Preface to Lyrical Ballads: A Portent

I conclude, that Poetic Genius is not only a very delicate but a very rare plant. – Coleridge (1815)

Is there a Poet now alive who will pretend to believe himself equal in genius to Wordsworth’s? – Coleridge (1819)

The Preface to Lyrical Ballads has secured to itself generations of superstitious veneration.  To pedagogues it has commended itself as a solid handhold where so much else eludes the grasp.  It has been treated as central, not so much because it was unquestionably central, but because it was portable and expound­able.  “To be mistaught,” Wordsworth observes drily in the Essay Sup­plementary, “is worse than to be untaught; and no perverseness equals that which is supported by system, no errors so difficult to root out as those which the understanding has pledged its credit to uphold.” It would be difficult to decide which has done more disservice to the under­standing of Wordsworth and Coleridge: the careless habit of bundling them together into the capacious bosom of “Romanticism,” or the amiable device of fitting them out in football jerseys of different colours and playing them off one against the other with the final result decided before the match begins.  Wordsworth and Coleridge do not accom­modate us by being either heavenly twins or sworn enemies.

The Preface to Lyrical Ballads was in some sense a joint production.  Yet a close study of the Preface, of its origins, and of the controversy it attracted in Wordsworth’s day, brings one to see how peculiarly Wordsworthian a document it is, and how little rooted in Coleridge’s practice of poetry or in his instinctive philosophy.  Coleridge stood aside from the Preface; and the Preface, far from securing Wordsworth’s poetic freedom, consolidated his movement towards disaster.  The dis­aster was the arrest in his development when he was coming into his force; the tragedy, that he courted disaster and secured his own down­fall.

As soon as the 1802 version of the Preface had been published, Coleridge started trying to single out the “radical difference” he sensed between his and Wordsworth’s views.  Nevertheless he told Daniel Stuart that the Preface expressed “our joint opinions on poetry.”  Letters to Sotheby and Southey (July 13 and 29, 1802) are more cautious.

I must set you right with regard to my perfect coincidence with his poetic Creed.  It is most certain, that that Preface arose from the heads of our mutual Conversations &c – & the first passages were indeed partly taken from notes of mine; for it was at first intended, that the Preface should be written by me… But…

I will apprize you of one thing, that altho’ Wordsworth’s Preface is half a child of my own Brain & so arose out of Conversations so frequent, that with few exceptions we could scarcely either of us perhaps, positively say, which first started any particular Thought…, yet I am far from going all lengths with Wordsworth.

Wordsworth, nettled by years of quibbling public abuse – “insults which the ignorant, the incapable, and the presumptuous, have heaped upon these and my other writings” – asserted that he had written the Preface only to please Coleridge and at his insistence.[1]  Certainly we can see Wordsworth declining Coleridge’s monumental gambit of the “system­atic defence” which should treat the subject with all “the clearness and coherence of which it is susceptible.”  Coleridge probably did not mind that omission much; and he was “warmly [in] accord with Wordsworth in his abhorrence of ... poetic licenses.”  But it was a radical difference that bothered him.  He intended to publish his view at once, but didn’t; and as he meditated the problem he was led to his distinction between Imagination and Fancy.

Nowhere does Wordsworth or Coleridge mention the Advertisement to the 1798 edition, either as the starting-point for the Preface or as a joint conception.  Yet it is a fairly substantial piece of prose, and con­tains the germ of the “theory” which the Preface propounds.  It also shows that, as early as 1798, Wordsworth considered The Ancient Mariner to stand outside the programme of Lyrical Ballads.

[It] was professedly written in imitation of the style, as well as of the spirit of the elder poets; but with a few exceptions the Author believes that the language adopted in it has been equally intelligible for these last three centuries.

Whatever hand Coleridge may have had in the Preface, his association with what the contemporary reviewers called “Mr. Wordsworth’s theory” or “system” begins to look tenuous.  The Preface laid Wordsworth open to repeated charges of “affected simplicity and meanness.”  But Coler­idge, vexed to find himself accused of swimming in Wordsworth’s wake, protested in 1813 against “This slang [which] has gone on for fourteen or fifteen years against us” – attacks which now charged his early poems with “sentimentalities, puerilities, whinings, and meannesses,” the very opposite of what he recognized as their actual vices.  “But,” he continued – and he was to say the same in the Biographia – “if it had not been for the Preface, they would never themselves have dreamt of affected simplicity and meanness of thought and diction.”  To withdraw the Preface would have been a simple and comfortable solution; but Wordsworth did not withdraw the Preface.

Of the discussions that led to the theory of Lyrical Ballads there is unfortunately no contemporary record except for a few badly rubbed and elliptical pencil notes on the end paper of one of Coleridge’s note­books.  The Preface itself gives no circumstantial account of the origin of the idea; and the account in Biographia Literaria is usually accepted without question because it is closer to the event than either Coleridge’s prefatory note to The Wanderings of Cain (1828) or Wordsworth’s Isabella Fenwick note to We are Seven (1843).

During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our con­versations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination…The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts.  In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural;…For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life…In this idea originated the plan of the “Lyrical Ballads”; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic;…Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day…With this view I wrote “The Ancient Mariner,” and was preparing among other poems, “The Dark Ladie,” and the “Christabel,” in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal, than I had done in my first attempt.

If the Lyrical Ballads sprang originally from a double programme, how did Coleridge get edged out of the 1800 title-page, when The Ancient Mariner, the longest poem in the collection, opened the volume and was the only poem other than The Idiot Boy to be accorded the dignity of a half-title?  Several of Coleridge’s poems written or begun in 1797-8 look as though they belonged to the Biographia programme: The Three Graves (started by Wordsworth early in 1797), The Wanderings of Cain (an unsuccessful collaboration with Wordsworth), Lewti (also from Wordsworth’s beginnings), The Ballad of the Dark Ladie (which never grew beyond a fragment and the splendid introductory poem Love com­posed more than two years later) – and Christabel, the most triumphant fulfilment of Coleridge’s announced task.  But was this task connected with the Lyrical Ballads, or did it come by a different and longer route?  The mention of the “two cardinal points of poetry” in the Biographia can mislead the unwary: Wordsworth’s programme could cover both.  Coleridge, explaining to Davy in 1800 why Christabel was at the last moment excluded from the second edition, said that an argument of more consequence than the poem’s excessive length was that it was “in direct opposition to the very purpose for which the Lyrical Ballads were published.”[2]

As we move closer to the composition of Lyrical Ballads, the impres­sion is confirmed – or at least not contradicted – that Coleridge may have encouraged the theory but was not led by it.  The first attempt at poetic collaboration was The Wanderings of Cain, conceived during a walk to Lynton in November 1797.  Each was to write one canto; the first one finished was to write the third canto; Coleridge had drawn up “the scheme and the contents.”  This has a fine pantisocratic swing to it, and reminds us how close we are to the Coleridge of Bristol composing antiphonally with Southey The Fall of Robespierre and (with differ­ences) Joan of Arc.  With The Wanderings of Cain, however, the arrest was sharp and significant.  “I cannot without something more than a smile moot the question which of the two things was the more im­practicable, for a mind so eminently original [as Wordsworth’s] to com­pose another man’s thoughts and fancies, or for a taste so austerely pure and simple to imitate the Death of Abel?”[3] – which is perhaps only another way of saying that Wordsworth could no more have written The Ancient Mariner than Coleridge could have written it without the albatross Wordsworth provided him with.  A comment of Wordsworth’s to Barron Field comes to mind: “I gave him [Coleridge] the subject of his Three Graves: but he made it too shocking and painful, and not sufficiently sweetened by any healing views.”[4]

The Ancient Mariner was conceived on the dark, cloudy evening of November 13, 1797.  Dorothy records that during an eight-mile walk “William and Coleridge [were] employing themselves in laying the plan of a ballad, to be published with some pieces of William’s”: projected joint publication, but not necessarily a joint theory.  Wordsworth’s note of 1843 takes up the story.

Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge’s invention; but certain parts I myself suggested…We began the composition together on that, to me, memorable evening…As we endeavoured to proceed con­jointly…our respective manners proved so widely different that it would have been quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separate from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog.  We returned…The Ancient Mariner grew and grew till it became too important for our first object, which was limited to our expectation of five pounds, and we began to talk of a Volume, which was to consist, as Mr. Coleridge has told the world, of Poems chiefly on natural subjects taken from common life, but looked at, as much as might be, through an imaginative medium.  Accord­ingly I wrote The Idiot Boy…

The Ancient Mariner, then, preceded the programme.  On biographical evidence alone one would be surprised to find it otherwise.  Wordsworth in November 1797 had just finished revising The Borderers; Coleridge had finished Osorio only a month before and had been entangled in personal affairs that kept him away from Stowey until the beginning of February 1798; William and Dorothy were in London and Bristol for the whole of December and did not return to Alfoxden until January 3.  “Mr. Wordsworth’s theory” did not reach the tip of his pen until January 1798 at the very earliest and probably later.  Goody Blake – “one of the rudest of the collection” – was probably the first of the programme poems.  Bateson dates it “? January 1798”: if in January, then in Coler­idge’s absence; if with Coleridge present, then February at the earliest.  Just how The Ancient Mariner “grew and grew” is not known: it seems to have been mentioned to Cottle in November and January, and Coler­idge brought the finished manuscript to the Wordsworths on March 23, 1798.  But there is still no definite sign of a joint programme; and a letter Coleridge wrote to Cottle on February 18 announcing the completion of “my ballad” (?The Ancient Mariner) is concerned, not with some pub­lication with Wordsworth, but with a projected third edition of his own Poems.[5]

During the spring of 1798 (and again unfortunately no terminus a quo can be firmly set, but March seems a likely starting date) Words­worth wrote a number of lyrical ballads: after Goody Blake at least ten more, and Peter Bell, that most unColeridgean study of guilt.  On May 9, 1798, he wrote to Cottle to say that he was impatient to see him to dis­cuss the Salisbury Plain; he adds, “I have lately been busy about another plan, which I do not wish to mention till I see you.”[6] Not we, but I: there is no mention of Coleridge in this letter.  For Coleridge the months February, March, April, and early May 1798 were the only long idyllic passage in the annus mirabilis.  By the middle of May the triune pattern was beginning to disintegrate.  Coleridge was shattered by the quarrel with Lamb and Lloyd; the Wordsworths would have to move soon from Alfoxden; plans for a trip to Germany were in the air, and Lyrical Ballads (when was the title first thought of?) was to help pay for it.  Since the walk to Watchet and Dulverton in November, Coleridge had written The Ancient Mariner, the first part of Christabel, his three finest Conversation Pieces, two of his major political pieces – France: An Ode and Fears in Solitude – and probably Kubla Khan.  Wordsworth’s pro­duction was less diversified: The Old Cumberland Beggar, about a dozen lyrical ballads, the first version of Peter Bell, a few personal pieces of small size, and some passages of blank verse – including the first draft for what was later to become the Prospectus to The Excursion.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Wordsworth’s theory of common speech and humble subjects does not dominate the annus mirabilis.  Wordsworth’s finest work in the period is not in that kind: and his finest contribution to Lyrical Ballads 1798, Tintern Abbey, moves from the bemused rhythmic spell of the half-Miltonic Prospectus “On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life” to the gentle intent note of Coleridge’s Conversation Pieces.  The theory had produced some experi­ments – whether experiments in the range of possible poetry or experi­ments in public response is not clear.  Coleridge’s first finished poem in the period was a masterpiece that he was never to excel.  If he could write The Ancient Manner, and then the delicate miracle of Christabel, and achieve the mellifluous intimacy of the Conversation Pieces, he had little need for Wordsworth’s theory.  He had already learned his lessons from the accident of Southey’s fascination with exotic materials and his failure to turn them into poetry; from Lamb’s counsel “Study, simplicity, Coleridge”; and from “the divine chit-chat of Cowper.”[7]  If he was writ­ing during the annus mirabilis to any programme, it was a theory that looked back to the Bristol days of 1795 and had since matured to en­compass a world of poetry and imagination perpetually closed to Wordsworth.

When Wordsworth wrote for the 1800 Lyrical Ballads his disingenu­ous and condescending note on the revised Ancient Mariner, he neg­lected the peculiar merits of the poem, quibbled about imagined defects, and ascribed to it virtues which he had established as his own ideal.  It is a curiously eighteenth-century performance.

The Poem of my Friend has indeed great defects;…Yet the Poem con­tains many delicate touches of passion, and indeed the passion is every where true to nature; a great number of the stanzas present beautiful images, and are expressed with unusual felicity of language; and the versification, though the metre is itself unfit for long poems, is harmonious and artfully varied…

There is also a smack of Augustan critical terminology and presup­position in Wordsworth’s phrase “to throw over incidents of common life a certain colouring of imagination,” and in Coleridge’s echo of this in the Biographia: “the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination.”  One begins to wonder whether Wordsworth’s theory may have been made as a reaction away from Coleridge.  Certainly it was to lie between them like an unsheathed sword.

Wordsworth was in dire peril as a poet, and dimly knew it; Coleridge was not.  To assert that without qualification is to assert the absolute difference between the two men as poets.  Wordsworth later hymned

the buoyant spirits

That were our daily portion when we first

Together wanton’d in wild Poesy.

Yet from the beginning their relations cannot have been easy for either of them, though softened by early enthusiasm, by Dorothy’s presence, and by Coleridge’s unrestrained worship of “the Giant Wordsworth.”  Coleridge admired Wordsworth’s extreme masculinity, his self-containedness, his rectitude, his fertility in composition.  But he was not always blinded by Wordsworth’s virtues, as a remark to Cary in Novem­ber 1817 shows.

If, indeed, I do estimate too highly what I deem the characteristic ex­cellencies of Wordsworth’s poems, it results from a congeniality of taste without a congeniality in the productive power; but to the faults and defects I have been far more alive than his detractors, even from the first publica­tion of the “Lyrical Ballads,” though for a long course of years my opinions were sacred to his own ear.

Lyrical Ballads is invoked again as the first and crucial issue.

If the inquiry is to be carried deeper, it must be taken back to the original Prefaces.  Later evidence is more manageable but less trust­worthy.  Wordsworth’s 1815 Preface moves in a different orbit and the Biographia is less clear and cool than it might have been; for Coleridge’s book had suddenly crystallized around the butcher’s reviews of The Excursion and that 1815 Preface in which Wordsworth openly chal­lenged views on Imagination, that Coleridge had for years circulated among his friends.  Coleridge was in the awkward position of having quarrelled irremediably with Wordsworth and of yet admiring his poetic genius; of being profoundly disappointed with The Excursion which he had nourished for years, and yet of half-agreeing with the points made against the poem by heavy-handed but not altogether wrong-headed critics.

What then was Wordsworth’s theory meant to do? Certainly it would be expected to outflank “gaudiness and inane phraseology” as well as “tricks, quaintness, hieroglyphics, and enigmas.”  A theory serves a poet as a compass serves a sailor: it can keep him on a straight course, but it cannot find his destination.  When we approach the Preface with the mind’s attention awakened from “the lethargy of custom,” and the celebrated sonorities temporarily laid aside, we encounter difficulty both in formulating the “theory” and in determining precisely what is ominous about it; for the arrangement is not clear, the argument more rhetorical than philosophical.

Lyrical Ballads, according to the Preface, had four purposes: (a) “to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society” could be adapted to poetry; (b) “to make the acci­dents of common life interesting by tracing in them…the primary laws of our nature”; (c) to enlarge man’s capacity for being excited without “gross and violent stimulation”; (d) to produce “a species of poetry…which is genuine poetry.”  Of these four, the last two being attainable need not delay us.  It is behind the first two that Wordsworth’s large assumptions lie.

In his desire to release poetry from the grip of inane diction, exces­sive stimulants, and dreary bombast, Wordsworth very properly turned towards simplicity.  But on what evidence (other perhaps than Rousseau-istic sentimentality) is simplicity and lucidity of language necessarily or exclusively to be found in “the middle and lower classes of society” or in “low and rustic life”?  When Wordsworth gives his reason for choosing “accidents of common life” why does he assume for rural people exceptional clarity of emotion and special virtuosity in articulating their passions into speech when in “a state of vivid sensation”?  On what evidence could he assume that in a rural setting “the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature”?  Why, in his insistent appeals to pleasure as a prime principle in poetry, does he draw special attention to the power imagination has of “tempering the painful feeling always found intermingled with power­ful descriptions of the deeper passions,” yet neglect to discuss the com­plex pleasure that arises from contemplating the form of a good poem?  And why does he so often indicate poetic activity by the words “de­scribe,” “imitate,” “represent”?

These questions cannot be satisfactorily answered from the Preface alone.  And when we turn to the Biographia to see how Coleridge formu­lated his complaints, we find that even he ran into difficulties.

With many parts of this preface, in the sense attributed to them, and which the words undoubtedly seem to authorise, I never concurred; but on the contrary objected to them as erroneous in principle, and as contradictory (in appearance at least) both to other parts of the same preface, and to the author’s own practice in the greater number of the poems themselves.

Eventually he is able to localize “the positions which I controvert”:

they are contained in the sentences – “a selection of the REAL language of men”; – “the language of these men [i.e.  men in low and rustic life] I propose to myself to imitate, and as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men.”  “Between the language of prose and that of metrical composition, there neither is, nor can be any essential difference”

All these points Coleridge attacks by showing equivocation in terms or by evincing the authority of observed fact.  The long passage Words­worth inserted in 1802 to patch up the vulnerable discussion of prose and poetry was, Coleridge admits, in part at least “very grand, and of a sort of Verulamian power and majesty”; but it had not altered the position it was intended to support.  In the end Coleridge draws up a list of characteristic defects of Wordsworth’s poetry – inconstancy of style, matter-of-factness, ventriloquism, prolixity, mental bombast – defects drawn not exclusively from the Lyrical Ballads but from all the poetry to 1815.  But there is no discontinuity in Coleridge’s account.  The discussion of Wordsworth’s poetry had started from the Preface; because, even though Wordsworth had “degraded” it to the end of the second volume in the 1815 collection, “he has not, as far as I can discover, announced any change in his poetic creed.”  In the Preface there are prominent discussions of verisimilitude, truth to nature, the factual and historical basis of some of the poems.  When Coleridge dis­cusses the element of “matter-of-factness” in the poems, he makes an observation which may well lie at the root of all his objections, and of our suspicions.

…a biographical attention to probability, and an anxiety of explanation and retrospect…seem… to destroy the main fundamental distinction, not only between a poem and prose, but even between philosophy and works of fiction, inasmuch as it proposes truth for its immediate object, instead of pleasure.

Coleridge takes this observation very seriously, raising it to the status of a formal definition: “A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth.”  A misunderstanding by Wordsworth at this point – and the shift could be a very subtle one – could lead to a dangerous form of plausible realism; and this Coleridge proceeds to analyse at some length.[8]

As for the “theory,” Coleridge cries: “I reflect with delight, how little a mere theory, though of his own workmanship, interfered with the processes of genuine imagination in a man of true genius.”  And he also proclaimed “decisively and aloud,” that “the supposed characteristics of Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry…whether they are simplicity or…faithful adherence to essential nature…are as little the real character­istics of his poetry at large, as of his genius and the constitution of his mind…The natural tendency of the poet’s mind is to great objects and elevated conceptions.”  By inference, from the Preface and from Coleridge, the theory can perhaps be formulated in unequivocal terms.  It was an experiment in using simple language, “common subjects,” and passionate situations in order to bring the reader into touch with the realities of the human heart.  And this theory – if we may believe the prominence and emphasis given to the matter in the Preface – would also gratify Wordsworth’s factual, almost clinical, interest in psychology, guided by “worthy purpose” habits of meditation, and a concern for “moral relations,” and leading to “a natural delineation of human pas­sions, human characters, and human incidents.”

Tracing the path of this “theory” through Wordsworth’s work, how­ever, we find that his opponents may have been right in assuming for it a wider ambience than the collection entitled Lyrical Ballads.  Of the class of poems that can technically be called lyrical ballads, about a dozen were written in 1798; the vein was momentarily transfigured in the Lucy Poems, all but one of which were written in 1798-9 and the last in 1801.  Nine or ten ballads were added in 1799-1800, and another four within a week in the middle of March 1802.  After that, very few: an occasional one from 1805 to 1808, less angular but not less dis­cursive than the originals, tuned more to the manner of The White Doe than of The Idiot Boy.  Most of the occasional and personal verses from 1799 to 1807 – other than blank verse passages and sonnets – fall some­how within the theory.  The strain can be traced from Peter Bell to the more bookish White Doe, with poems like Michael, Resolution and Independence, The Solitary Reaper, and the less plangent sections of The Prelude lying along the same line.  The theory lies heavy as frost upon the less satisfactory sections of The Excursion.  Yet there is no denying that the theory had clarified and strengthened Wordsworth’s poetic language and procedure, and had increased the range and extended the pace of his verse.

The poetry written to the programme, however, was not all that Wordsworth wrote during the Nether Stowey period, 1797-8.  The first run of lyrical ballads is bracketed by the most powerful sort of verse he was to write: the Prospectus to The Excursion a month or so after Goody Blake; Tintern Abbey (a mixed performance) only just in time for the 1798 edition; some of the finest passages of The Prelude a few months later in Germany.  The theme of “creative recollection” first comes to the surface in Tintern Abbey, that poem being the first full-grown child of the process.  The same theme, less personal and in an aspect almost archetypal, had already appeared in the Prospectus.  As a process it dominates The Prelude, and already in Tintern Abbey looks forward to the Immortality Ode – a dangerous rationalizing poem which persuaded Wordsworth that he was writing on the theme of immortality and not on the theme of his own death.  This kind of memory must be sharply distinguished from the inexhaustible dream-crowded processes that informed The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan.  By looking back Wordsworth could distance himself; and instead of describing “the pas­sions of men” he could describe passions conveniently remote, yet more intimately perceived – his own.  But in this Wordsworth was moving in a land most unlike the symbol-haunted country of Coleridge’s mind.  The events in memory were exhaustible because, though liberated from time, they were bounded by actuality: he was living on capital.  How acutely Hazlitt observed, in reviewing The Excursion, that “The power of his mind preys upon itself”; for deliberate recollection progressively erodes memory.  The personal memory was not too shallow a well for Proust, but it was too shallow for Wordsworth – not because he lacked psychological curiosity or insight, but because his “matter-of-factness” was disrupted by his sense of the numinous, and his sense of the numinous could not pass out of vagueness because of his literalness.

Mr. John Jones, in The Egotistical Sublime, gives a moving account of Wordsworth’s distinctive genius: of his solitude, his literalness, his way of looking steadily at the world for what it was and nothing else; and how this is at the root of both his power and his narrowness.  He describes him in Coleridge’s phrase as Spectator ab extra; a man sepa­rate, holding his own inviolate retirement, gazing steadily at his subject as though in the end it would yield its secret entire, believing – in the early years at least – that this world is substantial, that this is

the place where in the end

We find our happiness, or not at all.

For Wordsworth, subject and object are set over against each other, yet he sees them as “an intelligible complex.”  His mature stand is taken in the paradoxical and vulnerable attitude of “attachment-in-solitude,” the work of the Great Decade being “a huge, sustained argument from soli­tude to relationship.”  The scheme of The Recluse was to clinch the position, showing how exquisitely the mind is fitted to the world, and the world to the mind.

Whoever thought of the scheme for The Recluse in the first place, Coleridge gave it as much encouragement and thought almost as if it had been his own.  When Wordsworth had finished his preliminary self-inquiry in The Prelude, Coleridge was deeply moved by it; but The Excursion, published eight years afterwards, was a bitter disappointment to him.  The trouble, Mr. Jones says, was that Coleridge in proposing a “philosophical” poem to Wordsworth naturally had in mind a Chris­tian poem.  If Coleridge complained that in The Excursion the imagina­tive strongholds of The Prelude had been surrendered, it was (Mr. Jones continues) because Wordsworth was trying to write a Christian poem – at Coleridge’s instigation.  The implication is that the birth of Christianity in Wordsworth involved the death of attachment-in-solitude.  Returning to the annus mirabilis we find that Christianity was not a congenial topic of discussion between Coleridge and Wordsworth: Wordsworth was said to be “at least, a semi-atheist”; again, “on one subject we are habitually silent”; yet Coleridge acknowledged that his own Christianity was “too much my intellectual passion.”  There are no signs that Coleridge had anything but respect for Wordsworth’s pagan vitality, nor that he would, for several books of The Excursion, have weaned him to “sound belief.”  Nevertheless he was concerned about Wordsworth’s vulnerable position.  Coleridge himself had renounced the attractive superficialities of Godwin some time before he met Words­worth; Hartley too would drop out soon.  His mind was already moving vigorously towards some formulation of the unitary consciousness, in an attempt to combine with imagination and reason the mysteries of con­science and the will.  If his early Unitarianism was a naïve shortcut to the unity of God, and his early dalliance with atomic materialism a youth’s hasty acceptance of a plausible analogy, he was not to rest long with specious expedients.  Accustomed from childhood to move in a transmundane realm, his mind “habituated to the Vast,” he was strug­gling towards an adequate theory of association and imagination, fas­cinated as he was with his own “inner goings-on” both poetic and moral.  Most of this was in the future in 1798: but the germs were all there.  Wordsworth’s resources were much more slender than this.  To accommodate his sense of the numinous to his position of attachment-in-solitude, and rejecting the easy solution of a deus ex machina, he had taken up a fluid pantheist position.  In the years between Bristol and Germany a pantheist strain appears in some of Coleridge’s poems; but it disappears again, not in the face of Christian orthodoxy (though he eventually saw pantheism as atheism) but under the pressure of the poetic act.  By identifying himself with an object and simultaneously distancing himself from it, he could do what Wordsworth hoped to do – “see into the life of things.” Wordsworth said: “I have at all times endeavoured to look steadily at my subject.”  Coleridge, however, had found that by holding an object sharply focused in his attention – whether actually present or not – the object could become translucent and without losing its identity evoke images, ideas, feelings not neces­sarily associated with it in the mundane sphere.  He had in effect come upon the symbolic act, whereby the archetypal patterns of life and reality unfold and embody themselves.  He was concerned with reality, and with that self-losing which is the supreme self-finding.  His movement from Spinoza to the Neo-Platonists, Presocratics, and Cambridge Platonists, and to his favourite heterodox “mystics” like Swedenborg and Boehme endorsed and clarified his growing belief in correspondances, in the intimate relation of everything with everything else; Plato was always in the background.  Wordsworth’s stern and solitary preoccupation with the actual placed him at another pole; it could disclose to him a universe powerful indeed, but more vague and less populous than Coleridge’s.

Yet it was Coleridge who encouraged, perhaps outlined, the vast scheme for The Recluse; Coleridge who proclaimed that “Wordsworth possessed more of the genius of a great philosophical poet than any man I ever knew, or, as I believe, has existed in England since Milton”; Coleridge who looked forward to The Recluse as “the first and only true philosophical poem in existence.”  He knew perfectly well that Words­worth had neither talent nor taste for formal philosophizing; but his definition of philosophy was comprehensive enough – “an affectionate seeking after the truth.”  As far as one can see, Coleridge – although he passed a good many things on to Wordsworth – never thrust his own philosophy upon him.  Yet he must have appreciated Wordsworth’s predicament and hoped perhaps that he could rescue him from danger.  If that was his hope, he must also have understood that there was no way of effecting any radical change in Wordsworth unless Wordsworth could make the discoveries for himself.  Did Coleridge deliberately urge Wordsworth into The Recluse as a therapeutic and redemptive expedient?  And did Wordsworth, half-understanding what a crisis of self-making was confronting him, turn to The Prelude as an act – not altogether deliberate – of evasion?  Coleridge probably did not see the crisis very steadily; half-blinded with admiration, beset with crushing concerns of his own, repelled at times by their temperamental incom­patibility, he could not address himself continuously to the problem.  In any case Coleridge did not see philosophy as a panacea, but as a clarifier, a definer of the limits of the comprehensible.  “Philosophy in general,” he noted in a memorandum book, “[is] a plummet to so short a line that it can sound no deeper than the sounder’s eyes can reach – and yet – in certain waters it may teach the exact depth and prevent a drowning.”  In October 1803 he wrote an important letter to Poole – a letter which he urged Poole to destroy.

I now see very little of Wordsworth: ... I owe it to Truth and Justice, as well as to myself to say, that the concern, which I have felt in ... [certain] instances, of Self-Involution in Wordsworth, has been almost wholly a Feeling of friendly Regret, and disinterested Apprehension – I saw him more and more benetted in hypochondriacal Fancies, living among Devotees – having every the minutest Thing, almost his very Eating and Drinking done for him by his Sister, or Wife – and I trembled, lest a Film should rise, and thicken on his moral Eye.  The habit too of writing such a multitude of small Poems was in this instance hurtful to him – ... I rejoice therefore with a deep and true Joy, that he has at length yielded to my urgent and repeated – almost unremitting – requests and remonstrances – and will go on with the Recluse exclusively.  A Great Work … necessarily comprehending his attention and Feelings within the circle of great objects and elevated Con­ceptions – this is his natural Element.  The having been out of it has been his Desease – to return into it is the specific Remedy, both Remedy and Health … I have seen enough, positively to give me feelings of hostility towards the plan of several of the Poems in the L.  Ballads: and I really consider it as a misfortune, that Wordsworth ever deserted his former Mountain Track to wander in Lanes & vallies; tho’ in the event it may prove to have been a great Benefit to him.

Wordsworth did move away from the “small pieces,” continued with The Prelude, and finally finished it.  But that poem, for all its acknowl­edged splendors, proved to be also a movement along the line of Lyrical Ballads confirming his egotism, impoverishing his imagination.  If Coler­idge ever urged Wordsworth strongly to Christianity, it would be to break up the frost of lovelessness, that fatal incapacity for a rapture that could not quite risk self-losing.  “Wordsworth,” Coleridge wrote in 1811 – by which time Wordsworth was groping desolately, under pres­sure of bereavement, towards a genuine Christian belief – “Wordsworth is by nature incapable of being in Love, tho’ no man more tenderly attached…”  In Coleridge’s philosophy it was not metaphysical pene­tration that bridged the chasm between solitude and identification, but the active principle of love.  “I believe,” Coleridge wrote, “that Love ... that specific mode of Being, which one Object only [? at a time] can possess, and possess totally, is always the abrupt creation of a moment – tho’ years of Dawning may have preceded.”  Like Nicholas of Cusa, he saw love as a form of cognition mysteriously connected with the will.  Christianity was one way – but not the only way – of finding that.  Near the end of his life, Yeats wrote: “love … does not desire to change its object.  It is a form of the eternal contemplation of what is.”  The shift of emphasis for Wordsworth was, then, infinitesimal and Coleridge can be forgiven for hoping to bring it about; but also the change would be radical and massive, and Coleridge had reason to be wary.  The radical issue which Coleridge was powerless to resolve, though it came to the surface in a critical essay, was as deep as life.

Pinned to an empirical world from which he was powerless to release himself by philosophical insight or profound and flexible religious belief, Wordsworth populated his poetic world with solitaries, primordial, un-complex, subhuman.  Yet he was haunted by a powerful, ghostly, numinous world –

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

This sense of “something far more deeply interfused” moved him to awe, terror, guilt, perplexity.  He asserted that the world was an “intel­ligible frame”; yet it was only a “blessed mood” that could lighten “the burthen of the mystery,”

the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world.

As these occasions came to him at longer and longer intervals, he could still turn his acute ear and eye upon the world for the uses of Beauty and the worship of Nature, returning – but with a melancholy difference – to the clear-browed world from which the numinous had dis­lodged him, and in which, if he had never left it, he would have been safe.  In the 1815 Preface he reasserts the position he had started from, crying in Coleridge’s teeth that the Imagination no less than Fancy is an “aggregative and associative power”; and that Fancy, though less sub­limely conscious of “the soul in her mighty and almost divine powers,” is also a “creative faculty.”

The surprising thing is not that Wordsworth ceased for a long time to be a major poet, but that he discovered the inimitable manner of his maturity.  For a time, language bent itself to his will: not through the specificity of clear symbolic usage, but through a process more obscure, difficult, original, and precarious; the weight being carried less by the words or the logic (which he had to some extent deliberately destroyed) than by the rhythms and a peculiarly involute syntax.[9]  At moments of great poetic intensity abstract words and phrases take on the weight and solidity of the concrete, the sheer need for solidity in an insubstantial world forcing the emotional weight upon them until abstracts and gener­alities – as sometimes in Donne – take on metaphorical richness and depth; the movement of the syntax is not a pattern of logical relations so much as a musicalized image of the movements of mind and feeling.  Passages of The Prelude and other poems have the air of sustained and coherent philosophy, yet closer examination shows that philosophically they say very little.  Yet they are poetically sound, conveying the com­plex of thought and feeling in a very substantial and impressive body.  Here most of all – more than in any claim for Wordsworth’s “philo­sophy” or his view of the world – resides that originality that Coleridge was always insisting on: “the original spirit itself ... a subtle Spirit, all in each part, reconciling and unifying all.  Passion and Imagination are its most appropriate names; but even these say little – for it must be not merely Passion but poetic Passion, poetic Imagination.”  Words­worth’s lyrical gift was slight; his dramatic sense runs to ventriloquism; he has only limited powers of vision.  The miracle is entirely his own; sometimes spare, sometimes complex, always (when it occurs) powerful; and most impressive of all is the massive brooding incantatory sub-liturgical rumination that seems often to have no clear beginning and need never have an end; the literal rendering with tough finality of his vague and ghostly world of unintelligible patterns and strong inscrutable emotions.

The inconceivable feat somehow was achieved and for a time sus­tained with the help of the theory of the Preface; and in the end his work came to grief because – whatever the reasons – he could not advance beyond the theory.  For a time he was borne along by the very literalness that had led him first to distrust and then to destroy the received poetic language of his time.  Yet for want of a distinct symbolic procedure such as Coleridge had discovered and used, for want of a focusing method to redeem discursiveness, the theory and the kind of attention it implied drew him progressively into disaster.  For there is no literal language that can “describe” or “imitate” what lay at the heart of his poetry –

these emotions, whencesoe’er they come,

Whether from breath of outward circumstance,

Or from the Soul…