Coleridge’s Poetical Canon: Selection and Arrangement
An edition brought to a happy issue has the calm simplicity of a well-ordered literary household; like a poem well written, it leaves little if any trace of the problems and difficulties that may have been overcome in making it so. Beforehand, however, an editor might well reflect upon the peculiar nature of his task in the hope of outwitting the ‘foul dragoun’ of error and absurdity. Coleridge is my task, and here lie, among the shoals and moraines of the poetical works, troubles enough (I fancy) and taxings beyond prediction and common patience.
Putting aside the prime question of the integrity of the text as though that were a question easily answered, and the other question about how to provide deft and informative elucidation, there are the other questions about what is to be included and how it is to be arranged. The editors of the two standard editions, James Dykes Campbell and Ernest Hartley Coleridge, through their desire to include all that is important, precious, or of symptomatic interest, have shaped the corpus of the poems into a structure which is at once misleadingly monolithic and distractingly diffuse. Critical manœuvre in this area is a recondite art in which the uninitiated may not expect immediately to succeed, for the correct discernment of seamarks is as rare as a fortune landfall. This is not to disparage the accurate, sensitive, and scholarly work in succession of Henry Nelson, Sara, and Derwent Coleridge, and then of the two friends Dykes Campbell and E. H. Coleridge: all in their various ways, in seeking to embody the spirit of the great poet whom they revered, have left us – if only by implication – the indispensable heritage of their knowledge and the tradition of their judgement. But E. H. C. brought the editing of the poems to a crisis which has not yet been resolved. To him, and now to us, so much is known or knowable or coming to be known about Coleridge at first hand and his day-to-day thinking and practice that all the minutiae of his poetical activity need to be brought together and correlated, and set down in a form that is usable and self-revealing. Dykes Campbell’s edition of 1893, though ‘monumental’ and complete in a way not previously attempted, is at the end of the tradition started by Coleridge himself and cultivated most scrupulously by his daughter Sara: Campbell assumes that his prime duty is to allow us to read with delight and without distraction. E. H. Coleridge, in 1912, perhaps not fully aware of the implications of his decision, took one step further into literary self-consciousness by intensifying the texture of scholarly detail and surrounding the text with entablatures and sills of textual and bibliographical matter. E. H. C. of course thought of himself as fulfilling the modest services of the editor who would place at our scholarly disposal all things requisite; but the book is one that we can now scarcely study without expert guidance and a certain amount of improvised machinery.
The difficulty starts with Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself, who gave little enough guidance about collecting his work and whose successive publications in verse do not lend themselves to easy or systematic consolidation. If we leave out of account the single periodical publications of poems, the dramatic works separately issued, and the four or five poetic pamphlets, Coleridge’s volumes of poetry fall into three groups.
EARLY COLLECTIONS Poems on Various Subjects, 1796
Poems ... Second Edition. To which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd, 1797
Poems ... Third Edition, 1803
FIRST COLLECTIVE EDITION Sibylline Leaves, 1817
LATE COLLECTIONS The Poetical Works, including the Dramas, 3 vols., 1828
The Poetical Works, including the Dramas, 3 vols., 1829
The Poetical Works, 3 vols., 1834
Even though the Late Collections derive from the First Collective Edition, none of these groups offers solid footing. The Early Collection of 1796 is only tentatively clarified in its second edition, and leaves Coleridge’s hands in the third. Sibylline Leaves was prepared under conditions that made it difficult for him to collect all his poems for review and arrangement; important unpublished poems could not be included; the book was two years in the press without any chance of revision; one of the elaborate critical prefaces which was promised for this collection and might have given shape to this and later editions grew into Biographia Literaria (which is more about Wordsworth’s poetry than Coleridge’s), and the other as far as we know was never begun – the only preface is brief and perfunctory and of no critical substance. The Late Collective editions of 1828 and 1829 might have been drawn up under conditions more favourable to completeness and steady judgement, but we know that in fact they were not, and the tradition that the 1834 edition was substantially the work of Henry Nelson Coleridge divides Dykes Campbell and E. H. Coleridge over the choice of guide text for their editions.
Again, if we are looking for help in the way these successive collections were actually arranged, we should perhaps expect little in the early volumes. But Sibylline Leaves was assembled at a time when Coleridge had been reading the Preface to Wordsworth’s Poems of 1815 which, with its long discussion of thematic arrangement, had provided an indignant starting-point for the Biographia: yet the First Collective Edition does not explore any clear principle of selection or arrangement, even though Coleridge had tried to sell a collection of his poems in 1809 and again in 1811. Sibylline Leaves is the most distinctive of all the collections, not least of all in its principle of exclusion: its shape is carried over into the more cumulative Late Collections, but the last edition (1834) is afflicted by languor and by the uncritical acquiescence of a man who has lost interest in designing his own monument. If we suppose that Coleridge’s own wishes are truly reflected in the work of Henry Nelson and Sara Coleridge, his aim was selection rather than accumulation; for the editions up to 1852 take away from the fringes of the corpus more than they add.
The Poems on Various Subjects, 1796, brings together some fifty poems ‘written at different times and prompted by very different feelings’. Coleridge says in his Preface that he is aware that the poems will be a disadvantage by being ‘read at one time and under the influence of one set of feelings’; presumably his arrangement of the poems is meant to offset this disadvantage and to mitigate the ‘egotism’ of his performance. After opening with the ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’ and continuing with a preliminary series of eight other poems, the volume finds it centre of gravity and most of its substance in a series of ‘Effusions’ thirty-six in number (four of them are by Lamb): neat subclassical epigrams, sonnets, occasional blank verse reflections, sententiae in couplets, imitations Spenserian, classical, neoclassical, and Ossianic, and in the penultimate position the most presageful poem of all – ‘The Eolian Harp’. The Effusions are followed, without separation of transition, by five verse Epistles (all in stanzaic forms and one of them ostensibly by his wife Sara), and the volume closes with ‘Religious Musings’ in blank verse which, if an Effusion, is certainly the most rhapsodic of them. Lamb was delighted with much in this book but drew attention to the ‘monotony of identical feelings’ in the ‘Monody’. There is a certain justice in Coleridge’s choice of the term Effusion to mark the somewhat unvaried tone of personal sentiment, sometimes tender, sometimes elevated, that colours the book: the apparently unifying term gives a schematic solidity to the collection that the poems might not immediately convey to the ear. This volume is of interest for this principle of arrangement and for its vulnerability; but it does not seem to deserve canonization as a nucleus for a collective edition. Coleridge at least thought not, for the second edition of 1797 is a rather different affair, and Lamb had something to do with that.
The Poems ... Second Edition, To which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd, 1797, is tidier in arrangement but ruffled somewhat by an air of unresolved improvisation. This time there are clearly defined subdivisions: ‘Poems by S. T. Coleridge’, within which ‘Sonnets’ by S. T. Coleridge with ‘Religious Musings’ at the end; then ‘Poems by Charles Lloyd’, ‘Poems on the Death of Priscilla Farmer’ by Charles Lloyd, and ‘Poems by Charles Lamb’; and at the end – the first of Coleridge’s apologetic codas – a Supplement of nine miscellaneous poems, admittedly not of the first order, with an explanatory Advertisement. The arrangement of Coleridge’s part of the book is much as it was in 1796, but inflated and conflated. The title ‘Effusions’ has vanished: ‘What you do retain tho’,’ Lamb wrote, ‘call sonnets for God’s sake, and not effusions – spite of your ingenious anticipation of ridicule in your Preface.’ At the centre of the collection stands a group of ten sonnets; of the Effusions only seventeen have been retained and these have been distributed with no trace of their original sequence into the opening section of ‘Poems’, into the ‘Sonnets’, and into the Supplement. The ‘Monody’ is now preceded by the new ‘Ode on the Departing Year’, and some new poems are added in what had been the Effusions section. The Coleridge section closes (as before) with ‘Religious Musings’, but the volume opens with a new blank verse ‘Dedication’ to his brother George. A new Preface is added to the revised Preface to the First Edition. By reducing his fifty-one poems to twenty-seven and adding eleven new ones, Coleridge has heightened the impression of quality; but there is still no clearly defined centre unless it is in the little cluster of reflective-topographical poems that follow ‘The Eolian Harp’ at the end of the Sonnets.
The 1797 edition shows at least that Coleridge could bring himself to leave things out. The fact that most of the discarded Effusions found their way back into the ‘Third Edition’ of 1803, and so into the later collections, is chargeable to Lamb who chose the edition, and Longman who published it: for only six of the poems printed in the 1796 and 1797 volumes were excluded from the 1803. Lamb’s report to Coleridge at the time is not without interest as a specimen of the critical process at work:
Your poems have begun printing; Longman sent to me to arrange them, the old and the new together. It seems you have left it to him. So I classed them, as nearly as I could, according to dates. First, after the Dedication, (which must march first) and which I have transplanted from before the Preface (which stood like a dead wall of prose between) to be the first poem – then comes ‘The Pixies’, and the things most juvenile – then on ‘To Chatterton’, &c. – on, lastly, to the ‘Ode on the Departing Year’, and ‘Musings’, – which finish. Longman wanted the Ode first; but the arrangement I have made is precisely that marked out in the dedication, following the order of time. I told L. I was sure that you would omit a good portion of the first edition. I instanced several sonnets, &c. – but that was not his plan, and, as you have done nothing in it, all I could do was to arrange ’em on the supposition that all were to be retained. A few I positively rejected; such as that of ‘The Thimble’, and that of ‘Flicker and Flicker’s wife’, and that not in the manner of Spenser, which you yourself had stigmatised – and the ‘Man of Ross’, – I doubt whether I should this last. It is not too late to save it. The first proof is only just come .... I promise you not to alter one word in any poem whatever, but to take your last text, where two are .... Write as soon as you possibly can; for, without making myself responsible, I feel myself in some sort accessory to the selection which I am to proof-correct. But I decidedly said to Biggs that I was sure you would omit more .... For my part, I had rather all the Juvenilia were kept – memoriœ causâ.
Before the 1803 edition was published, Coleridge had some thought of another volume, or other volumes, of poems: ‘Another volume will clear off all your Anthologie Morning-Postian Epistolary Miscellanies,’ Lamb wrote, ‘but pray don’t put “Christabel” therein; ... Let there be a separate volume of Tales, Choice Tales, “Ancient Mariners”, &c.’ But Lyrical Ballads was still in print and copyright, and even as late as April 1809 there was some question whether ‘The Ancient Mariner’ was at his disposal when he proposed to Longman a new collection in three volumes – ‘the first being “Poems written chiefly from the age of 17 to 25” – the second – “Poems from 25 to 33” – and hereafter [it is my wish] to publish by the name of the particular Poem as “The three Graves, a Sexton’s Tale, by S. T. C.” -&c.’ Longman did not take up the offer; and a similar offer for a two-volume collection, outlined in less distinct detail, who also declined in May 1811. In the early spring of 1815, living in Calne, ill and in the need of money and the support of his of his Bristol friends, he approached Cottle and Gutch with proposals for a collection of poems and eventually secured their support. He would publish, he told Byron in the first letter he addressed to him,
in two Volumes all the poems composed by me from the year 1795 to the present Date, that are sanctioned by my mature judgement, all that I would consent to have called mine, if it depend on my own will. Of these the better Half, comprizing the poems of greater comparative importance from Length and the Interest of the Subject and (me saltem judice) from their superior worth – exist only in manuscript –
The rest would be from his periodical publications, from Lyrical Ballads now that Wordsworth was publishing separately, ‘a few of the better compositions’ from the Poems of 1797 – the whole ‘corrected throughout, with very considerable alterations and additions, some indeed almost re-written’; ‘Remorse’ (enlarged) would be added, and two prefaces: ‘A general Preface ... on the Principles of philosophic and genial criticism relatively to the Fine Arts in general; but especially to Poetry: and a Particular Preface to the Ancient Mariner and the Ballads, on the employment of the Supernatural in Poetry and the Laws which regulate it ––’. Both volumes, he said, would be ready for the Press by the first week in June; but the first proofs did not leave Bristol until November, and Sibylline Leaves was not finally published until July 1817. The collection was in one volume; none of the ambitious new works he had promised earlier were present, nor was either of the Prefaces. But the collection was much less all-embracing than the letter to Byron would suggest: only ten poems were taken over from the early volumes, ten hitherto unpublished poems composed in the past seven or eight years were included, and all the rest (for the volume is really not very large) – some thirty-eight titles – had not appeared in any collection of his before. Three of the sonnets from 1797 stand together, and the little cluster of ‘conversation poems’ survives with the ‘Dedication’ to George Coleridge now added: otherwise the volume consists almost entirely of uncollected or new material, and the arrangement is freshly conceived.
According to the short preface, the collection ‘contains the whole of the author’s poetical compositions, from 1793 to the present date, with the exception of a few works not yet finished, and those published in the first edition of his juvenile poems [Poems 1796], over which he has no controul’. Though Coleridge refers several times to some difficulty over the 1796 poems, it is never clear what the difficulty was. ‘The Eolian Harp’ is in any case taken in from that edition, though ‘Religious Musings’ which had appeared in 1796, 1797, and 1803 is omitted. ‘The Ancient Mariner’ opens this volume as it had opened the first edition of Lyrical Ballads: it is now provided in all but final detail with the marginal gloss, and the effect of taking the position of honour is only slightly diminished by a pre-coda of three poems inserted unceremoniously into the forepages. Then follows ‘The Foster-Mother’s Tale’ which, with ‘Love’ at the beginning of the section of ‘Love-Poems’, is the only other relic of Lyrical Ballads. The rest of the volume is divided into four sections: ‘Poems Occasioned by Political Events’, six poems; ‘Love-Poems’, seventeen poems including ‘Love’ and ‘Lewti’; ‘Meditative Poems in Blank Verse’ where we find the new ‘Hymn Before Sunrise’ and after ‘The Eolian Harp’ the splendid group of conversation poems: ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’, ‘To William Wordsworth’, ‘The Nightingale’, and ‘Frost at Midnight’. ‘The Three Graves’ stands by itself next, as ‘Fire, Famine and Slaughter’ stands by itself at the end of the first division; then ‘Odes and Miscellaneous Poems’, twenty poems of very mixed kind including ‘Dejection’, the ‘Ode to Tranquillity’, the ‘Ode to the Rain’, some early poems, an imitation of an Akenside elegy, and ‘The Destiny of Nations’ extracted from Joan of Arc. Because they were to have a separate existence elsewhere, ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘Christabel’, and ‘The Pains of Sleep’ are not included. Though the arrangement is not thoroughly thought through, and though some of the necessary omissions are unfortunate, this is both a good and a characteristic volume. There was not to be another for more than ten years, although in 1823 – the year of ‘Youth and Age’ – there was some hope of John Murray doing an edition, but when he insisted that it be edited by Henry Mart Milman, Coleridge’s junior at Cambridge, Coleridge rejected the proposal with amused contempt.
If Sibylline Leaves was put together under disadvantageous conditions, that was even more true of the three collections that were to follow. The Poetical Works of 1828 (3 volumes, including dramatic works) was bedevilled from the start, as evidence the long letter to Alaric Watts on 14 September 1828. Pickering was the publisher; the edition ‘so many years pretendedly in hand’ was delayed and finally interrupted by ‘false and lying pretences’; there was insufficient copy and at Gillman’s importunity Coleridge agreed to release some manuscript poems; these were published by Pickering in The Bijou without permission and without fee; because of the failure in sending proofs the poems appeared in a form ‘infamously incorrect’; to crown it all the edition was for only 300 copies ‘and therefore there can be no profit, as it will merely pay the expence of paper and printing’ whereas ‘an edition of a thousand, properly advertised and befriended ... would have been sold within a twelve month’. According to Daniel Stuart, the editorial work was done by Gillman and a friend of Hartley Coleridge’s. When the 1829 edition was prepared a few months later Coleridge did what he could to repair the textual damage done by Pickering; but neither of these editions, though Campbell is probably correct in saying that they were last upon which Coleridge could devote attention, is a clear example of Coleridge’s shaping spirit.
Here the whole of Sibylline Leaves is reprinted, subdivisions and all, with very little rearrangement except for the transfer of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ to the beginning of Volume II; ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Pains of Sleep’ are placed at the end of the Miscellaneous section, and ‘Christabel’ is in Volume II immediately after ‘The Ancient Mariner’. There is a new section at the beginning of Volume I – ‘Juvenile Poems’ – and here, in yet another arrangement a little reminiscent of both 1797 and 1803 but not repeating either, are most of the contents of Poems on Various Subjects (1796): that is, all the larger poems which had had individual titles in 1796, together with twenty-six of the thirty-two Effusions and two of the four Epistles. In Volume II, after the two ballads and the core of Sibylline Leaves, there is a new section of seventeen poems under the title ‘Prose in Rhyme: or Epigrams, Moralities, and Things Without a Name’: here we are surprised to find, inter alia, ‘Work without Hope’ and ‘Youth and Age’, as well as ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’, ‘The Blossoming of the Solitary Date-tree’, ‘The Two Founts’, and ‘The Wanderings of Cane’. If Coleridge seemed almost austerely selective in Sibylline Leaves the impression is somewhat altered here. By October 1828 the edition was sold out and another edition prepared at once. Many revisions and corrections were made but the selection is not substantially altered: one small poem has been omitted and three miscellaneous pieces added: ‘The Allegoric Vision’, ‘The Improvisatore’, and ‘The Garden of Boccaccio’.
This pattern did not change: Sibylline Leaves in the middle, juvenilia added at the beginning and miscellaneous uncollected pieces at the end, and after that the dramatic works. The tradition that Coleridge had little hand in the 1834 edition must surely be sound. Here the arrangement of 1828 and 1829 is followed exactly but more poems are included: twenty-one juvenilia are added; ‘The Ballad of the Dark Ladie’ is placed in the ‘Love Poems’ after its introductory poem ‘Love’; there are five additions to the ‘Odes and Miscellaneous Poems’, all of late composition; and in the last section, now renamed simply ‘Miscellaneous Poems’, fifteen poems are interleaved through the old material, and there is a coda of twenty-seven poems hitherto unpublished and uncollected. In the end there are four fairly coherent groups: Juvenilia, Love Poems, Meditative Poems, and Odes; and three of these groups, with the political poems, are still held within the title Sibylline Leaves. But the Odes share a section with ‘Miscellaneous Poems’, and the final section of miscellaneous poems is large and very mixed in kind and quality. ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Christabel’ stand together by themselves, but ‘Kubla Khan’ remains embedded in the ‘Odes and Miscellaneous Poems’, its implied classification as an ode being perhaps more important than has commonly been noticed.
If Coleridge in collecting and arranging his poems had been as resolutely (or perversely) ingenious as Wordsworth, or as fastidiously aware of an emergent thematic structure as Yeats was, editors would have less difficulty with his work. His own remark in the Table Talk is well known:
After all you can say, I still think the chronological order the best for arranging a poet’s works. All your divisions are in particular instances inadequate, and they destroy the interest which arises from watching the progress, maturity, and even the decay of genius.
But he never attempted a chronological arrangement himself and it would appear that Henry Nelson Coleridge – to whom the remark was made – was not encouraged to do so in 1834. The editors of the two standard editions disagreed about the choice of guide texts: James Dykes Campbell chose the 1829 edition ‘as being the last upon which he [S. T. C.] was able to bestow personal care and attention’; E. H. Coleridge chose the 1834 because of ‘the existence of conclusive proof that, here and there, Coleridge altered and emended the text of 1829’. In preparing her 1852 edition (as Derwent recorded after her death) Sara Coleridge worked from the 1817 and 1828 editions – perhaps Derwent meant 1829? – taking these to represent ‘the author’s matured judgement upon the larger and more important part of his poetical productions’. Henry Nelson Coleridge and his wife Sara after him made a conscientious effort to arrive at what they believed the poet would have approved. Their successive editions show them including new poems and dropping others, then sometimes dropping out some that they had themselves added: the 1852 edition omits almost twice as many poems as it includes afresh. Clearly Sara and Derwent did not regard either the 1828-9 or the 1834 selection as having canonical definition.
For the 1852 edition, Sara decided to attempt a chronological arrangement ‘as far as circumstances permitted – that is to say, as far as the date of composition of each poem was ascertainable, and as far as the plan could be carried out without effacing the classes into which the Author had himself distributed his most important poetical publication, the “Sibylline Leaves” ...’ Beyond the schematic five-fold division in 1817, she could see the poems – as we know Coleridge himself had seen in the earlier years – ‘distributed with relation to time ... into three broad groups, representing, first the Youth, – secondly, the Early Manhood and Middle Life, – thirdly the Declining Age of the Poet’; she considered that ‘each division has its own distinct tone and colour’ and assigned the three periods approximately to the three larger subdivisions of 1828-34 – Juvenilia, Sibylline Leaves, and Miscellaneous Poems. She made it clear too in the 1852 edition that her aim was not pious completeness – that she felt free to omit certain ‘sportive effusions of Mr. Coleridge’s later years’ which, though well enough in their own way, were in danger of ‘diluting and weakening, to the reader’s feelings, the general power of the collection’.
Sara Coleridge’s strict attempt to arrive at an ideal collection by including ‘only such of the Author’s early performances as were sealed by his own approval’ and by arranging them in what she took to be an Esteesean order reached its fulfilment in the edition of 1852 (reissued 1863, 1870). Richard Herne Shepherd’s edition of 1877 broke that tradition by attempting comprehensive inclusion and seeking a different order, and so set the way towards the two ‘standard’ editions of 1893 and 1912 each of which attempted in its own way to gather together all the fruits and relics of Coleridge’s poetic practice and to set these down in a form suitable for study, enjoyment, and reflection.
The Dykes Campbell and E. H. Coleridge editions are very closely related and both draw upon the same strong manuscript sources. Campbell acknowledges ‘the unwearied kindness and generosity of my friend Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, to whom all that is worthy in the editorial part of this volume owes more than I can adequately express’. The two editors were close friends. E. H. C. had in his possession a more comprehensive collection of Coleridge’s manuscripts, annotated and association books, and printed editions than has ever been assembled in one place since he divided the collection with Lord Coleridge in 1892; these resources were at Campbell’s disposal. E. H. C. in his turn speaks of Campbell’s ‘monumental edition’ and says that he was ‘constantly indebted for information and suggestions to the Notes to the Poems ... in the edition of 1893’; but adds that ‘if I differ from his conclusions or have been able to supply fresh information, it is because fresh information based on fresh material was at my disposal’. Nevertheless the editions are very similar in arrangement: both present the poems in an unbroken chronological sequence, the dramas collected at the end; both attempt a complete collection of all Coleridge’s poetical writings, and E. H. Coleridge makes his title The Complete Poetical Works; both, despite the hitherto unparalleled inclusiveness of their main text, resort to copious appendixes, the titles of which are also very similar – First Drafts and Prose Versions, Epigrams and Jeux d’Esprit, Fragments, Adaptations (but E. H. C. has two sets of Fragments and a separate section for Metrical Experiments). Beneath these similarities the editions are rather different: one represents the older tradition, being the more bland and readable; the other represents the new departure, being the more minute and scrupulous. Campbell’s edition in one volume, with its still-unsuperseded biographical introduction and terse but excellently informed notes and bibliographical appendix is – despite the chronological arrangement – the last in the line of the editions that originate with Henry Nelson Coleridge in Coleridge’s lifetime: this is perhaps the ideal edition for undistracted reading. E. H. Coleridge’s edition, in two volumes, with its detailed collation of all known texts, manuscript and printed, the running account of successive publications (including periodicals), its bibliographical appendix, and much other scholarly matter – this edition has been indispensable to the scholar ever since its first publication in 1912. E. H. Coleridge broke out of the formal limits implied by Coleridge himself, the limits tacitly respected by his early editors. He was obliged to seek a new pattern because of the wealth of information which, though familiar to him, was unknown to others and therefore could not be withheld. His new departure though in some respects indecisive makes it impossible for us to turn back, for scholarly purposes, to Sara Coleridge’s ideal. We want to read ‘The Ancient Mariner’ in its first form, complete, as printed in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798, but we are not prepared to lose the complex configuration of the poem as it finally stood after 1817 with the gloss finished. There are now – though neither Campbell nor E. H. C. knew this – two versions of ‘Dejection: an Ode’, each integral, each in its own way important. The way the successive drafts of ‘Glycine’s Song’ in Zapolya emerge from the German of Ludwig Tieck and mount jewelled into a sky that the Khan Kubla may have gazed upon – this is an unmistakably Coleridgean process and an essential document in the study of his art. Many fragmentary or abortive poems, lines, phrases in letters and notebooks are more vivid and valuable than many of the thoroughly finished derivative juvenile verses. Flashes of astonishing brilliance discharge into tedious flatness or vanish whimpering on the air; and footless birds of paradise may without warning enter the field of vision as that tune did that, like a Hummel Bee, whizzed across the diameter of Coleridge’s brain and embodied itself in the words of ‘Youth and Age’ at ten in the morning of Wednesday 10 September 1823. Not the sternest or purest edition of Coleridge’s poems can afford to turn these out of doors or even conceal them (as though from the police of common sense) in the attics and potting sheds of appendix and editorial note where the air may be unwholesome being filled with fine print. And yet, if all is included in a single chronological arrangement, what happens to the poems that have always been recognized (and rightly) as the nucleus of the canon?
For a scholarly edition of Coleridge’s poems there is now, I believe, no serious alternative to a single chronological sequence. There will have to be some principle of exclusion, but a generous one; and there will have to be a subcanonical level or zone in relation to the canon itself. As for selection, the editor cannot decide this simply on his own judgement; the poet himself must have a decisive word wherever possible, and since Coleridge has not given very clear instruction we must try to discern as best we can – as Sara Coleridge did – what his intentions were and what his selection would have been if he had been able to consider the matter in an ideally patient and steady manner. I am inclined to find the exclusiveness of the Poems of 1797, of Sibylline Leaves, and the 1828 edition more typical of Coleridge’s taste than the inclusiveness of Poems 1796 or the Poetical Works of 1834: an editor needs to be correspondingly fastidious. Some or all of the following rules might guide one satisfactorily. All poems issued separately in pamphlet form would be included. Any poem printed in a periodical and not collected by Coleridge does not belong in the canon; neither does any juvenile poem that was not collected after 1797; any poem composed before 1815 which was included only in 1834 would be excluded. It would be interesting to see what would happen if we included in the canon only those poems which appeared in two out of any three consecutive editions in this list: 1796, 1797, 1817, 1829, 1834. But some intricate formula would also have to be invented to protect the ‘Ode to the Rain from suffering for its unaccountable exclusion after a single appearance in Sibylline Leaves.
Once the canon is settled, the problem of handling the whole body of material chronologically becomes a typographical problem. The page should if possible be cleaner than E. H. Coleridge’s, with nothing outside the text except the variant readings and the footnotes that Coleridge attached so generously to his poems despite his statement in 1811 that ‘Notes to Poetry are contrary to my notions, however fashionable they may be’. The poems of the canon would have to be printed in such a way as immediately to distinguish them, but without at the same time subduing the subcanonical materials below the level of accurate attention. An ingenious editor might even discover some system of unobtrusive classificatory marks so that a reader could tell at once whether he was looking at (say) a metrical experiment, a translation, an adaptation or condensation of another writer’s poem, an epigram, a tentative or abortive fragment – if such a system could be at once precise and uncontentious. Extended drafts or prose versions unmanageable in the apparatus criticus could be placed among the extended editorial notes away from the text; and the few prose poems are not likely to be mistaken for anything else. Prefatory notes and extended headnotes – as in the ‘Songs of the Pixies’, ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘The Three Graves’, to mention only three – would have to be located according to visual cleanness and with reference to their typographical character in the original editions. As for ‘The Ancient Mariner’, that poem will in any case have to be handled separately and can be expected to tempt and delight any designer who decides to accept all the problems it presents to him. There would be needed some clear and easily worked tables to show the exact constitution of each of the lifetime editions, so that one could quickly put together groups of poems in their historical sequences; and an index, not only of first lines, but also of titles in all their wordy variables; and some flash of inspiration might suggest a way of indexing the untitled and fragmentary materials outside the canon. Given that all this were triumphantly achieved, we should have a collection such as Coleridge himself never saw even in his mind’s eye, and never intended. Yet I think he might admire the felicity of the thing and might even see in it an elaborate instance of his own theory of method.