Coleridge: Early Visions. Richard Holmes
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of Coleridge in these terms. I have attempted to recapture his fascination as a man and a writer, and above all to make him live, move, talk, and “have his being”. If he does not leap out of these pages – brilliant, animated, endlessly provoking – and invade your imagination (as he has done mine), then I have failed to do him justice.
The present volume takes Coleridge to the age of thirty-one, the exact halfway point in his career, and his departure for Malta in 1804, the year before the Battle of Trafalgar. But it uses materials drawn from the second half of his life – notably his labyrinthine autobiography, the Biographia Literaria (written in Wiltshire in 1814–15), and his journalism in The Friend, a paper he wrote and edited in the Lake District in 1809–10. Coleridge, like many later nineteenth-century writers (Dickens, Hardy, Kipling) worked hard to reconstruct the truth of his early experiences and opinions, and this double vision, or duplicity, is an important theme from the start. It is partly for this reason that my second volume will be entitled: Darker Reflections.
In his first thirty years Coleridge wrote much of the poetry for which he is now remembered: “Kubla Khan”, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Christabel”, “Frost at Midnight”, and “Dejection: an Ode”. Many of these have become part of the folklore of Romanticism, and entered proverbially into the language – “an albatross”, an “ancient mariner type”, a journey “to Xanadu”. But what is much less well-known, is that Coleridge went on rewriting, improving, and re-presenting them in later life (the most famous case being the preface to “Kubla Khan”, and the highly significant arrival of that person from Porlock), and I shall have more to say about their development in volume two. His play Osorio, which was written in 1798 but first performed as Remorse in 1812, will also receive further attention. Moreover there is much major – but neglected – poetry yet to come: “To William Wordsworth” (1807), “Constancy to an Ideal Object” (1805–25), or “The Garden of Boccaccio” (1828).
Contrary to legend, Coleridge remained a poet throughout his life, and his later work – the poetry of old age and failing vision – is some of the most moving and revealing. It is impossible to understand him without reference to such works as “A Tombless Epitaph” (1811), which re-explores the symbolic caverns of his youth, as already appears in this volume.
The sequence of autobiographical verse known as the Conversation Poems, which runs from 1794 to 1807, seems to me perhaps his finest poetic achievement (without which Wordsworth would never have developed The Prelude). I have examined its themes closely in my narrative, suggesting that our notion of “Romanticism” itself partly grows out of them. Coleridge (and Wordsworth) used the word “Romantic” largely in a loose, eighteenth-century, topographical sense – that “deep Romantic chasm”, or even on one memorable occasion that “old Romantic goat” – to denote the visually wild and sublime (sometimes comically so). But they were equally conscious of using language experimentally, and creating a revolution in taste and sensibility. So I have also freely used the term with its modern, critical implications (disputed of course) to denote that new element of imaginative power and intensity of self-expression which we now associate with the period of political and cultural revolution throughout Europe between 1780 and 1830.
But Coleridge was much more than a Romantic poet: he was also a journalist of genius, a translator, a matchless letter-writer (six volumes), an incomparable autobiographer and self-interrogator in his Notebooks (over sixty surviving between 1794 and his death), a literary critic, a spectacular lecturer, a folklorist, a philosopher, a psychologist (specialising in dreams and creativity), a playwright and dramatic critic, and – that much disputed word – a metaphysician. He was also a travel-writer, a fell-walker, and amateur naturalist with an inspired eye for movement and transformation processes – cloud structures, plant growth, animal activity, light shifts, water changes, wind effects. All these aspects I have tried to bring alive, although Coleridge scholars will know what dreadful chasms (such as English and German Idealist philosophy) I have perilously skimmed over, in this first volume at any rate.
Indeed, on the surface at least, I hope this book will read like the most traditional form of popular narrative biography. Coleridge is such a difficult subject – his personality so complex, the exact nature of his literary gift so protean, his daily life contained so much in pure ideas – that the real challenge for me has been simply to unearth his “human story”, his living footsteps through the world. Even his vast array of friends, among the living and among the dead, have not been allowed to obstruct the tale unnecessarily, but find a subsidiary place in a form of dramatis personae listing, “Coleridge’s Circle”, at the end of the book.
The tendency of much recent scholarship, following the example of Professor John Livingston Lowes in The Road to Xanadu (1927, see Bibliography), has been to see Coleridge’s whole imaginative existence as one gigantic booklist, the life of “a library cormorant” (Coleridge’s own mocking phrase), alive only in annotations and influences. Instead, I have taken Coleridge into the open air. I have made the fullest use possible of the superb editorial work of E. L. Griggs on the letters, and Kathleen Coburn on the Notebooks (an epic of modern exegesis). I have emphasised Coleridge’s physical presence as much as his metaphysical one (Leigh Hunt said shrewdly that he was “a mighty intellect put upon a sensual body…very metaphysical and very corporeal”): he seemed to learn as much from landscapes as from literature; as much from children’s games as from philosophic treatises; as much from bird-flight as from theology.
Despite the traditional form of my narrative, I have tried certain biographical experiments, two of which might be mentioned. Coleridge is remembered as the greatest talker of his age – that ephemeral form most difficult to re-create in biography (unless you are James Boswell, at your subject’s elbow). So I have attempted, from the very start, to set Coleridge talking, to tell his story through his own magnificent – and constantly humorous – flights of phrase and metaphor. I have tried to make his voice sound steadily through the narrative, and indeed in the end to dominate it. So what I have written is critical biography partly in the form of Romantic monologue. (As Madame de Staël once said in exasperation, “avec Monsieur Coleridge, c’est tout à fait un monologue”.)
Secondly, I have introduced a series of footnotes – if the reader should care to pause for breath – which does not so much add information in the traditional scholarly way, as initiate another level of speculation, a third perspective – besides those of Coleridge and his narrator. They are intended as a sort of down-stage voice, reflecting on the action as it develops, and suggesting lines of exploration through some of the biographical and critical issues raised.* They are, I suppose, my humble equivalent of Coleridge’s marginal “gloss” to the Ancient Mariner.
But it will be clear from them, as from the book as a whole, that in the subliminal battle of imagination between subject and biographer, upon which all life-writing ultimately rests, Coleridge has very properly – and wonderfully – triumphed. He is the visionary hero of my book, a hero for a self-questioning age; though whether comedy, tragedy, or romance prevail, remains to be seen.
1
Coleridge was always fascinated by anything that promised poetical marvels or metaphysical peculiarities. The subject of his own childhood was no exception. “Before I was eight years old,” he used to begin in his hypnotic manner, “I was a character – sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth…were even then prominent & manifest.” And then, like the Ancient Mariner, there was no stopping him.
2
In later life he talked of boyhood and schooldays with many of his closest friends, and wrote vividly about it in his poetry, his letters, his Biographia, and his private Notebooks. In all these records, a rich mixture of tragi-comedy, he developed the self-portrait of a precocious, highly imaginative child, driven into “exile” in the world, before he was emotionally