Coleridge Unlabyrinthed

Perhaps Coleridge will be unlabyrinthed when all the editorial work is finished – the six volumes of letters, the eleven volumes of notebooks, the twenty volumes of the Collected Coleridge.  Then at least we should be able successfully to run the labyrinth of our Coleridgean perplexities.  In any case, Ariadne’s thread will end by being a pretty substantial rope.

I

I’m not sure who in the first placed roused all this interest in Coleridge: it may have been some inevitable ground-swell.  John Livingston Lowes certainly set the cat among the pigeons with The Road to Xanadu (1927; second edition, 1930) though he claimed that he was using Coleridge as a pretext rather than theme.  Earl Leslies Griggs has been collecting and editing Coleridge’s letters for more than forty years and has now nearly finished his indispensable six-volume edition of them.  Griggs’s work, and T. M. Raysor’s collections of critical writings in the early thirties, added to accessible letters and manuscripts without much purifying the sources of the early editors: the difference between the Unpublished Letters of 1932 and the Collected Letters of 1956 shows how the scholarly climate has changed.  The late Miss Alice D. Snyder added some new or inaccessible material rigorously sorted and edited, between 1929 and 1934, but her work was on too small a scale to start a revolution; it was overtaken by Lowes’s book, a seminal work that some scholars hurried to diminish as “unscholarly.”  It must be Miss Kathleen Coburn who has quietly given an irreversible impetus to the inquiry by taking up the unfinished work of Coleridge’s literary executor and of the early family editors and seeking to rediscover S.T.C. with a thoroughness and scrupulous honesty that the earlier editors could neither justify nor achieve.  In succession Miss Coburn has edited the hitherto unpublished Philosophical Lectures of 1818-19 (1949); then “A New Presentation of Coleridge” entitled Inquiring Spirit (1951), a survey of the landscape of Coleridge’s mind and a glimpse of his intellectual activity drawn from his less well-known and unpublished writings; then the charming and valuable period piece, The Letters of Sara Hutchinson (1954).  But it is with the full-scale edition of The Notebooks that Miss Coburn’s work on Coleridge comes to its full importance in a scholarly work of great daring, skill, and insight; two of the five pairs of volumes have already appeared – the first in 1957, the second just before the end of 1961.  Before the second volume had been issued the plan for the Collected Coleridge was announced.  The first volumes of the Collected Coleridge are now nearly completed.  The whole edition will be in about twenty volumes.  It will not include the letters or notebooks, but will bring together, with all the published writings, a great deal of unpublished or hitherto sadly jumbled writing.  The last volumes are to be finished by 1972, the bicentenary of Coleridge’s birth.

Is this comprehensive collecting necessary?  Isn’t Coleridge well enough known, revered enough as poet and critic, his works kept in print?  Editors of the Collected Coleridge ask themselves these questions too; in the Mariner’s way they “listen and look sideways up,” having observed some ominous signs.  

The scholarly English nineteenth-century clergy, who in the past thrust into our hands with an altogether gratuitous generosity many editions, indexes, concordances, glosses, cumulative expositions, left Coleridge’s work unindexed and unexpounded, despite their announced admiration.  To attempt a subject-index of The Friend or start looking for a half-remembered passage in the Anima Poetae or Philosophical Lectures explains the lack.  The symbol of the One is a serpent with his tail in his mouth, and that is also a symbol for the Infinite; and that is also the symbol for Coleridge’s mind.  “Myriad-minded” is the word Coleridge plucked from an obscure Greek original to describe Shakespeare: it describes Coleridge himself too, being the symbol not of multiplicity only, but of a singular and manifold unity.  To index Coleridge thoroughly you almost have to be Coleridge: not merely because he is myriad-minded, but because his mind is (as he said himself as the age of twenty-one) “tenacious and systematizing”; his mind acts habitually in that unifying or esemplastic or coadunative manner that he was later to delineate with brilliant elusiveness when speaking about the Imagination in Biographia Literaria.

To choose a symbolic instance of Coleridge’s mind at work is, in view of such variety, difficult.  Here is an example chosen by Humphy House from a notebook entry of 1810: a very personal passage written towards Sara Hutchinson though probably she never read it.

I had been talking of the association of Ideas, and endeavouring to convince an Idolater of Hume & Hartley, that this was strictly speaking a law only of the memory & imagination, of the Stuff out of which we make our conceptions & perceptions, not of the thinking faculty, by which we make them – that it was the force of gravitation to leaping to any given point – without gravitation this would be impossible, and yet equally impossible to leap except by a power counteracting first, and then using the force of gravitation.  That Will, strictly synonimous with the individualizing Principle, the “I” of every rational Being, was this governing and applying Power – And yet to shew him that I was neither ignorant, nor idle in observing, the vast extent and multifold activity of the Associative Force / I entered into a curious and tho fanciful yet strictly true and actual, exemplification.  Many of my Instances recalled to my mind my little poem on Lewti, the Circassion / and as by this same force joined with the assent of the will most often, tho’ often too vainly because weakly opposed by it, I inevitably by some link or other return to you, or (say rather) bring some fuel of thought to the ceaseless yearning for you at my Inmost, which like a steady fire attracts constantly the air which constantly feeds it / I began strictly and as matter of fact to examine that subtle Vulcanian Spider-web Net of Steel – strong as Steel yet subtle as the Ether, in which my soul flutters inclosed with the Idea of your’s – to pass rapidly as in a catalogue thro’ the Images, exclusive of the thousand Thoughts that possess the same force, which never fail instantly to awake into vivider flame the forever and ever Feeling of you – ....

One further touch at least is needed.  Over against the subtle Vulcanian spider-web net of steel, subtle but strong, tenacious and systematizing, we must set another element of the man – the element that accounts at once for the small number of his completed works, for our difficulty in doing him justice, and the need for a comprehensive edition of his writing:

I have many thoughts, many images; large stores of the unwrought materials; scarcely a day passes but something new in fact or illustration, rises up in me, like Herbs and Flowers in a Garden in early Spring; but the combining power, the power to do, and manly effective Will, that is dead or slumbers most diseasedly.

II

Yet the list of works Coleridge published during his lifetime is not trifling.  He was born in 1772, two years after Wordsworth.  His first separate book publication was three political speeches delivered in Bristol in the early months of 1795.  In 1796, when he was not quite twenty-four, he published his first volume of poems: and since it is as a poet that Coleridge is best known to the world we may trace his poetical publications through in one group.  The Poems of 1796 was expanded and revised in 1797, diversified with contributions by Lamb and Lloyd.  The Ancient Mariner and some other poems – not least The Nightingale – were published in the anonymous Lyrical Ballads of 1798 and followed a separate existence there until Wordsworth managed to get rid of them for the Poems in Two Volumes in 1807: the Poems of 1803 (the so-called Third Edition of Coleridge’s poems) was an abbreviated reissue of the 1797 Poems, prepared, edited, and seen through the press by Lamb with little or no help from Coleridge.  From 1798 onwards Coleridge published a number of poems in various periodicals – a few of them serious, like the Dejection Ode, but many of them epigrams and squibs.  These at first appeared regularly but in diminishing quantity; and I must confess that the collective editions of Coleridge’s poems are disfigured by too zealous a presentation of these things – though heaven alone knows what is to be done with them in a collected edition.  Otherwise, as far as publication is concerned, he fell upon poetic silence: the fragmentary Christabel, fertile enough to have borne poetic progeny before she even appeared in public, and the Kubla Khan that Lamb said “irradiates and brings heaven and Elysian bowers into my little parlour while he sings or says it” were known to a considerable circle before 1805; but neither poem was published until 1816, when – at Byron’s instigation (which he promptly regretted) – these two poems were issued with the moving and ominous poem The Pains of Sleep.  But by that time, Coleridge – gradually emerging from his darkest years in Bristol – had entered upon his most productive phase of writing, and had brought together the collection of poems called Sibylline Leaves, to which the Biographia Literaria might have been the introduction if it had not outgrown its modest beginnings and become a two-volume affair in its own right.  Sibylline Leaves, collected in 1815 and published with the Biographia in 1817, is not a volume of new verse but rather a retrospective collection.  By that time his output of poetry was small; he was never to discover again the fine ebullience of his best earlier poems.  Sibylline Leaves was no best-seller, but it was received with enough respect to encourage three successive collected editions after an interval of more than ten years: 1828, 1829, 1834 (the year of his death), each in three volumes and each gathering in more and more of Coleridge’s poetry including the later and scattered occasional verse, until the Ancient Mariner – with its gloss now complete – was to be found in the same set with Christabel and Kubla Khan, together with that larger group of poems that lovers of Coleridge’s work have come to value and admire, and much else that they don’t.  Ernest Hartley’s Coleridge’s edition of 1912, including the two verse plays and the verse translations of Schiller’s Wallenstein, runs to over 1100 pages.

Except for a highly derivative periodical called The Watchman (1796) and a few political lectures, all Coleridge’s prose works (other than journalistic contributions to Daniel Stuart’s two London newspapers) cluster together in the last eighteen years of his life; or more exactly, they fall within the first ten years at Highgate.  It is true that in 1809-10 Coleridge wrote single-handed a periodical called The Friend – “the main pipe, thro’ which I shall play off the whole reservoir of my collected Knowledge and of what you are pleased to call Genius.”  No easy work of topical journalism, this was a periodical only in the sense that it was to be issued from time to time.  It roused little enthusiasm.  Even Coleridge could tell that part of the trouble was the weight of the matter under discussion and the entortillage of his style.  After the twenty-eighth number he simply stopped writing it, ending with the formula “To be continued.”  The Friend was reissued in 1812, copies of the original sheets with little revision bound into a volume.  But in 1818 the whole thing was carefully revised and expanded to three volumes.  The “rifacciamento” of The Friend contains, among other things of interest, the long and characteristic discussion of a central philosophical and critical concept of his – Method – a notion much clarified by his scheme for the arrangement of the newly projected Encyclopaedia Metropolitana.

The interval between the second and third editions of The Friend embraces the earliest lectures given in London and Bristol on literature and the art; these were also the years of deepening ill-health and addiction.  From 1811 to the middle of 1815 too little is known about his day-to-day thoughts and activities: during the last couple of years of that time he passed through very deep waters.  The wonder is that he survived.  Perhaps he was in the end galvanised by his disappointment in Wordsworth’s Excursion and nettled a little by Wordsworth’s perverse exposition (in the Preface to the 1815 Poetical Works) of Coleridge’s favourite, but scarcely-published, distinction between Imagination and Fancy.  The sudden access of energy is typical of the man.  Supported and encouraged by his friends, he started to write again.  “After so many deaths I live again” – he marked the passage in George Herbert’s Temple – and if he could not yet “relish versing” he was at least at work, and self-respect and self-possession began to return.  In 1815 he collected the Sibylline Leaves and wrote most of the Biographia Literaria.  By the middle of April 1816 he had taken up residence with James Gillman, surgeon, at Highgate, where he was to remain for the rest of his life.  Before going to Highgate, he had written and published of sub-Shakespearian Christmas Tale Zapolya (with its one splendid Kubla Khanish song rendered years before from the German of Ludwig Tieck), and had published the Christabel volume.  Now there appeared in succession the fruits of his erudition and industry: in 1816 The Statesman’s Manual (A Lay Sermon addressed to the Highgate Classes of Society); in 1817 a second Lay Sermon (addressed to the Higher and Middle Classes on the text “Blessed are ye that sow beside all Waters”), Sibylline Leaves, and Biographia Literaria.  Late in 1817 he issued his Treatise on Method, part of his engagement in the new Encyclopaedia Metropolitana; by November of that year the new Friend in three volumes was published while he was already embarked simultaneously upon two sets of lectures – one literary, the other philosophical.  After that immense and productive effort, he withdrew to complete the “great work” he had had in mind for many years – the Opus Maximum; it was never completed and work on it prevented him from publishing much else.  Yet the Aids to Reflection, first published in 1825, was the one book of Coleridge’s – other than poems and Remorse – to be reprinted in his lifetime: it consisted of a series of extracts from Bishop Leighton “and other our elder divines” with interpolated reflections and propositions to help “in the formation of a manly character on the several grounds of prudence, morality and religion.”  On the Constitution of the Church and State was published in 1830.  The Poetical Works of 1834 was issued only a few days before Coleridge died on 25 July.

After Coleridge’s death all the published works were carefully edited and reissued by his daughter Sara, who shared the work with her husband and first cousin Henry Nelson Coleridge: and very attractive little books most of them are in Moxon’s neo-Aldine style, dolphin and all.  Uncollected and unpublished material was unobtrusively added, often rather heavily tidied or overwritten to bolster Coleridge’s reputation and to destroy the air of fragmentariness.  First the four-volume Literary Remains (1836-9) brought together uncollected poems, a quantity of lecture notes, some unidentified notebook entries, a first extensive gathering of “marginalia” or manuscript notes written in printed books.  Then there was Henry Nelson Coleridge’s Table Talk, the composite Theory of Life, the posthumous Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, more marginalia collected by the poet’s son Derwent.  After that, nothing of importance came forward until the poet’s grandson Ernest Hartley Coleridge published two volumes of letters in 1895 and in the same year the attractively printed small selection of notebook entries entitled Anima Poetae.  His friend James Dykes Campbell had published an excellent one-volume edition of the Poetical Works in 1893, with the still unsuperseded Narrative of the Events of Coleridge’s Life as introduction.  In 1912 Ernest Hartley Coleridge’s edition of the Political Works was published in two volumes and ever since then, though with diminishing certainty, has been the standard authority for textual variants and the bibliographical minutiae of the poems.  The Literary Remains by drawing attention to marginalia encouraged a fairly steady trickle of transcripts more or less complete and more or less accurate.  Miss Florence Brinkley’s Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century (1955) brought together a large selection of the traditional marginalia, correcting the texts of some and adding to a variety of published and unpublished material some marginal notes not published before.  But before that the Philosophical Lectures had been published (1949), giving incidentally a glimpse of the important marginal notes still not yet fully published from German philosophical writings – particularly those on Tennemann, Kant, and Schelling.

III

Most of what was published until about 1950 was what may be called Coleridge’s “public” writing: books published by himself, or lectures, or materials intended for eventual publication.  Among the published writing, the letters and fragments of notebooks fell outside the “public” category, representing what may be called “internal” writings, being different from the “public” writings in kind, in rhythm, and in purpose.  The complete edition of the notebooks stands for the most important internal writings; the marginalia stand on the border between public and internal, but are perhaps dominantly internal.

Coleridge made a brilliant and promising start as a young man.  But as time passed, and he published little he began to feel with increasing certainty that, for all his powers of genius, the world was not particularly interested in what he had to say.  To find no resonance from his audience was for Coleridge a serious deprivation.  His poetry found a new manner but he developed it uncertainly as though the inspiration were niggardly.  His prose style, though always able at times to come upon those moments of astonishing felicity when grace and power would go decorously hand in hand, became increasingly intrinsicated and turgid.  He knew about his prose style and how its wingedness and unwingedness was connected with the subject and with his state of mind: “Instead of a covey of partridges with whirring wings of music ... up came a metaphysical bustard, urging its slow, heavy, laborious, earth-skimming flight over dreary and level wastes” – words written as early as July 1802.  His solitude deepened – the more terrible for a gregarious and talkative man; he found no intellectual peer, for even Charles Lamb, his staunchest friend, could meet him only on a narrow ground.  By the age of thirty he had fallen into a habit of self-communing.  His letters had always been copious; more often than not unabashedly self-revealing; sometimes gay, even buffoonish; seldom obsequious, or disingenuous; often closely reasoned into critical or philosophical discourses of extravagant weight and extent.  But his notebooks, which he had started as work-books or sketch-books, became with the wreck of his marriage and his first steps towards opium addiction “the confidants who have not betrayed me, the friends whose silence was not detraction, and the inmates before whom I was not ashamed to complain, to yearn, to weep, or even to pray.”  Here we come into direct contact with the man’s mind, his genius, his person, his inventive intricacy – the man suffering, thinking, delighting, laughing, reading, speculating.  The style is quite different from the published writings, and usually different from the letters: more dense, nervous, direct – at first seeming needlessly opaque, yet on acquaintance showing a marvellously swift vividness, very various; bringing one, as Plato’s Greek does, into direct tactile relation with his mind.  The notebooks run from 1794 (when he was twenty-two) for forty years with few serious interruptions until not many hours before his death.  There are about seventy of them: not journals, nor common-place books, nor sketch-books only, nor memorandum books, but all these and much else.  Fortunately more than a third of the bulk of them is now in print, well edited, capable of speaking clearly to us if we wish to listen.

The other large body of internal writing – the marginalia – is not quite so consistently private as the notebooks, yet not so consistently directed outward as the letters are.  They are self-communings too, but usually controlled by a text; directed often towards the author (often long dead, for Coleridge was inordinately fond of old and neglected books) and sometimes including in the discourse not only the author, but also the owner of the book when it was not Coleridge’s own.  For in the later years of his life, Coleridge gained among his acquaintance some celebrity as a “spoiler of books” – “enriching” is what Lamb called it – and sometimes annotated books at their owners’ request.  But most of the notes were conceived in the privacy of his critical reflection, almost invariably written with astonishing fluency, despite – or perhaps even because of – a trenchant style imposed by the confines of margins and single blank pages.  Even when they were written on request the marginalia seem to have little or no outward-directed emphasis.

These notes start a little later than the Notebooks, probably in 1802 when he was not quite thirty.  To begin with, they consist of terse ejaculations, cross-references, memoranda, protests, marks of agreement or classification.  But before very long Coleridge’s notes had settled into the fluency of the notebook writing and had assumed much the same style; they often ran to single sustained notes of several hundreds of words, written thought head- and foot-margins, beginning at the point in the text that set his mind and pen in motion and continuing until that particular flight of thought had come to rest some pages later.  In his copies of Shakespeare and Milton, Jeremy Taylor and Luther, Baxter, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Donne’s Sermons (two copies) he has written many hundreds of notes.  Much of his serious reading of Kant was done before he fell into the habit of copious annotation, but his copies of Kant present a separate and intricate problem; for here, as in some of the other books, he has written over a period of years – twenty years or more for the Kant – notes in layers, and notes on notes, and fulguratiunculae (tiny little flashes of lightning but, in his own translation, “flashes in the pan”), and thoughts and afterthoughts, until a transcriber’s or editor’s head spins at the patience, profusion, and persistence of the man.

Many of the marginalia have been published, but many have not; and not many published sets of marginalia are either complete or accurate.  Coleridge regarded the marginal notes, above everything else in his unpublished writing, as part of his canon; and hoped some day – some long summer or winter – to harvest and systematize them into a public part of his life’s work.  They are very numerous, very various, sometimes very brilliant.  In many cases they provide the only direct evidence for his critical contact with important books and writers: without them, for example, we should have only a limited record of his view of Shakespeare or Donne or Milton, and our knowledge of the importance to Coleridge of the seventeenth-century writers would be insecure and fragmentary.  I hope one day to publish them all.  If nothing else, they will do something to confirm Coleridge’s reputation as a perceptive and lively reader.

But the marginal notes are only one part of all the information about what Coleridge read, and when, and where, and even why.  He sometimes read eight hours a day for weeks on end.  We know that he owned far fewer books than Southey and may even have read less.  We know something about his habits in handling books, as we do of Lamb: he never, for example, opened the pages of a book with a buttery knife as Wordsworth is scandalously said to have done; and I do not find that he ever used a kipper as a bookmark as some ancient scholar is said to have done (but the name happily eludes me).  A mark of his astonishing fluency is that most of the marginal notes are in ink: luckily, because the pencil notes (most commonly in the German books) are often now very difficult to read, being offset and rubbed and faded.  The marginalia include incidentally a certain amount of biographical and personal information not recorded elsewhere; as well as a few lists of desiderata, there are some quite outspoken comments upon other persons, and a few poems and drafts for poems.  You never know what to expect, even when the notes are discoursing upon the text with an almost tidal steadiness.

The Notebooks, the Letters, the Marginalia – each of these “internal” writings has its own range, and each presents its own editorial problems.  Of these, only the marginalia will be included with the “public” works in the Collected Coleridge; but there will be gathered together in the collected edition many miscellaneous manuscripts, entirely or largely unpublished, the biggest single group being the Logosophia or Organum vere Organum or Opus Maximum – that vast philosophical systematic work begun in 1802 or 1803 which remained unfinished at his death.  In the Collected Coleridge all manuscript material will be meticulously prepared afresh from the originals except in those lamentable cases in which the originals have disappeared or have been destroyed.  And all the public works will be edited with deft and economical reference to all that is now known about Coleridge.

IV

As early as October 1802, Coleridge (aged thirty), said:

I lay too many Eggs in the hot Sands of this Wilderness, the World with Ostrich Carelessness & Ostrich Oblivion.  The greater part, I trust, are trod underfoot, & smashed; but yet no small number crawl forth into life, some to furnish Feathers for the Caps of others, & still more to plume the Shafts in the Quivers of my Enemies, of them that lie in wait against my Soul.

He liked that figure and polished it carefully, and used it many times in the next fifteen years.  It was still in the back of his mind nearly twenty years later when he wrote to the young Thomas Allsop, explaining how, year after year, he had been forced to turn aside and “go and gather blackberries and earthnuts”:

... the main portion of my harvest is still on the ground, ripe indeed, & only waiting, a few for the sickle, but a large part only for the sheaving, and carting, and housing; but from all this I must turn away, must let them rot as they lie, and be as though they never had been.

The question then is: What is the main portion of the harvest?

Let me begin again – this time in the celebrated style of W. H. Auden, a style that may not establish monumental critical categories but will at least point a moral by loading the conclusion.  There are three kinds of editorial scholarship: (a) Burying the Dead; (b) Resuscitating the Drowned; (c) Helping us to Live with the Living.  There are always jobs of resuscitation to be done: all of us could give examples of Coleridge being treated as a Drowned Man whose bones were being picked in whispers by more than passing currents undersea.  But our real troubles begin (as Humphry House showed some years ago) when we are convinced of Coleridge’s genius and decide to try to take him as he is, as living.  “Until I understand my author’s ignorance,” Coleridge used to say, “I assume myself ignorant of his understanding.”

But even in the pure pursuit of truth, it is difficult not to be deflected into yet another category of purpose: (d) Castigating the Wrong-headed.  We enter on this activity normally with a nice balance of modesty and Puritan zeal.  Looking across the field of Coleridge criticism, we can detect here and there a blight or bubo.  This man treats Coleridge as brilliant but fragmentary, and therefore plunders in detail and without respect; that man tips his hat to Coleridge’s famous myriad-mindedness – as poet, critic, philosopher, journalist, social and political thinker, theologian, biblical scholar – then marches him off as a member of some exclusive club or other, narrowed to poet only, or merely critic, or (with apologies) philosopher-of-a-sort.  One man speaks discourteously of alleged theological intrusions into the Biographia; another rejects all theological matter as “uninteresting”; another denies the generic difference between Fancy and Imagination – the only philosophical discovery Coleridge was ever proud of – and builds a virtuoso book on the rejection; another again – a very distinguished critic indeed – gravely ascribes to Coleridge an incorrigible Hartleyan affiliation, not noticing that before he was thirty Coleridge had exploded and renounced the Hartleyan psychology.  Then in many places we find those who proclaim Coleridge a Romantic, extending towards him that gesture of regretful condescension that self-styled classicists customarily reserve for Romantics.  All of which, even if not more widespread than it is, is vexatious and suggests that there may still be a little field-work to do – perhaps even the silent field-work of producing texts well edited.

As long as Coleridge cannot be ignored, it is unlikely that there will be any lack of brief clear statements about the great man.  And in order to cast a prophetic stigma upon something by way of parody, horroris causa, that may at this very moment be under the pen somewhere, I set down an idiot’s guide to “Coleridge, The Man and the Mind,” writing it in the easy omniscient encyclopaedia style that sounds like a sight-translation from an intractable central-European dialect.

COLERIDGE, S. T.  Tenth (and last) child of an eccentric Devon parson who knew Hebrew and astronomy and communicated to his son a taste for star-gazing.  Educated at Christ’s Hospital and Jesus College Cambridge, Coleridge early showed good form as a poet, and held his own until he read Kant in 1799.  Three years later his poetry dried up; but since he was a Romantic poet this might have happened in any case.  After he stopped being a poet, he became a literary critic; though some have made extravagant claims for his originality in that kind, it is unlikely that posterity will agree in finding his contribution contemptible.  Unfortunately his one work of criticism, whimsically entitled Biographia Literaria, is – as he himself admits – immethodical and miscellaneous; yet it is prized for some interesting incidental information about the origins of the historical volume Lyrical Ballads.  His interest in criticism soon subsided into minute theological speculations which we no longer find rewarding.  He died piously in 1834, having failed to complete the large philosophical and theological work which he (mistakenly) supposed would crown his labours and change the world.  He spent the last eighteen years of his life domesticated with a surgeon in Highgate where he had gone to spend a weekend.  His philosophical writing sometimes derives from unacknowledged transcendental sources.  The distillation of his remarkable but undisciplined poetic talent is to be seen in three poems known to everybody.  The first of these, The Ancient Mariner, is about an albatross; the second, Christabel, is, like much of his work, unfinished; the third, Kubla Khan, is fragmentary and unintelligible though sonorous.  He took opium, sometimes in lethal quantities, and was an Escapist.

It would be immodest of me to suggest that nobody has ever read Coleridge straight; yet many details in this familiar but imaginary account can be contraverted from the Biographia alone.  Unfortunately the Castigation of the Wrong-headed is an unprofitable business: both the wrong-headedness and the castigation date badly.  One can only indulge the Olympian hope that once things are set down clearly, people will understand them.

There is however a real and persistent difficulty that these travesties point to.  The apparently fragmentary and discontinuous nature of much of the Coleridge material, fortified by all the talk about indolence and opium, tempts us to read fitfully or with intermittent seriousness; to pick out what is bright and useful, and to ignore the rest.

The Biographia Literaria is a typical case.  It is a difficult book.  It is gravel sometimes in the throat – and particularly to those who, being no chickens, do not normally use gravel as an aid to digestion.  It exacts patience, sometimes a gymnastic alertness, the ability to traverse chasms of thought on the end of a cliff-hanging sentence.  Coleridge himself speaks of it (as our encyclopaedist was quick to notice) as “so immethodical a miscellany.”  Elsewhere – many years after the book had been published – he said that “the metaphysical disquisition at the end of the first volume of the Biographia Literaria is unformed and immature – it contains the fragments of the truth, but it is not fully thought out.”  But it is not conceivable that Coleridge – even when ill and in despair, hag-ridden by the well-intended importunity of his friends – could renounce the whole systematizing habit of his mind and write a chaotic book.  The roots of that book go too far back in time: some twelve or thirteen years to the discussions over the Preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1802.  The first definite sign is in October or September 1803, more than twelve years earlier, when (having no doubt already stumbled upon but not yet fully extrinsicated the distinction between Fancy and Imagination) he made an entry in Notebook 4:

Seem to have made up my mind to write my metaphysical works, as my Life, & In my life – intermixed with all the other events – or history of the mind & fortunes of S. T. Coleridge.

The roots also run deep in a personal no less than in a thematic sense.  In 1797 he noted:

Wordsworth is a very great man – the only man, to whom at all times & in all modes of excellence I feel myself inferior – the only one, I mean, whom I have yet met with –

The Preface to Lyrical Ballads, though written by Wordsworth was, Coleridge tells us,

half the child of my 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.

The book could hardly fail to be trenchant, somehow unified, especially when spurred finally into utterance by Wordsworth’s self-preoccupied obtuseness.  The theory of Imagination in the Biographia is guided by Coleridge’s own knowledge of his own experience of writing his greatest poems; and it is centred upon his deep respect for Wordsworth’s poetry, and his long-digested insight into Wordsworth’s stubborn originality.  It is when we pick up the unifying reverberations of the Biographia that we begin to understand the scope and fertility of the book.  Coleridge has every right to defend his own work; in this he can be as ferocious as Hopkins but cooler.

My prose writings have been charged with a disproportionate demand on the attention; with an excess of refinement in the mode of arriving at truths; with beating the ground for that which might have been run down by eye; with the length and laborious construction of my periods; in short with obscurity, and the love of paradox.  But my severest critics have not pretended to have found in my compositions triviality.

His own words, premonitory, in the Biographia Literaria.

Let us take another instance – Immanuel Kant.  Did Coleridge read Kant?  Indeed he did.  I have a list of fourteen titles in German and two in English – a total of twenty-three volumes – and all but two volumes in German have Coleridge’s manuscript notes in them, and neither of the English texts is annotated.  The notes were written over a period of at least twenty-four years.  And yet in 1825 – and there are plenty of signs of unease long before this, not least of all in the Philosophical Lectures of 1818-19 – we find him writing:

Of the three schemes of philosophy, Kant’s, Fichte’s, and Schelling’s (as diverse each from the other as those of Aristotle, Zeno, and Plotinus, though all crushed together under the name Kantean Philosophy in the English talk) I should find it difficult to select the one from which I differed the most, though perfectly easy to determine which of the three men I hold in highest honour.  And Immanuel Kant I assuredly do value most Highly; not, however, as a metaphysician, but as a logician who has completed and systematised what Lord Bacon had boldly designed and loosely sketched out in the ... Novum Organum.

Yet we have been told repeatedly that Coleridge is a Kantian.  I reply that Coleridge was Coleridge, and that to call him a Kantian is a useful suggestion but one that may conceal as much as it illuminates.  The need for further exact information is urgent and widespread, particularly in this area.

But Coleridge’s mind is heuristic, tendrilling, suspensive, always fearful of destroying the delicacy of any perception minute or subtle; so he seems to shimmer and shamble, to be luminous but misty, elusive, withholding the final formulation.  A born teacher, he wants to make himself clear, to show what he has found, to share the excitement of discovery; yet he lacks the hectoring, sleeve-plucking, elbow-jogging importunity of those pedagogues whose theory is dogma.  Coleridge will run (as Keats says, smarting under heaven knows what imagined boredom) to three volumes octavo in pursuit of some fine similitude.  It is easy to become bored and impatient.  But what it comes down to in the end is whether we are prepared to accept Coleridge for what he is, whether we genuinely want to find out what he has to say, or whether we insist upon making capital of what he happens to offer in the way of easily portable content.  The problem of Coleridge is not, to begin with, a problem of exposition or explication: it is the humble task of collecting with faithful attention to fact and relevance and relation, all the writings.  We need them edited as accurately and informatively as is possible.  First the textual facts, and the factual facts – everything that can be incontrovertibly unfolded – and not least important, what Coleridge called “facts of mind.”  Even about fact Coleridge advises caution: “Facts! never be weary of discussing & exposing the hollowness of these – every man an accomplice on one side or other / & then human Testimony! ...”

V

Coleridge’s poetry will always continue to bring delight and wonder, and to exact a strenuous affection.  So there is valuable work to be done still in making the corpus of his poetry look less like a junk-yard; for there are different kinds of his poems, some of them rugous in their strength, especially among the late emblematic half-metaphysical poems.  There are no signs that the three great poems are exhausted, and few signs that anybody is tempted any more to think that those are the only considerable poems Coleridge ever wrote.

It is in other areas of his mind that we can expect the editorial activity to bring unexpected rewards: not least in criticism, because the critics are the ones at present who find Coleridge most “useful,” and because here a correct reading of all the documents is most likely to unseat some firmly rooted critical assumptions.  The same can be said of his philosophy and psychology – and even his theology – for these have scarcely been touched yet.  All these will turn back to illuminate the poems and the life and all the other works; and some of them, may prove important in a less personal context.

A few points seem to me distinctive and essential – points of doctrine that have either been clarified by recent work over the manuscripts or have arisen directly out of them.  Some of these are still by no means widely recognised.

(A) Coleridge sees POETRY as a special kind of knowing: he sees it in its broadest sense as a peculiarly luminous reconciliation of the internal with the external.  It is at once a mode of knowing, and a mode of perception; a radical apprehensive state which is our birthright, being the means of vision without which we perish.  As a state it is prototypal and supranormal.  “All men are poets in their way: tho’ for the most part their ways are damned bad ones.”  This view of poetry goes with a rather special theory of knowledge; but we are always ill-advised to assume that we know all that can be known about our ways of arriving at knowledge.

(B) Coleridge sees IMAGINATION as a process rather than a faculty: a state we get into rather than a faculty we have.  It is an integrative and integrating process which springs (in Coleridge’s theory) directly out of the nature and structure of perception and is the primary way of realizing things – that is, making things real, or discovering reality.  Coleridge’s view of Imagination, as far as I have been able to determine, is the only theory – with the possible exception of Whitehead’s – which moves in a single arc from rudimentary perceptual experience, through the development of responsive feeling, to poetry and art; the only theory, that is, that is able to show how the symbolizing activity is radically different from the describing activity, and how items in the actual phenomenal world move into the symbolic field and achieve an energetic existence there.  The Notebooks (usually without deliberately intending to do so) actually show this process occurring.

(C) In the face of all the peculiar things that have been said about the “subjectivity” of Coleridge’s poetry and philosophy, Coleridge’s whole way of mind – not only his philosophy – is relational or existential or experiential or whichever of those terms is at the moment least fashionable.  (He himself was the first to transfer the term existential from late Latin to modern English.)  He made much use in his talk and writing of the terms “object” and “subject.”  Carlyle tells us that Coleridge snuffled over the words, saying omject and sumject; we remember that with the genial clarity of malice.  But we are tempted by Coleridge’s subject-object preoccupation for another reason: because those terms seem to offer an easier philosophical solution to our problem than in fact life or thought ever gives us.  But here is Coleridge, in a marginal note, stating his position, shortly before writing the Biographia Literaria.

Whatever is, must be a mystery: and must appear a Miracle if we reflect on it as having become.  But the sole Bond of Beings / is their Relations: and these are not, but exist only in the focus of the Percipient.  And how Beings?  The one needs no Bond: & how can that verily be?  which is other than One?  There is an eternal History implied in Being, by force of it’s Existence.  It is History that ties the Gordian Knot, & it is History alone that must cut it.  The philosophy, that begins, is History: the History that begins in a Will, is the only true Philosophy.

As philosopher and psychologist Coleridge was a more practised and experienced observer and speculator than most of the literary critics who have so far presumed to extricate his work.  He is a metaphysician at heart: that is, he is concerned primarily with questions about Being and Knowing.  That has the advantage of keeping him away from beguiling surfaces of abstraction and holding him near to what Yeats called “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”  This is what he told Southey in August 1803 – the words written two and half years after he had told Godwin, “The Poet is dead in me.”

... a metaphysical Solution, that does not instantly tell for something in the Heart, is grievously to be suspected as apocryphal.  I almost think, that Ideas never recall Ideas, as far as they are Ideas – any more than Leaves in a forest create each other’s motion – The Breeze it is that runs thro’ them / it is the Soul, the state of Feeling –.

Coleridge’s idea of philosophy then needs to be defined.  Quoting only from Biographia Literaria we have: “The term philosophy defines itself as an affectionate seeking after the truth; but Truth is the correlative of Being.”  Or again:

The postulate of philosophy, and at the same time the test of philosophic capacity, is not other than the heaven-descended Know Thyself.  And this at once practically and speculatively.  For as philosophy is neither a science of the reason or understanding only, nor merely a science of morals, but the science of being altogether, its primary ground can be neither merely speculative or merely practical, but both in one.  All knowledge rests on the coincidence of an object with a subject.

Being and Knowing, in this scheme, fall into some sort of coincidence – as well they might since we are always and inevitably at the centre of our own knowing.  Truth is never final: it is a relational continuum into which we may enter by grace rather than by force, a relation in which images beget fresh images and questions beget fresh questions.  The end of philosophy, he says in a marginal note, is always “presumably Insight.”  Elsewhere he says, “And what after all is Philosophy but I-thinking?”  It is in this way, and because of his rootedness in the facts of mind (by which he means the truth of experience), that Coleridge claims to be a realist – in the face of his alleged Kantianism, Platonism, Neoplatonism, Romanticism, poeticism; appealing firmly in the Biographia again (though it is vigorously worked out elsewhere) to the ancient and radical realism that starts from the reality of what is given instead of the abstract notion of what can be inferred about the origins of our perceptual experience.  And the force of his criticism is that it is referred to his experience of having made (let us say) The Ancient Mariner, and to his deep understanding of Wordsworth’s ambiguous but elemental genius.  “What is poetry?” he says, “is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet?  that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other.”  In search of “fixed canons of criticism” he is in search of something very different from the sort of thing Pope or Boileau or even Aristotle would call “fixed canons.”  He is looking for “the seminal principle,” and he looks for it in the only place one could reasonably expect to find it: in our understanding of the laws of human perception and knowledge and being.  He speaks then of poetry as having “a logic of its own as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex and dependent on more and more fugitive causes.”  He spent half his lifetime trying to formulate that logic: not so that poetry could be written by rote but so that we might be able to have less intermittent experience of the vision of wholeness and sanity.

The difficulty in working with Coleridge, even when all the documents are in, is to refrain from finding there the “image” of Coleridge: the difficulty is how never to lose touch with the “I-thinking.”  (His fondness for present participles, in default of a more highly inflected language than English, is symptomatic.)  He is constantly aware of how ingeniously we can betray ourselves in action, confusing Vision and Desire, allowing Will to dominate Vision.

Something inherently mean in action.  Even the Creation of the Universe disturbs my Idea of the Almighty’s greatness – or would do so, but that I conceive that Thought with him Creates.

He was haunted by a passage in Wordsworth’s Borderers –

                                    Action is transitory – a step, a blow,

                                    The motion of a muscle – this way or that –

                                    ’Tis done, and in the after-vacancy

                                    We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed.

                                    Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,

                                    And shares the nature of infinity.

This theme is powerfully though subliminally present in The Ancient Mariner.  The relation of Will and Imagination is for him a perpetual mystery, and colours strongly his account of Fancy and Imagination.  He implies that the only action that is not self-betrayal is the action which flows directly out of contemplation, an action that does not form out of a decision to act according to prior formulation.  His search for a “logic” of imagination was a search for the means of inducing a state in which vision, knowledge, and action would flow in a single impulse.  A person, in his eyes, unlike the mechanist’s model, endowed with faculties and driven impetuously by the mechanism of desire, is rather a work of imagination, discovering itself in the identity of activity and stillness, an intricate complexity emerging as translucent simplicity.  Not that “Life is a Poem” – he indulged no Nest-of-Robins-in-the-Hair philosophy – but that a poem is an image of self-realizing, self-finding, self-losing activity, and Imagination the condition under which this can occur.

We know what havoc Coleridge’s broken will played in the working out of his genius to his immedicable sickness of heart.

A sense of weakness – a haunting sense, that I was an herbaceous Plant, as large as a large Tree, with a Trunk of the same Girth, & Branches as large & shadowing – but with pith within the Trunk, not heart of Wood / ­– that I had power not strength – an involuntary Imposter – that I had no real Genius, no real Depth /–/ This on my honor is as fair a statement of my habitual Haunting, as I could give before the Tribunal of Heaven /

In March 1801 he wrote to Godwin:

The Poet is dead in me – my imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been imaginative) lies, like a Cold Snuff on the circular Rim of a Brass Candle-stick, without even a Stink of Tallow to remind you that it was once cloathed & mitred with Flame.  That is past by! – I was once a volume of Gold Leaf, rising & riding on every breath of Fancy – but I have beaten myself into weight & density, & now I sink in quick-silver.

From time to time he would suddenly feel “that sort of stirring warmth about the Heart, which is with me the robe of the incarnation of my genius” – then it would slip away again.  It is a most sorrowful story that tends to deflect a compassionate heart from its analytical purpose.  And yet, that his afflictions did not bring his powers utterly to nothing is clear from the scope of his work – almost forty volumes of it.

The incompleteness of his work is one of the facts of his work.  Nobody can now substitute for Coleridge in systematizing that work – nor ever could.  But we can bring together; we can even, if we are careful, do a little appropriate arranging.  And perhaps an essential element of the form is its apparent lack of form – as ignorance is part of the matrix of knowledge.  Beyond what may positively be discovered to inform, delight, or stimulate in Coleridge’s writing, his work may offer something very rare.  He offers us the chance (even taking into account the magnitude of his positive achievement) to study the mind of genius in its activity rather than in its products.  There is always a gulf between the man of genius and his finished work; we do not find Shakespeare in his plays; and though Milton’s personality is to be detected broadcast in his work we can nowhere find Milton-the-poet-in-the-act-of-composing (say) Lycidas, or Milton-discovering-the-scheme-of Samson Agonistes.  Not that we should want to use such information (if we could have it) to understand Lycidas or Samson, but because genius is different in kind from even the highest talent and because we cannot happily wish to know less than everything.

Can it be that Coleridge’s mind and sensibility, his intellect and poetic power, in their very incapacity to complete themselves, tell us what we could not otherwise have known – about him?  And about ourselves?  Can it be that here, where the philosophical mind and poetic skill meet in his profound insight into human experience, we shall encounter what criticism has so far been loath to consider: the possibility that Romantic art (when not degenerate) is a genuine polar counterpart to Classic art rather than a more or less deplorable falling from grace?  Subjectivity, as mere self-preoccupation, self-expression, the enervating projection of desire into fantasy, is of course reprehensible and justly to be condemned.  But is that the only alternative to the “objectivity” of classical art?  If in true art and in true knowledge we find in a moment of relation the coincidence of the inner and the outer, the object and the subject, then the terms “subjective” and “objective” may at best be relative and imprecise, and for discussions (above all) of art most approximate.  Certainly Coleridge, as his own imaginative writing and his manifold speculations will show, never mistakes a distinction for a real division in the world.

In 1822 or thereabouts Coleridge jotted down an agreeable sketch of his “I-thinking.”  Southey had described himself as a Greyhound who, once he sighted the Hare, went straight after it in a straight line, while Coleridge would always be “nosing every nettle along the Hedge.”

But the fact is – [Coleridge cried] – I do not care two pence for the Hare; but I value most highly the excellencies of scent, patience, discrimination, free Activity; and find a Hare in every Nettle I make myself acquainted with.  I follow the Chamois-Hunters, and seem to set out with the same Object.  But I am no hunter of that Chamois Goat; but avail myself of the Chace in order to pursue a nobler purpose – that of making a road across the Mountain in which Common Sense may hereafter pass backward and forward, without desperate Leaps or Balloons that soar indeed but do not improve the chance of getting onward.

When Coleridge drew very near to the end of his life, conscious enough of the wreck of his hopes, and the wreck of that fine genius of his so little fulfilled in the eyes of the world, he seemed to be able to see the whole scheme of his thought closing in upon itself with a beautiful and eloquent precision.  He spoke of the metaphysical part of Biographia Literaria as “unformed and immature”; and yet, he said, “it is wonderful to myself to think how infinitely more profound my views now are, and yet how much clearer they are withal.  The circle is completing; the idea is coming round to, and to be, the common sense.”  What he wrote and what has survived is instinct with life.  He was a lynx among moles, “a hooded eagle among blinking owls.”  “No one can leap over his Shadow / Poets leap over Death.”  We touch the spiderweb net of his mind, his knowledge, his feeling; and encounter there the person quotidian, bizarre, familiar, astonishing, and know that we are in the presence of a very great mind indeed – powerful, original, and strange.  As we become more familiar with the landscape of that mind, the relations resonate, the great central thoughts and recognitions rise from the catacombs of forgetfulness, so that we find them, as Coleridge himself did at the point of death, stealing into the mind “like breezes blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope.”  What was distant, foreign, unintelligible, strange, becomes – in this living pattern – the common sense; and there seems some hope that we may in the end be allowed (as Yeats would have it) to enter into “the labyrinth of another’s being.”