Shelley: a biography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 170, 193–5

21.  Richard Holmes, Shelley, the Pursuit (London:1974), pp. 391, 594, 678.

22.  “Some Observations upon an Article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,”  Blackwood’s, August 1819.  The response was unpublished until John Murray’s 1833 edition of The Works of Lord Byron.