Coleridge’s Debt to Charles Lamb
It is said that a poet is born, not made. That may be. But most poets need a little licking into shape – by themselves or somebody else – before they become important poets. Poet-making is a delicate and hazardous pastime, requiring on the one hand an accurate sense of poetic values, and on the other the courage to outface the poet’s curiosa ferocitas that may at any moment discharge thunderbolts upon the heads of the tactless or impertinent. And some way has to be found of dealing with the poet’s protective habit of studious inattention, his way of humming to himself while appearing to listen.
Charles Lamb, gifted with a poet’s instinct, a fine critical sense, and a light touch with the pen, braved these terrors in his early friendship with Coleridge. So unobtrusive was his poet-making that it has largely escaped notice. Yet his part in bringing Coleridge to his annus mirabilis was, I think, not less important than the friendship that was to bind them together – with only one short and lamentable intermission – throughout their lives.
One would like to discern a little more clearly by what route Coleridge came upon the kind of poetry for which he is most widely celebrated – The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, and Christabel; and came upon that other manner, both before and after, of the finely wrought Conversation Poems like The Nightingale and Frost at Midnight, and its fuller development in the Dejection ode. The received account tells how, when Coleridge and Wordsworth came together in Somerset in 1797, the poetic uranium reached critical mass and the resulting chain-reaction was Lyrical Ballads. This version, however, overlooks certain wayward complexities of the poet’s nature, and a number of facts that the chaste industry of scholarship has placed at our disposal.
The poems Coleridge wrote up to the end of 1794 fill nearly ninety pages in E. H. Coleridge’s edition of the Poetical Works. With these verses Coleridge had already won, in London and elsewhere, some reputation as an accomplished young poet of promise. Some of the poems have charm, most have some striking and finely turned lines and phrases, all give evidence of a sensitive if at times too sedulous ear. But there is little sign in them either of the poetic revolutionary or of the major poet.
By the end of 1794 a distinct vein had begun to emerge – the Miltonizing manner as Humphry House called it – first in a series of sonnets addressed to eminent characters and then expanding into larger odes informed by political anger and a biting sense of the injustices of society. On the whole these are bombastic, rhetorical, full of expletives and superlatives and quaint quasi-superlative compounds; by the accumulated weight of verbal force he seeks to exert an energy that can only properly be imparted by imagination and bred into the bone and nerve of a poem. It was upon these larger Miltonizing politico-social pieces like Religious Musings and Ode to the Departing Year that Lamb and others thought Coleridge’s claim to be a second Milton would rest.
Although this manner continued through and beyond the annus mirabilis, Coleridge himself was uneasy about it. In a poem addressed to Lamb in December 1794 he wrote :
Thus far my sterile Brain hath fram’d the song
Elaborate & swelling – but the Heart
Not owns it.
And in the same month he told Southey: “I cannot write without a body of thought – hence my Poetry is crowded and sweats beneath a heavy burthen of Ideas and Imagery! It has seldom Ease ––’ In the preface to the second edition of his Poems (1797) he recognized that his poems had been “rightly charged with a profusion of double-epithets, and a general turgidness … and [with] the heavier accusation … of obscurity.” “I have,” he said, “pruned the double-epithets with no sparing hand; and used my best efforts to tame the swell and glitter both of thought and diction”; but sometimes he had found it impossible to “disentangle the weeds from the fear of snapping the flower.” In 1813 he cried out against the charges of “ sentimentalities, puerilities, whinings, and meannesses” levelled against his early poems: he knew his early poems had vices, but they were not these. And he came to his full stature as a poet, not by mortifying his vices but by outflanking them in a radical discovery of the nature of poetry and the true function of poetic language.
Throughout 1795 Coleridge struck upon two new veins which developed side by side without superseding the political-rhetorical manner. One of these – the “magical” manner that was to culminate in The Ancient Manner and Kubla Khan – was to do with the transmutation of exotic materials; it emerges intermittently in isolated passages and phrases, and is a matter of colour rather than a sustained style, the promise (that probably could only be seen in hindsight) of a strange imaginative tone not yet fully established. For this we have Southey to thank.[1] Southey’s deliberate attempts to accommodate strange and exotic materials to poetry during 1795, and his failure to achieve anything much beyond “cold-blooded carpentry”, had opened to Coleridge a new world of poetic possibilities and had tempted him to try his own hand at this intriguing and fruitful problem. The other vein was developed in the Conversation Poems which – as Coleridge said of the sonnet in 1796 – “create a sweet and indissoluble union between the intellectual and the material world.” By combining a gentle reminiscent tone with tough and flexible rhythms, these blank verse meditations carry personal reflection to the point where complex states of feeling, in all their flow and movement, attain substantial body. In germ this sort of thing was suggested to Coleridge by Bowles, and perhaps also by Akenside; but in its later development it owes far more to William Cowper. Coleridge wrote the first of the Conversation Poems on his honeymoon, late in 1795, though there were earlier indications of the manner; three were written in Wordsworth’s company. When we consider the volume that crowned the annus mirabilis it is interesting to notice that only one Conversation Poem found its way into Lyrical Ballads (through a last-minute cancellation of Lewti), and that the second-best poem in the volume – Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey – is in that same kind.
The story of Lamb’s share in these matters may properly begin with an episode of such blissful conviviality that Lamb delighted to his dying day to recall it. At the turn of the year 1794-5 Coleridge had just failed in his last attempt to win the hand of Mary Evans and was wavering – not without misgivings – towards his melancholy acceptance of Sarah Fricker as a wife. At the Angel Inn and at the Salutation and Cat, he assuaged his grief and anxieties with Lamb’s receptive companionship and a stiff course of egg-hot and Orinoko. From Lamb’s reminiscences we know that they “beguiled the cares of life with Poesy”, that Coleridge talked about his larger poetic schemes – among other things – and recited Bowles’s sonnets and his own poems in a memorable and impassioned style. The intimacy of those days was the soil from which their later critical intercourse flowered.
Early in 1795 Coleridge was summoned to his duty in Bristol by Southey. During the short Pantisocratic effort he worked and lived with Southey, until both became overwrought and drifted apart in September and a few months later consolidated their differences in a quarrel that one would have thought irremediable. Late in that September Coleridge and Wordsworth first met in Bristol. After that there was some interchange of letters (which are not preserved), and Coleridge performed some critical offices upon the manuscript of Salisbury Plain from March to May 1796. Coleridge remained in and about Bristol until the end of 1796 and then removed to Nether Stowey. There was to be no closer association with Wordsworth until the middle of 1797.
The first letter from Lamb to Coleridge to be preserved was written on 27 May 1796. Lamb had just recovered from some mental illness; there may have been no meeting or exchange of letters since December 1794, though that seems unlikely. From time to time Lamb destroyed correspondence to protect himself from the legalistic inquisitiveness of his brother; this no doubt accounts for the loss of Coleridge’s side of the correspondence, all but one letter of consolation which Lamb specially treasured. The first thirty-three letters in E. V. Lucas’s edition are all addressed to Coleridge and cover, with a few gaps, exactly two years ending with Lamb’s withering Theses quœdam Theologicœ on the subject of Coleridge’s defection to “the schools of Germany”. Whatever else this unique quarrel with Coleridge meant to Lamb, it thrust him out of a position of isolation into an ever-increasing circle of friendship. But it is no accident that all the first letters were addressed to Coleridge. Lamb frequently speaks to Coleridge in these letters as to his only friend and confidant. This gives these critical letters of Lamb’s a peculiar concentration of emotional energy: they are “what honest Bunyan terms heart-work”. All are informed by warm affection and by a deep and guileless admiration. Lamb, still only twenty-one, was two and a half years younger than Coleridge – “I thought you had been older,” he observed in October 1796. They had been Bluecoats together and, as Lamb never forgot, Coleridge had been a Grecian, Lamb only a Deputy Grecian. Lamb never quite outgrew that sense of awe for Coleridge, though he came to live more comfortably with it as time went on.
When the correspondence opened on 27 May 1796, Coleridge’s first collection of Poems had recently been published (16 April) and his periodical The Watchman had just expired (12 May). To begin with, Lamb writes almost exclusively on literary and critical matters. The family disaster of September 1796 disrupted literary discussion for a month. But the first long gap is from April to June 1797, accounted for by Coleridge’s sudden preoccupation with the Wordsworths whom he finally induced to move to Stowey early in July. They had scarcely arrived when Lamb paid his long-delayed visit to Stowey (?7-14 July); thereafter the correspondence languished, with a long gap from September 1797 to January 1798 and again from January to May 1798. The second edition of Coleridge’s Poems, with contributions by Lloyd and Lamb, was published after long delay, on 28 October 1797; but even this failed to revive the exchange of criticism. Lamb’s formative literary influence upon Coleridge then is to be traced in the letters written between 27 May 1796 and the middle of February 1797, the clearly defined interregnum between Coleridge’s conjunction with Southey and his intimacy with the Wordsworths: a period of gestation lasting almost exactly nine months.
Within the nine-month period the discussion falls into two phases. During the first six months it is to do with the poems in The Watchman, with Joan of Arc, and with the Poems of 1796. The second phase deals with the revision of the first edition of Poems for the second edition, with Coleridge’s attempts to rewrite his part of Joan of Arc, and with his poetic plans for the future. Lamb clearly regarded his critical function as a privilege: “the pleasure and pride of thus conversing with you” – “pleasant because the poems are yours, pleasant because you impose the task on me, and pleasant, let me add, because it will confer a whimsical importance on me to sit in judgement upon your rhimes.” And when four of his poems were included in Coleridge’s first volume, and he was offered a whole section to himself in the second – even if it was the last in the book – he was delighted to walk up Parnassus with Coleridge.
Despite the difference of age and despite Lamb’s sense of awe and his assumption of intellectual inferiority, he is in these letters unflinchingly honest and forthright, though always prepared to reconsider a judgment if not to alter it. He judges not by rule or principle but by nerve, by touch, by his acute sense of emotional integrity. He can be extravagant in his praise in a way that now makes us gasp; he can prize a poem like Religious Musings for the wrong reasons. Yet his judgement is personal, sincere, firm. Time after time he touches upon a radical defect. We can feel Coleridge wince, even though we haven’t Coleridge’s reply; we can feel him stubbornly refusing to mend this phrase or that line. But Lamb goes on with his kindly cautery, aware of the occasional hurt to Coleridge’s vanity, quietly and with increasing assurance refining Coleridge’s taste, forcing him to renounce rhetoric and the easy effect in favour of a hard clean line with energy self-contained. Gently he shifts Coleridge from the morose sentimentalities of Bowles towards the firmness of Burns, the fluency of Cowper. Then he has a larger, almost breath-taking vision to show Coleridge – Coleridge’s own vision. And all this was evidently as much a discovery for Lamb as it was for Coleridge.
In the first letter, Lamb finds Religious Musings “noble” but “elaborate”. In his next letter he retracts “whatever invidious there was in my censure” and pronounces the poem “sublime”; but, he insists, there is something “approaching to tumidity (which I meant not to infer in elaborate: I meant simply labord)” in “the Gigantic hyperbole by which you describe the Evils of existing society. Snakes, Lions, hyenas and behemoths, is carrying your resentment beyond bounds.”
He “hungers and thirsts” to read the whole poem but praises a line in another poem as worthy of Burns, and sends news of Cowper’s recent recovery from an attack of madness. Then he reads the whole poem “with uninterrupted feelings of profound admiration”. He is, however, unhappy about the ending of the Monody on Chatterton.
The letter of 8-10 June is the largest one – closely packed with critical observations too intricate for adequate summary. Lamb has just read the first edition of Poems and the Joan of Arc. The lines and phrases he picks out for admiration are all good ones: some have the primitive Kubla Khan touch, and some have the manner of the Conversation Poems. One line he describes as “nervous”, another as “sweet”; but in the midst of his panegyric he can single out a simile which he finds “far-fetch’d”, and declare that the epitaphs are more diffuse than the sonnets. The last two lines of the 19th Effusion are “obvious and unnecessary” – so why not omit them, he asks, since Coleridge hasn’t called the poem a sonnet and is not committed to fourteen lines? He does not like the Shurton Bars poem as much as the Clevedon poem – an early Conversation Poem. Then – “Time nor nothing can reconcile me to the concluding 5 lines of [the sonnet to] Kosckiusko”. The Monody on Chatterton still bothers him, and he “propose[s] with diffidence” a number of detailed suggestions to “make it more compress’d and I think more energic.” Again, Coleridge has, without permission, altered some of Lamb’s poems before publication. “Spare my ewe lambs,” he cries: and his reason is characteristic and unassailable – he sees that Coleridge has smuggled in “a fiction”, has changed the original feeling and introduced an alien one.
But the opening of the letter is concerned with Joan of Arc; and in this he is even more provocative. He was “delighted, amazed – I had not presumed to expect anything of such excellence from Southey.” Coleridge had written a small part of Joan – as Lamb knew and acknowledged in this letter. But he writes out a tantalizing Parnassian tetrad: Burns and Bowles, Cowper and – leaving a blank for the fourth name – “fill up the blank how you please, I say nothing.” He finds in Book IX a passage “very confused” that “sickens me with a load of useless personifications”; and Book X is the most “languid”. But Book IX reminds him of Dante and Ariosto (in translation); and even though “Master Southey spoke very slightingly … and disparagingly of Cowper’s Homer” Lamb expects that Southey will one day rival Milton. ‘‘I already deem him equal to Cowper and superior to all living Poets besides.” So the blank in the tetrad was to be filled with Southey’s name – not Coleridge’s.
This was like putting a rusty iron spoon under Coleridge’s tongue. His reply seems to have been prompt and full of reason, burdened with weighty and high-minded argument. It produced from Lamb – by return of post – a penitential admission of “childish judgement” and a statement that he is in complete agreement in “your opinion of the genius of Southey”. But Lamb changes the subject to ask how Coleridge’s Hymns are getting on, and then returns to his original ground: “Southey in simplicity and tenderness, is excelled decidedly only, I think, by Beaumont and F[letcher] … and perhaps by Cowper in his ‘Crazy Kate’.” Coleridge, it seems, would have to get used to these bracing if bitter tonics.
In the next letter – 1 July – Lamb acknowledges receipt of a poem no longer preserved, and of certain dactylics entitled “The Soldier’s Wife”. Southey and Coleridge had written these verses together in Bristol early in 1795 after reading some Piers Plowman. It is curious that the man who was to unfold within a year the metrical subtleties of Christabel should bother to copy out these stumbling unlovely verses. The Anti-Jacobin was to lampoon them unmercifully in 1798; but Lamb’s sense of fun couldn’t wait that long. “What shall I say to your Dactyls? They are what you would call good per se, but a parody on some of ’em is just now suggesting itself, and you shall have it rough and unlicked.”
Sorely your Dactyls do drag along limp-footed.
Sad is the measure that hangs a cloud round ’em so,
Meagre, and languid, proclaiming its wretchedness.
Weary, unsatisfied, not little sick of ’em,
Cold is my tired heart, I have no charity.
Painfully trav’lling thus over the rugged road.
O begone, Measure, half Latin, half English, then.
Dismal your Dactyls are, God help ye, rhyming Ones.
Again Coleridge was stung into a quick, perhaps explosive, reply; for Lamb writes on 6 July, under the general rubric Let us prose, gaily provocative.
For your Dactyls I am sorry you are so sore about ’em – a very Sir Fretful! In good troth, the Dactyls are good Dactyls, but their measure is naught. Be not yourself “half angry, half agony” if I pronounce your darling lines not to be the best you ever wrote – you have written much.
Earlier on he had said: “Your verse is for the most part so exquisite, that I like not to see aught of meaner matter mixed with it.” Is Lamb now, perhaps, talking obliquely but firmly about the responsibilities of genius?
The first critical phase may now be quickly closed. On 22 September Mary Lamb killed her mother. Five days later Lamb reported this to Coleridge in deep distress, and added: “mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every vestige of past vanities of that kind.” But slowly he rallied and in little more than a month had resumed the discussion of Coleridge’s poems – which of course he had never regarded, even in his despair, as “past vanities”. In the interval, however, a subtle but profound maturity had come to Lamb; a new sternness enters his voice, stripped now of the painful vulnerability of his earlier dependence on Coleridge. He is speaking of a passage in Coleridge’s cherished letter of consolation: “I know I cannot instruct you,” he writes; “I only wish to remind you of that humility which best becometh the Christian character.” Coleridge knew what it was to be chided, browbeaten, admonished – as well as praised, worshipped, and admired. But he had probably never been spoken to in quite this tone of stern and sober authority. It marks, I believe, a very important turning-point in their relations. Coleridge might henceforth ignore or neglect Lamb’s suggestions about what poems to include in the next collection, or what lines or words needed changing; but he could not ignore any remark delivered in this tone of voice, if it struck to the heart of his poetry. For poetic virtue is moral virtue: it is to do with honesty, purity of heart, clarity of intention. When, in his next letter, Lamb pointed to Walton’s Compleat Angler as “the very spirit of innocence, purity, and simplicity of heart” was he not also by implication, and with authority, holding in question all matters of meretricious bombast and clever rhetoric – as well as the coxcombical conceit of which the Preface to the 1796 Poems is not innocent? When Lamb asked “What progress do you make in your hymns?” that was almost a command to do something about them. And the climax of this first phase comes in the letter of 8 November.
Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge, or rather, I should say, banish elaborateness; for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart, and carries into daylight its own modest buds and genuine, sweet, and clear flowers of expression. I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.
Less than a week later, congratulating Coleridge upon dedicating his poems to Bowles, the note changes to a studied elegiac strain.
Genius of the sacred fountain of tears, it was he [Bowles] who led you gently by the hand through all this valley of weeping, showed you the dark green yew trees and the willow shades where, by the fall of waters, you might indulge an uncomplaining melancholy, a delicious regret for the past, or weave fine visions of that awful future,
When all the vanities of life’s brief day
… are but as shadows past.
It is as though Lamb were writing a deliberate epitaph upon that carefully cultivated “speculative gloom” which Coleridge’s allegiance to Bowles had induced. Coleridge did not in the end dedicate his volume to Bowles; and it is at about this time that he turned away from languor to a more strenuous and manly style of verse.
As the correspondence moves into the second phase in December 1796, with the discussion of revisions for the second edition of the Poems, there is no abrupt change. Lamb tries to recue some pieces he likes and has little success; he wants “some loppings made in the Chatterton” and Coleridge pays no attention; Lamb bluntly insists that the title “Effusions” should be dropped and Coleridge cedes that point. He is glad Coleridge loves Cowper (which Lamb has been re-reading “with fresh delight”): “I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton, but I would not call that man my friend, who should be offended with the ‘divine chit-chat of Cowper’.” He finds the Reflections on Leaving a Place of Retirement “the sweetest thing you ever wrote”, thereby approving the manner of the Conversation Poems. And of the Eolian Harp he said: “Write thus, and you most generally have written thus, and I shall never quarrel with you about simplicity.” Quite beyond the fact that the command to simplicity is in substance Cowper’s own, Lamb’s linking of simplicity and Cowper is important. He is still impatient of all imperfection and particularly of “imperfect beginnings and endings”. But at the turn of the year Coleridge returned to his high bombastic manner in the Ode to the Departing Year. In this Lamb found much to admire; but he also found much to condemn as prosaic, or superfluous, or easily-conceived, or useless, or impertinent. He returns to the names of Burns and Cowper: “Burns was the god of my idolatry, as Bowles of yours. I am jealous of your fraternizing with Bowles, when I think you relish him more than Burns or my old favourite, Cowper.” As for the Ode – “Your success in the higher species of the Ode is such, as bespeaks you born for achievements of loftier enterprize than to linger in the lowly train of songsters and sonneteurs. Sincerely I think your Ode one of the finest I have read.” Nevertheless his criticism of one part of the Ode is trenchant and final.
Whether it is that in the present case the rhyme impairs the efficacy; or that the circumstances are feigned, and we are conscious of a made up lye in the case, and the narrative is too long winded to preserve the semblance of truth; or that [some] lines … are mean and unenthusiastic; or that [others] in their change or rhyme shew like art – I don’t know, but it strikes me as something meant to affect, and failing in its purpose.
Then suddenly, in the middle of a long letter of 10 January 1797, Lamb writes as though he had stumbled upon the very thing he had been half-consciously looking for.
Coleridge, I want you to write an Epic poem. Nothing short of it can satisfy the vast capacity of true poetic genius. Having one great End to direct all your poetical faculties to, and on which to lay out your hopes, your ambitions, will shew you to what you are equal. By the sacred energies of Milton, by the dainty sweet and soothing phantasies of honey-tongued Spenser, I adjure you to attempt the Epic. Or do something more ample than writing an occasional brief ode or sonnet; something “to make yourself for ever known – to make the age to come your own”. … You have learning, you have fancy, you have enthusiasm – you have strength and amplitude of wing enow for flights like those I recommend. In the vast and unexplored regions of fairyland, there is ground enough unfound and uncultivated; search there, and realize your favourite Susquehana scheme.
In his next letter, after attacking Coleridge’s proposed rewriting of his part of Joan of Arc, he returns to his vision of Coleridge’s destiny.
Southey certainly has no pretensions to vie with you in the sublime of poetry; but the tells a plain tale better than you. I will enumerate some woeful blemishes, some of ’em sad deviations from that simplicity which was your aim … The loftier walks of Pindus are your proper region. There you have no compeer in modern times. Leave the lowlands, unenvied, in possession of such men as Cowper & Southey. … I cannot think what subject would suit your epic genius; some philosophical subject, I conjecture, in which shall be blended the Sublime of Poetry & of Science. Your proposed Hymns [on the Elements] will be a fit preparatory study wherewith “to discipline your young noviciate soul”.
This may have been partly “pouring balsam into the wounds I may have been inflicting on my poor friend’s vanity”; but only partly. After an interlude, he continues :
I have a dim recollection that, when in town [in 1794], you were talking of the Origin of Evil as a most prolific subject for a long poem. Why not adopt it, Coleridge ? there would be room for imagination. Or the description (from a Vision or Dream, suppose) of an Utopia in one of the planets (the Moon, for instance). Or a Five Days’ Dream, which shall illustrate, in sensible imagery, Hartley’s 5 motives to conduct … An imagination like yours, from these scanty hints, may expand into a thousand great Ideas ––
This is very remarkable talk. It might almost be Coleridge talking to himself. Certainly some of these ideas are to be found in the Gutch Memorandum Book, noted down at various dates. It is important to find that in substance they go back to the Salutation and Cat days, and that Lamb brought them into the forefront of Coleridge’s mind shortly before the annus mirabilis was to open.
When Lamb and Coleridge next met, however, it is unlikely that they discussed matters of this sort. It was in Stowey and and the Wordsworths were there; and Lamb “could not talk much” though his silence (he said) was not sullenness nor (he hoped) from any bad motive. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that from this time Lamb felt that the Wordsworths had usurped Coleridge’s affections. At the end of a letter written shortly before his visit to Stowey, Lamb had quoted Bowles to Coleridge: “What I have owed to thee, my heart can ne’er forget.” Coleridge might well have said the same. For Lamb’s discipline of simplicity was soon to serve Coleridge to a spectacular degree. Some of Lamb’s advice was to be repeated by Coleridge – a bit later but not very much changed – in urging Wordsworth to undertake the Recluse. Lamb’s injunction “Cultivate simplicity” was passed on to Thelwall almost a year later by Coleridge in the form “Study compression”. Was it this perhaps, refracted through Wordsworth’s peculiar socio-linguistic theory, that became the guiding principle for Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads – a principle of which Coleridge never wholly approved? Certainly Lamb’s compelling suggestion about the Hymns to the Elements and a large poem on Evil, grafting itself on to other hints and visions, became The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan.
When the miracle of The Ancient Mariner had been achieved – and for that there is no accounting – Lamb, without claiming any proprietary interest in the poem, instantly recognized how great an achievement it was. Not so Wordsworth, Southey, or Lloyd – none of them liked the poem. The only just tribute to Lamb’s loyalty and critical acumen is to read over the letters he wrote to the unconverted and stiff-necked brethren.
To Southey, 8 November 1798:
If you wrote that review in the “Critical Review”, I am sorry you are so sparing of praise to the “Ancient Marinere;” – so far from calling it, as you do, with some wit, but more severity, “A Dutch attempt” [at German sublimity], I call it a right English attempt, and a successful one, to dethrone German sublimity. You have selected a passage fertile in unmeaning miracles, but have passed by fifty passages as miraculous as the miracles they celebrate. I never so deeply felt the pathetic as in that part,
A spring of love gush’d from my heart,
And I bless’d them unaware
It stung me into high pleasure through sufferings. Lloyd does not like it; his head is too metaphysical, and your taste too correct; … But you allow some elaborate beauties – you should have extracted ’em. “The Ancient Marinere” plays more tricks with the mind than that last poem [Tintern Abbey], which is yet one of the finest written. But I am getting too dogmatical; and before I degenerate into abuse, I will conclude with assuring you that I am/Sincerely yours,/C. Lamb.
To Wordsworth, 30 January 1801: after reading the second edition of Lyrical Ballads and the note in which Wordsworth enumerates certain “grave defects” in the poem:
For me [Lamb writes] I was never so affected with any human Tale. After first reading it, I was totally possessed with it for many days – I dislike all the miraculous part of it, but the feelings of the man under the operation of such scenery dragged me along like Tom Piper’s magic whistle. I totally differ from your idea that the Marinere should have had a character and profession … the Ancient Marinere undergoes such Trials, as overwhelm and bury all individuality or memory of what he was, like the state of a man in a Bad dream, one terrible peculiarity of which is: that all consciousness of personality is gone. Your other observation is I think as well a little unfounded: the Marinere from being conversant in supernatural events has acquired a supernatural and strange cast of phrase, eye, appearance, &c. which frighten the wedding guest. You will excuse my remarks, because I am hurt and vexed that you should think it necessary, with a prose apology, to open the eyes of dead men that cannot see.
The response to this letter, as we know from Lamb’s letter to Manning on 15 February 1801, was immediate and terrible.
I had need be cautious henceforward what opinion I give of the “Lyrical Ballads”. All the North of England are in a turmoil. Cumberland and Westmoreland have already declared a state of war. I lately received from Wordworth a copy of the second volume ... [He had not acknowledged my play before] owing to an “almost insurmountable aversion from Letter-writing.” ... I answered in due form and time, and enumerated several of the passages which had most affected me, adding, unfortunately, that no single piece had moved me so forcibly as the Ancient Mariner, The Mad Mother, or the Lines at Tintern Abbey. The Post did not sleep a moment. I received almost instantaneously a long letter of four sweating pages from my Reluctant Letter-Writer, the purpose of which was, that he was sorry his 2d vol. had not given me more pleasure … and “was compelled to wish that my range of sensibility was more extended, being obliged to believe that I should receive large influxes of happiness and happy Thoughts” (I suppose from the L.B.) – With a deal of stuff about a certain Union of Tenderness and Imagination, which in the sense he used Imagination was not the characteristic of Shakspeare, but which Milton possessed in a degree far exceeding other Poets: which Union, as the highest species of Poetry ... “He was most proud to aspire to”; … [The specimens he quoted] are good Poetry: but after one has been reading Shakespeare twenty of the best years of one’s life, to have a fellow start up, and prate about some unknown quality, which Shakspeare possessed in a degree inferior to Milton and somebody else!!
This was not to be all my castigation. Coleridge, who had not written to me some months before, starts up from his bed of sickness to reprove me for my hardy presumption: four long pages, equally sweaty and more tedious, came from him; assuring me that, when the works of a man of true genius such as W. undoubtedly was, do not please me at first sight, I should suspect the fault to lie “in me and not in them,” &c. &c. &c. &c. &c. What am I to do with such people? I certainly shall write them a very merry letter.
As the letter goes on, we are reminded of his earlier correspondence with Coleridge.
Writing to you, I may say that the 2d vol. has no such pieces as the three I enumerated. It is full of original thinking and an observing mind, but it does not often make you laugh or cry. – It too artfully aims at simplicity of expression. And you sometimes doubt if Simplicity be not a cover for Poverty. The best piece in it … [is She Dwelt among the untrodden ways]. This is choice and genuine, and so are many, many more. But one does not like to have ’em rammed down one’s throat. “Pray, take it – it’s very good – let me help you – eat faster.”
Charles Lamb’s back might “tingle with the northern castigation”; but he was unrepentant.
There are some very puzzling things about the annus mirabilis and the origin of Lyrical Ballads. One thing is that The Ancient Mariner and practically all Coleridge’s best poems for that period were finished before Wordsworth started writing Lyrical Ballads in March or April 1798. We should like to know much more in detail about that early impetuous release of Coleridge’s poetic energy between the Wordsworths’ arrival in July and the beginning of The Ancient Mariner in November. Much of it was abortive – The Brook, The Wanderings of Cain, The Three Graves, The Ballad of the Dark Ladie – abortive in themselves but, judging from the final outcome, not fruitless. All played their part in exercising his imagination in its mysterious shaping and selecting, in refining his ear to the deft management of words and the decent liturgical movement of rhythms. But as far as we know there was no clear-cut stylistic decision; no directive addressed to himself as operative, from himself as chairman of the board of directors. His movement is impetuous and energetic but apparently random; his way of mind (in a favourite image of his) is like a cloud of starlings on the wing. Yet the starlings, at one moment a shapeless cloud, will suddenly turn like one bird, as though at a word of command imperiously uttered and with cheerful alacrity obeyed. In this way Coleridge’s mind, circling and wheeling in an indolent fancy, suddenly becomes intent, stoops, fascinated at the marvellous hint of a vision and the body of a vision; all its powers concentrated, at full stretch, responsive as a fiddle-string. Precisely how this happened we do not know, and shall never know. But one thing is sure: that Coleridge was launched forth upon his marvellous year with vision clarified and energies redirected by his fruitful nine-months’ correspondence with Charles Lamb.