The Harvest on the Ground: Coleridge’s Marginalia

In March 1820, when he was forty-seven years old, Coleridge wrote a long letter to his young friend Thomas Allsop to thank him for a generous gift of money.  Allsop, a London business man twenty years younger than Coleridge, had attended the literary lectures in 1818, had fallen under Coleridge’s spell, and was now a close friend.  Coleridge now unfolded in some detail the work he had in progress and discussed the prospects of completing what he hoped to do, in the face of ill health, public neglect, and the interruptions forced on him by the need to meet his obligations to his hosts in Highgate and to his scattered family.  He had five works in hand, he said: “The Characteristics of Shakespeare’s Plays”; a philosophical analysis of the genius and works of Dante, Spenser, Milton, Cervantes, and Calderon, with shorter studies of Chaucer, Ariosto, Donne, and Rabelais; the history of philosophy (the “Philosophical Lectures” delivered between December 1818 and March 1819); letters on the Old and New Testament; and “my GREAT WORK, to the preparation of which more than twenty years of my life have been devoted” – the Opus Maximum – to which (he said) all his other writings, except the poems (and perhaps even those too) were preparatory.  Altogether, not including the Opus Maximum, these would make about ten large volumes.

To the completion of these four Works [i.e. all but the Opus Maximum] I have literally nothing more to do, than to transcribe; but ... from so many scraps & sibylline leaves, including Margins of Books & blank Pages, that unfortunately I must be my own scribe – & not done myself, they will be all but lost – or perhaps (as has been too often the case already) furnish feathers for the Caps of others – some for this purpose, and some to plume the arrows of destruction to be let fly against the luckless Bird, from whom they had been plucked or moulted!

He was, he said, “Gifted with powers confessedly above mediocrity”; he had had an education “of which ... I have never yet found a Parallel”; he had devoted himself “to a life of unintermitted Reading, Thinking, Meditating and Observing”; his published work gave evidence that “I have not been useless in my generation.”  And yet (and did he in this mean to echo one of the saucy couplets Touchstone improvised to tease Rosalind?) – and yet

from circumstances the main portion of my Harvest is still on the ground, ripe indeed and only waiting, a few for the sickle, but a large part only for the sheaving, and carting and housing – for from all this I must turn away, must let them rot as they lie & be as tho’ they had never been: for I must go to gather Blackberries, and Earth Nuts, or pick mushrooms & gild Oak-Apples for the Palates & Fancies of chance Customers –[i]

Coleridge lived for fourteen years after that and did not succeed in completing or publishing any of these five works; and much of the harvest still remains upon the ground.  Of that harvest, the marginalia are a considerable part – the notes he wrote in the margins and on the flyleaves and blank pages of his and other people’s books.

I

De Quincey’s praise of Coleridge’s notes is too well known to be left unquoted.

Coleridge often spoiled a book; but in the course of doing this, he enriched that book with so many and so valuable notes, tossing about him, with such lavish profusion, from such a cornucopia of discursive reading, and such a fusing intellect, commentaries so many-angled and so many-coloured that I have envied many a man whose luck has placed him in the way of such injuries ...[ii]

A few statistics will show the extent of the country and the lie of the land.  The biggest collection of annotated books is in the British Museum, the second largest in the Victoria College Library, Toronto; together they amount to about 300 titles.  Other libraries in the United Kingdom and United States hold altogether a little over 100 more titles, and private collectors about fifty.  This makes a total in round figures, leaving out of account the annotated copies of Coleridge’s own works, of almost 400 titles.  I have record of 142 titles of annotated books that have disappeared: for 70 of these there is no transcript of the notes, though some clue to the extent of the annotation; for the other 72 there are transcripts of varying degrees of completeness and accuracy.[iii]  The actual total of books for which we have all or some notes is 459 titles by 323 authors.  A further 411 titles of marked books have been identified – books with Coleridge’s name or mark or a presentation inscription, but no notes – bringing the total of identified readings to 870, not including records of library borrowings and books which it is clear from internal evidence that he certainly used, read, or owned.  The number of volumes involved would be perhaps twice the number of titles.

Several books have only one note or only a few; fifteen or twenty notes is quite a typical burden.  But the most heavily annotated books have many more than that: Jeremy Taylor’s Polemical Discourses has 253, the Stockdale edition of Shakespeare 200 (there are 365 altogether on Shakespeare), Jacob Boehme’s Works 180, the two copies of Richard Baxter’s Reliquiae Baxterianae 172; there is a total of 170 notes on Schelling, 141 on Tennemann’s Geschichte der Philosophie, 116 on Kant (including three copies of the Vermischte Schriften), and 115 on Southey’s Life of Wesley; there are three annotated copies of Robert Leighton’s Works with 93 notes (not counting numerous editorial preparations for Aids to Reflection), and among the biblical commentators Eichhorn is outstanding with a total of 189 notes (all unpublished).  The notes range from a single word – in his 1732 edition of Dante the word “Pacchiaretti” (a pardonably corrupt version of the name of the wine in which he celebrated Nelson’s victory at the Battle of the Nile) – to short essays that may take up two or more blank folio pages, or run head-and-foot through ten or twelve pages of printed text.  Some of the notes – and these by no means the least interesting – bear no relation to the books they are written in.  I suspect that altogether the marginalia may run to about a million words.

Nobody could claim that Coleridge’s marginalia are a new thing.  Many of them were published by Henry Nelson Coleridge in the Literary Remains (1836-8) and later in various places by the family editors; and since then, though mostly in this century, a number of series of notes have been published, usually separately and often in recondite places.  T. M. Raysor collected a quantity of literary notes in his two editions, Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism (1930) and Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism (1936); and Miss Florence Brinkley brought together a rather different kind of notes in her Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century (1955).  But few published versions are complete, or completely accurate; and few editors have felt any need to reproduce the literal details that can convey the nervous vitality of the originals.

“Without Drawing,” Coleridge noted in October 1803, “I feel myself but half invested with Language – Music too is wanting to me.”[iv]  So we cannot expect to find in his marginalia anything to compare, for example, with the hundreds of brilliant and amusing little drawings that the eighteen-year-old Hans Holbein made in the margins of a copy of Erasmus’s Moriae Encomium (1515);[v] nor in fact is there anything written by Coleridge on a poetic text that would match the notes written by “Alain” (Emile-Auguste Chartier) in Paul Valéry’s copy of Charmes.[vi]  Yet what is preserved of Coleridge’s marginal notes is strange, various, and substantial enough to baffle ready comparison.  If it were possible in small compass, I should like to give some impression of the range and variety of the marginalia written in Greek, Latin, German, and Italian books – as well as English: in works of literature, philosophy, science, theology, biography, political and economic theory, and studies of the political issues and social anomalies of his own day and of earlier times.  I should like to be able to convey the swift brilliance of some sets of notes, the minute – even quibbling – relentlessness of others; the subtle and acute play of intelligence, the felicities of phrasing, the humour (sometimes blunt and clownish, occasionally even a little indelicate), the words coined for the occasion and metaphors deftly intrinsicated for a unique and unexpected purpose; the way he can evolve argument and analysis, or drive some preposterous philological speculation for fun to a self-mocking extreme of grotesquerie.  But I am uneasy about the violence that may be done by plucking bright flowers for wonder and admiration: the more modest blossoms stand with their faces demurely turned aside, the weeds go untended, and the anthologist may attract to himself more attention than he deserves.  Any industrious polymath could have written as many notes in as many books as Coleridge did, and probably many have; and we might well find them less than profitable to read.  With Coleridge, the variety is not delineated by the number or variety of texts he wrote notes on; it is seen rather in the sensitiveness, range, and depth of his response to what he is reading and the unexpected turns his response will take.  The marginalia trace the figures of his way of thinking and knowing; they body forth in sustained and concentrated activity the “method” that he wrote about in his general introduction to the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana and reconsidered at greater length and with more ease in the 1818 edition of The Friend – the activity of mind and sensibility that he sketched out in an informal note of about 1822.

There is no way of arriving at any sciential End but by finding it at every step.  The End is in the Means: or the Adequacy of each Mean is already its End.  Southey once said to me: You are nosing every nettle along the Hedge, while the Greyhound (meaning himself, I presume) wants only to get sight of the Hare, and Flash – Strait as a line!  he has it in his mouth! – Even so, I replied, might a Cannibal say to an Anatomist, whom he had watched dissecting a body.  But the fact is – I do not care two pence for the Hare; but I value most highly the excellencies of scent, patience, discrimination, free Activity; 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 not 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 chances of getting forward.[vii]

It is this process – Coleridge’s way of getting to know something as living and present to him – that I wish to explore rather than the range or content of the notes, interesting and important though those may be.  I shall choose one author, and within that one author one book, and that book a literary text, considering that this might be more accessible than some other possibilities; taking a microtome section of a small piece of tissue rather than attempt a whole anatomy.  But before that, to say a little about Coleridge’s way of reading and his reasons for writing notes in his books.

II

Coleridge was a poet and poets tend in any case to be a little bookish if only because language and the ways of words are a passionate preoccupation with them, and because virtuosity and excellence in that sort are most to be found in books – since only the Irish (it seems) can count on hearing it in speech.  From his early childhood Coleridge was guilty of what André Gide called “this unpunished vice of reading” and suffered also from that “worst voluptuousness” that Donne speaks off – “an Hydroptique and immoderate desire of humane learning and languages.”  From the age of eight to fourteen, Coleridge says in a late autobiographical fragment, he was “a playless Helluo Librorum” – a book-Cormorant; a chance visit with a clergyman in London made him, as a schoolboy, free of “a great Circulating Library in King’s Street, Cheapside,” and he “read thro the whole Catalogue, folios and all – whether I understood them or did not understand them.”  This “preposterous pursuit” left him isolated from his schoolfellows in “the wide, wild wilderness of useless, unarranged Book-knowledge, and book-thoughts.”[viii]  But what with his early reading and his conversations with his father (who died when Coleridge was eight – a real Parson Adams, but also a knowledgeable astronomer and distinguished Hebraist), he had come to the conviction by his early twenties, if not earlier, that “all the knowledge, that can be acquired, [is] child’s play – the universe itself – what but an immense heap of little things?”; and his mind felt “as if it ached to behold & know something great – something one & indivisible.”[ix]  Early in 1796 he told that harried revolutionary John Thelwall that “I am, & ever have been, a great reader – & have read almost every thing – a library cormorant – I am deep in all out of the way books, whether of the monkish times, or of the puritanical æra – ... Metaphysics, & Poetry, & ‘Facts of Mind’... are my darling Studies.”[x]

Some leniency must be allowed the guileless vanity of youth; he was only a beginning then.  For the Bristol years there is record of his borrowings from the Bristol Library Society, and for the three years before he went to Malta there is record of borrowings from two cathedral libraries; and his borrowings from friends can to some extent be reconstructed.  We catch occasional glimpses of him among his books.  In September 1799 he is “sunk in Spinoza ... as undisturbed as a Toad in a Rock”;[xi]  In March 1800 he declined a lucrative offer from Daniel Stuart saying “I would not give up the Country, & the lazy reading of Old Folios for two thousand Times two thousand Pound –”;[xii] in November 1802 he told his wife “I love ... books ... ; but I do not care what binding the Books have, whether they are dusty or clean”;[xiii] in October 1803 he said “I have not read on an average less than 8 hours a day for the last three years”;[xiv] and in June 1810, after the Friend had come to an end, Dorothy Wordsworth reported that “Coleridge is gone to Keswick, where, as at Grasmere, he has done nothing but read.”[xv]  In March 1810, in a catalogue of remembered images associated with Sara Hutchinson – images “which never fail instantly to awake into vivider flame the for ever and ever Feeling of you” – he included “All Books – my Study at Keswick ... Books of abstruse Knowledge – the Thomas Aquinas & Suarez from the Durham Library/”[xvi]  And in November 1827, at a distance of more than thirty years, another book-recollection comes back to him with the clarity of a dream:

– by the bye, I must get the Book – which I have never seen since in my 24th year [1795] I walked with Southey on a desperate hot summerday from Bath to Bristol with a Goose, 2 Vol. of [Andrew] Baxter on the Immortality of the Soul, + the Giblets, in my hand – I should not wonder if I found that Andrew had thought more on the subject of Dreams than any other of our Psychologists, Scotch or English –[xvii]

Certainly Coleridge read a great many books, some of them curious, some strange, some of them commonplace enough.  But we must not allow the seductive enthusiasm of John Livingston Lowes (for this was not Lowes’ intention) to persuade us that Coleridge had in fact read everything.  The truth is more plausible and more interesting.  He several times called himself a “library cormorant”; as a lover of White’s Natural History of Selborne and a fastidious observer of birds, he probably meant what he said.  The cormorant is indeed a voracious bird; but he is not nit-witted like the booby, nor – as sailors says of his half-brother the gannet – an indiscriminate glutton.  The cormorant Coleridge had a keen appetite and almost flawless digestion.  I regret only that he cannot have known a poem of more recent date that has delighted many children and has sometimes run through my head while toiling at the unharvested marginalia.

                                                The common cormorant or shag

                                                Lays eggs inside a paper bag.

                                                The reason you will see no doubt

                                                It is to keep the lightning out.

I think he would have forgiven the anonymous author that for the sake of the rhyme he had merged into a single image ... phalacrocorax carbo carbo and phalacrocorax aristotelis aristotelis.

A Sotheby Sale Catalogue for 18 December 1908 includes tantalizing entry:

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.  18 vol.  1792-1809.  This interesting copy was formerly in the library of Thos. Poole of Nether-Stowey ... Several of the volumes contain profuse pencil notes, in the margins, in the handwriting of Coleridge dating from 1796 onwards until his leaving the village.

I should like to see those volumes: the description is suspect because it is the only evidence for profuse annotation before 1800.  Coleridge left Nether-Stowey for the North in 1799.  He did visit Poole in 1807 and we know that he wrote notes in some of Poole’s books at that time; the volumes of Philosophical Transactions, if in fact annotated by Coleridge, could have been done at that time.  In Church and State Coleridge says that he was already notorious among his school-fellows at Christ’s Hospital for his habit of annotating books, but the surviving records do not endorse his statement.  The known marginalia before 1800 are few, slight, and tentative: a Bowles-like poem written in a prayer book in the chapel of Jesus College, Cambridge, entries in a family Bible, an affectionate presentation inscription in a copy of Bowles’s Sonnets, a Latin epigram in a copy of Catullus, a few brief pencillings in a copy of Bürger’s Gedichte.  In the Gutch Memorandum Book (Notebook G) there is a more extensive set of quasi-marginalia – notes that would normally have been written in a printed book if it had been possible or appropriate to do so: notes from a critical reading of William Godwin’s St Leon made for Godwin’s benefit, a list of page numbers with comments of only a few words added to some of them.[xviii]

The writing of sustained marginal notes begins late in 1801 in a group of books which are noticeably not work-books but books of close personal association with Sara Hutchinson and Charles Lamb: for Lamb a copy of George Dyer’s Poems 1801 with the unique copy of the cancelled preface, and – as a reminder that Coleridge’s interests were never exclusively literary – Godwin’s Thoughts occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Parr’s Spital Sermon (1801) and a speech of John Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare on the Catholic Question (1793); for Sara Hutchinson, a copy of Bartram’s Travels, favourite reading at that time at Dove Cottage.  At this time and a little later he was also writing he was also writing notes in his and Wordsworth’s copies of Anderson’s British Poets, and wrote a couple of notes in Wordsworth’s copy of Cowley’s Works (1681).  A copy of Matthisson’s Gedichte has a note dated 10 October 1801 which records a meeting of Coleridge, the Hutchinsons and the Wordsworths and the building of “Sara’s Seat,” a place almost as sacred to them as the Rock of Names.  There is a spirited set of notes on the second and enlarged edition of Malthus’s Essay on the Principles of Population (1803); these are addressed to Southey and seem to be advising him how to review the book.  The earliest dated note on Kant – in the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1797) – is for 6 December 1803, but most, if not all, of the notes on Kant seem to have been written after 1806.  The celebrated letter to Sara Hutchinson, in which “The Huntsmen are up in America,” was written on the front flyleaves of a copy of Sir Thomas Browne’s works in folio on 10 March 1804 just before Coleridge sailed for Malta, the rest of the notes being written on at least two later occasions.  This copy of Sir Thomas Browne was bought for Coleridge by Lamb.  The letter to Sara Hutchinson was published in Blackwood’s in 1819 over James Gillman’s inverted initials after Coleridge had himself carefully revised the text; apart from three notes in Church and State (1830), this was the only specimen of Coleridge’s marginalia to be openly published in his lifetime.

The sojourn in the Mediterranean introduces Italian titles – Ariosto, Dante, Boccaccio, even the Italian version of the Code Napoléon – but the most interesting set of extensive notes was written in a copy of Marcus Aurelius during the voyage to Malta: the comments are often stylistic, but there are a number of personal references and several important discussions of love.  The whole story is too long to unfold in detail.  While Coleridge was with the Wordsworths at Allan Bank 1808-10 and the Friend was being written – that was a good time to write notes.  After he left the Lakes in 1810 he had no abiding home, nor many of his books around him, until he took up residence with the Gillmans in Highgate in 1816.  The literary notes were often part of his preparation for the successive series of lectures in London and Bristol from 1808 to 1819; this is particularly true of most of the notes on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and on Tennemann’s and Stanley’s histories of philosophy.  Some books he returned to over and over again – Kant for example until about 1818, and Schelling and Steffens – so that a later note will comment upon or correct an earlier note.  In Jeremy Taylor, Richard Baxter, Jacob Boehme (and some others) notes have been written from time to time over a span of several years.  Though many of the late notes are theological and biblical, so are some of the earlier ones, and the variety of books annotated does not diminish as the years advance.  He continued to write notes in the margins of books almost to the day of his death in 1834.

Once he had developed a taste of annotating books, Coleridge was stimulated rather than inhibited by the chance limitations of the margins and by the spaces the printer and binder had left him to write in, at chapter openings and endings, the versos of fly-titles and engravings, the flyleaves and paste-downs.  The spaces left on the printed page were, as much as paper, type, or binding, an essential feature of the physical identity of a book.  He preferred to write unceremoniously, in the margins of the text from choice, overflowing into larger blank spaces if they turned up at suggestive points, taking to the flyleaves last.  Like an artist who chooses the stimulating hazard of drawing with a pen, Coleridge preferred the irrevocable commitment of writing his marginalia in ink.  The German books, printed (like French music) on a soft absorbent paper, obliged him to write on the text in pencil or to turn to the flyleaves or paper wrappers to use ink; and when a German book, already annotated, had outlived its wrappers he would have a rebound with leaves of writing paper bound in at each end and made good use of these.  The Gillmans gave him an interleaved Shakespeare; he wrote nearly 200 notes in it but they are terse and constricted.  The German books presented another difficulty, but it did not arrest fluency.  “The paper retains the Ink but the Ink will not retain the Letters. – “The Ink simply runs: but the Words run away.”[xix]

Mem.  I have had, for years, the first Volume [or Eichhorn’s Commentarius in Apocalypsin Joannis], among my Odd Books – & should have so filled the Margins before this time, that it would have been fairly worth the 10½ Blood-drops wrung from the pinched Hippocratic Nose of my Poverty, (£0,,10,,6) to any Friend of mine of an Apocalyptic Turn – But the villainous paper, the spongy Goodwin Sands, that would suck in a Galleon of Ink-wit, baffles every attempt / tho’ you may still see sundry black Wrecks hulling shapeless in the Margins.

            N.B.  The Reward of my Thanks offered to Sir Humphrey Davy, Guy de Lupac, D^r Woolaston, or any other of the Chemical Magnates of this All-chemical Generation, for the discovery of a new Pounce or other Additament, fluid or solid that shall render the papyrus cacatoria of German Books as retentive of the forms, as it is absorbent of the Stuff, of Marginal M[anu]ss[cri]pta – ...[xx]

The notes written on the text in soft pencil are now dismally rubbed and confusedly offset upon each other; even Coleridge himself could not always reconstruct them.  To make matters worse, many of the German books have been clumsily guillotined in rebinding so that the transcript of some notes will have more square brackets than characters of clear text.  But on the whole his “villainous hand-scrawl” is not too difficult to read and – except for some of the German books – the problems of establishing a good text for the notes are much less taxing than the problems of dating.

One noticeable feature of Coleridge’s reading is that he usually paid close attention to the preliminary matter – prefaces, introductions, dedications.  Also, he did not invariably annotate the whole of a book, nor did he invariably finish reading a book he had started.  Considering how Hegelian some of Coleridge’s terms and logical diagrams seem to be, it is interesting to see that his eleventh note on Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik is written on page 91 of the first part, leaving more than 900 pages untouched.  In some cases a considerable part of the book will remain unopened; yet there is at least one book where he has written a marginal note between the gathering of the unopened section.  The evidence of unopened and unannotated sections of books, however, has to be handled with caution: he often used more than one copy of a book and a number of books that are known to have been important to him have no notes at all in them.

III

No doubt there were times of illness or languor or confused purpose when Coleridge would read a book to pass the time, or as anodyne, to avert crisis or defer decision.  In Malta at the time of John Wordsworth’s death by drowning he noted: “Books are conversation at present.  Evil as well as Good in this, I well know / but Good too as well as Evil.”[xxi]  Usually, however, and even at times of distress and inanition, books were literally food for thought.  The notebooks and marginalia show very clearly that reading was for Coleridge a strenuous activity, and that almost anything he took up to read would instantly arouse his mind to intense reflective and organising energy.  In the Biographia Literaria he said that “Intelligence is a self-development,” that we may conceive of it under “a metaphor borrowed from astronomy” as “an indestructible power with two opposite and counteracting forces, which ... we may call the centrifugal and centripetal forces.  The intelligence in the one tends to objectize itself, and in the other to know itself in the object.”[xxii]  “What are my motives but my impelling thoughts – ” he asks in a note on Tetens’ Philosophische Verusche; “and what is a Thought but another word for ‘I thinking’?”

In a notebook entry of 18 May 1808 he reflects upon his reason for writing in his notebooks:

I write more unconscious that I am writing, than in my most earnest modes I talk – I am not so unconscious of talking, as when I write in these dear ... Books, I am of the act of writing – So much so, that even in the last minute or two that I have been writing on my writing, I detected that the former Habit was predominant – I was only thinking.[xxiii]

“All minds must think by some symbols,” he goes on; “the strongest minds possess the most vivid Symbols in the Imagination,” and this in turn “ingenerates a want, pothos [a sort of sexual yearning] ... for vividness of Symbol: which something that is without, that has the property of Outness can alone fully gratify.”  And “Hence I deduce the habit, I have most unconsciously formed, of writing my inmost thoughts – .”  Here he is thinking specifically of the notebooks.  The marginalia seldom have the confessional intimacy of the notebooks, it is true; but they came to achieve the same fluency and to arise from the same need.  What he writes – the “Symbols” – are not so much expressions of opinion or statements of thoughts as an essential physical element in a process of self-knowing, self-realisation, “self-production.”[xxiv]  For “Form [that is, the written Symbol in this case] is factitious Being, and Thinking is the Process.  Imagination the Laboratory, in which Thought elaborates Essence into Existence.”[xxv]

The notes most of us write in books seem to be quarrelsome assertions of our own opinions and prejudices.  Coleridge’s are sometime; but usually they go beyond the degree of self-enclosedness to plot curves in a continuous process of thinking, of getting to know, of discovering the form by giving it a body and so (as a reader) coming upon the Being of an author’s intent.  This blend of active imagination and hospitable passivity is guided by one of Coleridge’s favourite maxims: “Until I understand a writer’s ignorance, I presume myself ignorant of his understanding.”  To bring the thinking process to fruition took discipline and strong nerves, for – as he well knew – energetic thinking, being at once centrifugal and centripetal, is an activity which does not proceed according to the patterns of logic though it will (in his case) eventually seek the ratification of logic.  For a mind as active as Coleridge’s, and with a “memory capacious & systematizing,” there were dangers: “If one thought leads to another, so often does it blot out another. ... My Thoughts crowd each other to death.”[xxvi]  The advantage of thinking while reading (given the right kind of book) must have been that the book itself provided not only a commanding stimulus but also a controlling matrix: it served the same directing and crystallizing function that symbolic activity serves in poetry.  To lose touch with the symbolic structure is – as often happens in undisciplined and meretricious criticism – to indulge free fantasy.  As reader, as critic (Coleridge felt) the only sense and sanity is to place at the disposal of what is being read all possible resources – of understanding, imagination, learning, feeling – and allow a relevant selection and concentration to occur.  So the marginal notes are often characteristically

Hints & first Thoughts, often too cogitabilia rather than actual cogitata a me, & may not be understood as my fixed opinions – but merely as the suggestions of the disquisition; & acts of obedience to the apostolic command to Try all things: hold fast that which is good.[xxvii]

By no means always or until the end did he suspend judgment.  On the inside cover of Weishaupt’s Ueber Wahrheit und sittliche Volkommenheit (the three volumes make up almost 1100 pages) he has written: “I have no recollection of any work so verbose as this – Such a forest of Leaves –.  An apple brought d[own] a whole basket of leaves – taken away, & again brought, the very same apple, another huge basket of other leaves [&] so forth.  It is most wearisome.”  Nor was his judgment always patient or charitable, as witness a note on the grey paper wrapper of Herder’s Kalligone.

Dec. 19. 1804.  Malta.  – And thus the Book impressed me, to wit, as being, Rant, abuse, drunken Self-conceit that kicking and sprawling in the 6 inch-deep Gutter of muddy Philosophism from the drainings [of] a hundred Sculleries dreams that he is swimming in an ocean of the Translucent & the Profound – I never read a more disgusting Work, scarcely so disgusting a one except the Meta-critik of the same Author.  I always, even in the perusal of his better works ... thought him a painted Mist with no sharp outline – but this is mere Steam from a Heap of Mans dung.

On Herder On the Resurrection he writes – “All this Trash might be silenced by one Question. ...”; on Thomas Abbt – “Of all the contemptible Ass-flings of infidel Wantonness this is surely the most asinine and contemptible!  And in German too!  And not a Translation from the French!”; on Paullini’s Disquisitio curiosa an mors naturalis plerumque sit substantia verminosa – “I cut open this book Oct. 1, 1803, the leaves having remained uncut an exact Century, 8 years of the time in my possession.  It is verily and indeed a Book of Maggots”; on Schelling’s Denkmal der Schrift von den göttlichen Dingen – “In addition to the harsh quarrelsome and vindictive Spirit that displays itself in this Denkmal, there is a Jesuitical dishonesty in various parts that makes me dread almost to think of Schelling.  I remember no man of any thing like his Genius & intellectual Vigor so serpentine & unamiable.”

The last note refers to Schelling himself, not simply to his writing.  This is another clue.  For Coleridge to read a book was to venture a personal encounter.

It is often said, that Books are companions – they are so, dear, very dear, Companions!  But I often when I read a book that delights me on the whole, feel a pang that the Author is not present – that I cannot object to him this & that – express my sympathy & gratitude for this part, & mention some fact that self-evidently oversets a second.  Start a doubt about a third – or confirm & carry a fourth thought.  At times, I become restless: for my nature is very social.[xxviii]

To read a book was, for Coleridge, to enter into a life; to suspend action in order to partake of the activity of another mind and the feelings of another; to meet almost face to face the writer of the book, or rather that purified and intense image of the writer transfigured in the embodiment of what he meant to say.  The marginalia then, even when specifically intended for somebody else to read (as a few sets were) are ringed about with silence the way poems are; heuristic rather than dogmatic; if a dialogue (a word mercilessly eroded by cant usage) then, to take a phrase from a favourite poem of his, “a dialogue of one,” the tone conversational, the style fluid but firm, the attitude affectionate and patient rather than judicious and stern.

This same impulse is clearly to be seen in Coleridge’s love of out-of-the-way books.  He did not share the Dibdinish bibliomania that set Southey to gathering – in angelic folios, and others of his contemporaries to collecting Gothique ornaments for intellectual Strawberry Hills.  Coleridge’s choice of old books and neglected authors depended upon his judgment of their vitality, their timelessness (which is also their timeliness), their place in the organic community of civilised thinking and perception.  The history of philosophy given in the lectures of 1818-19 was to be considered “as a tendency of the Human Mind to exhibit the powers of the Human Reason – to discover by it’s own strength and origin & laws of Man and the world.”[xxix]  In this perspective he could conceive of Heraclitus, Plato, the Church Fathers, Bacon, the Caroline divines, and Wordsworth as simultaneously active in the self-declarative workings of human reason and the human spirit.  The heterodox geniuses whom Coleridge wished to vindicate in the eyes of the thinking world were canonised for him by their powerful originality, the clarity of their vision, the integrity of their intellectual purpose, no matter how quaint, cumbersome, crabbed, or perverse they might seem to be a more orthodox mentality.  Giordano Bruno, Emanuel Swedenborg, George Fox, Jacob Boehme, Benedict Spinoza, John Wyclif, Martin Luther, Giambattista Vico: these were sacred names to him.  (What a pity he knew nothing of William Blake beyond the Songs of Innocence and Experience.)  In Jeremy Taylor and the Cambridge Platonists, and in one or two neo-platonists and pre-socratics, he was delighted and reassured to find his own theory of Imagination and Fancy anticipated and some of his psychological discoveries supported.  Those scholars who assign Coleridge’s “debt” in such matters exclusively, or even largely, to Immanuel Kant have found out rather less than the whole story: Coleridge admired Kant as a towering intellect and read carefully enough through his work over a long enough time to earn the privilege of profound disagreement on certain points.  Detailed agreement was not the test.  Coleridge’s ear could catch far off the hound-call of a distinguished intellectual temper, the tune of a fine style of thinking, the specific signature of genius; and some improbable names fall into resonance – Plotinus, Hieronymus Fracastorius, Petrarch (in his Latin writings), that Reverend Samuel Johnson who in Coleridge’s view was a much finer stylist than the other man of that name; Jonathan Swift, John Asgill (“a thorough Humorist ... so remarkably clear-headed, so remarkable for the perspicuity of his Sentences, and the luminous Orderliness of his Arrangement.”)  Don Quixote was a book of consuming delight and interest for the graceful depth of Cervantes’ psychological insight.  And when Coleridge chose music, having (he regretted) no training in music, his favourites were Cimarosa, Mozart, Purcell, Beethoven.  His most victorious choices were rather more difficult to make 150 years ago than they are now.  His choices were personal, an enlargement of his intellectual zest and of his life: this may explain both his catholicity and his accuracy.

“I often please myself with the fancy,” he wrote in the Friend, “now that I may have saved from oblivion the only striking passage in a whole volume, and now that I have attracted notice to a writer undeservedly forgotten.”[xxx]  His own writing was not widely current in his own time, and how was this to be done?  The marginalia give some inkling, though a more oblique method could scarcely be imagined – as he was playfully aware in the midst of writing them.

[This] will seem, perhaps it may be, somewhat fanciful, not to say whimsical, that is, maggotty – but there are worse things run in people’s heads than maggots. ... A Maggot may catch a Fish, and a Fish may have a Diamond Ring in it’s Guts (such cases are read of) or the Seal of Solomon.  Or it may become a Bee and make honey, or a Silkworm & help adorn Buckingham-house and give bread to Spital-fields.  At the worst, it will turn to a Fly, and make a Buz in one of my Flycatchers.  So let it wriggle into Light – into ink, at least, and end this maggotty digression.[xxxi]

So year by year for more than thirty years the notes accumulated, without any certainty that his work would be fulfilled or his central concerns shared.  In 1818, while the literary lectures were under way, he made a rueful sketch of himself as harvester.

S. T. C. = who with long and large arm still collected precious Armfuls in whatever direction he pressed forward, yet still took up so much more than he could keep together that those who followed him gleaned more from his continual droppings than he himself brought home – Nay, made stately Corn-ricks therewith, while the Reaper himself was still seen only with a strutting Armful of newly cut Sheaves.  – But I should misinform you grossly, if I left you to infer that his Collections were a heap of incoherent Miscellanea – No! – the very Contrary – Their variety conjoined with the too great Coherency, the too great both desire & power of referring them in systematic, nay, genetic subordination was that which rendered his schemes gigantic & impracticable, as an Author – & his Conversation less instructive, as a man / – Inopem sua Copia fecit [His wealth made him poverty-stricken] – too much was given, all so weighty & brilliant as to preclude choice, & too many to be all received – so that it passed over the Hearers mind like a roar of waters – [xxxii]

IV

In the Coleridgean manner we have gone a long way round through a cento of recondite texts, and come at last as promised to examine one set of the marginalia – the notes on John Donne’s Poems (1669).  In case this might seem an obvious choice, we have only to take our departure from a curious statement of T. S. Eliot’s in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: “But did Wordsworth or Coleridge acclaim Donne?  No, when it came to Donne – and Cowley – you will find that Wordsworth and Coleridge were led by the nose by Samuel Johnson.”

Wordsworth was indeed rather silent about Donne, but he was quizzical of what Johnson had to say about Cowley and the metaphysical poets.  For Coleridge the case is much clearer; if he were led by the nose by Samuel Johnson he must have been a very reluctant and disrespectful ass.  In an early sketch for a “History of English Poetry” (? 1796) Coleridge threatens a sharp attack on Johnson’s prose style, and later was perfectly outspoken about his “bow-wow manner,” his dogmatic tone, and his “pilfered brutalities of wit.”  (In the end, however, he was generous enough to allow that Johnson may have been “greater in talking than in writing.”)  Coleridge was no more patient of Johnson’s view of metaphysical poetry, having views of his own.  He had, he said in 1799, outgrown his earlier admiration for the misty and evocative imprecisions of Gray’s Bard and Collins’s Odes; now he looked for sharp precision in poetic imagery, and “From this cause it is that what I call metaphysical Poetry gives me so much delight.”[xxxiii]

One of the least expected things about Coleridge’s reading of Donne is how early he noticed Donne’s work with admiration: that was in 1796, at the age of 24, and probably in the small type and corrupt text of Anderson’s British Poets which he acquired at that time.  (Three copies of Anderson have Coleridge’s notes in them.)  Like Ben Jonson, he first liked the Satires: he proposed to write a satire “in the manner of Donne,”[xxxiv] and in the projected “History” intended to lead from a discussion of Dryden into an examination of the “witty logicians” – Samuel Butler, Ben Jonson, Donne, Cowley, Pope.[xxxv]  There are no marginalia for this time; but late in 1803 he made some notes on the Elegies and verse Letters, evidently working from Wordsworth’s copy of Anderson.[xxxvi]  There is no trace of his reading Donne during the Malta period, and the next contact is not with the Poems but with the Sermons when – in 1809 – he wrote eight notes in Wordsworth’s copy of the 1640 folio.[xxxvii]  It was after he had left the Wordsworths and was in London lecturing that he wrote a number of notes in Lamb’s copy of the 1669 Poems.

The account of the reading of Donne can be carried further.  In the literary lectures of 1818 the tenth lecture was devoted to Donne, Dante, and Milton.  “I am vain enough,” he told Henry Francis Cary, “to set a more than usual value on the Critique, I have devoted to the names of Dante, Donne and Milton (the middle name will, perhaps, puzzle you) and I mean to publish it singly, in the week following it’s delivery.”[xxxviii]  Unfortunately he did not do so, and although part of what he said about Dante and Milton on that occasion is recorded, nothing on Donne has survived.  It was perhaps at this time that he returned to the poems in Chalmers’s English Poets and wrote at least four notes there – three on the Songs and Sonets, the other being the epigram that comes to mind whenever the names of Coleridge and Donne come together.

                                    With Donne, whose must on dromedary trots,

                                    Wreathe iron pokers into true-love’s knots;

                                    Rhyme’s sturdy cripple, fancy’s maze and clue,

                                    Wit’s forge and fire-blast, meaning’s press and screw.

The only other marginalia on Donne are on another copy of the Sermons 1640 and are much later – October 1831 to January or February 1832, coming to within two years of his death.  This second copy – a splendid example of the fluency and depth of the late marginalia – made a sojourn in India and has now come to Bodley’s library from the collection of the late S. G. Dunn of Stratford-upon-Avon.  If we had supposed that in his declining years Coleridge had renounced delight in the pretty fancies and strong conceits of Donne’s poems (as Donne is said by some to have abandoned a naughty life in his later years), we need only look at the back flyleaf of Notebook 43 to find record of a joyous reading of Donne later than 1830, in which he singled out “Break of Day,” “A Valediction of the Book,” “Love’s Growth,” “Love’s Exchange,” and “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”

Coleridge’s enthusiasm for Donne’s poets, as he himself was aware, was not usual in his time.  But Charles Lamb shared it with him and may even have persuaded Coleridge to look more carefully beyond the Satires.  William Godwin had a fine – almost complete – collection of Donne’s work and it is possible that Coleridge used these at some time.  Hazlitt does not even mention Donne in his lectures on the English Poets (though Lecture III on English Comic Writers shows that he later did his homework).  Baron Hatherly, meeting Coleridge at Basil Montagu’s on 29 January 1829, wrote in his diary how Coleridge “had been seized with a fit of enthusiasm for Donne’s poetry, which I think somewhat unaccountable.  There was great strength, however, in some passages which he read.  One stanza or rather division of his poem, on the ‘Progress of the Soul’, struck me very much; ... The rest of the poem seemed the effusion of a man very drunk or very mad.”[xxxix]  This is a little like Hazlitt’s account of Lamb indignantly responding to the suggestion that Donne’s meaning was “uncomeatable”: “seizing the volume, [he] turned to the beautiful ‘Lines to his Mistress’, dissuading her from accompanying him aboard, and read them with suffused features and a faltering tongue.”[xl]  This is the same poem that Lamb printed out in full as a note to Philaster in his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets in 1808, three years before Coleridge wrote his notes in Lamb’s copy of the Poems.

In a way, the marginalia on Donne’s Poems are not new.  The four notes in Chalmers’s English Poets have been in print since 1836 in the only version we have; the one note written on Anderson’s British Poets was included in Raysor’s Miscellaneous Criticism (1936); even some of the notes from Lamb’s copy of the 1669 Poems were printed as long ago as 1853; and all these have been progressively collected.  But the original of the 1669 Poems had vanished.  Four transcripts of the notes had been found (three of them in copies of the 1669 edition, and two of them mistakenly described by collectors as the original); from these a few more notes could be reconstructed bringing the total from 25 to about 40, but in an unreliable text.  The original came into possession of Mr. Weld Arnold, and in 1963 Miss K. Davis published a complete transcript in Notes and Queries.  A little later E. F. Beinecke presented the book to the Yale University Library.  There are in fact 62 Coleridge notes, as well as a few marks and short notes by Lamb.  To see the original manuscript is almost to discover a new set of notes.  It is the notes in their original state that I now wish to examine.

When Coleridge was reading Shakespeare, he fought shy of the big scholarly editions like Malone’s; they seemed to him pedantic, ingenious but perverse, giving painful evidence of an insensitive ear.  In the case of Donne’s poems, he had no choice even if he had wanted help.  Unlike Yeats and Eliot he could not fall back on Grierson; Dame Helen Gardner’s edition was still 150 years away; there was no Jack Leishman to lead a rope.  Confronted by a plain and unreliable text, and lacking the general critical reassurance that Eliot was later to give us, Coleridge made a courageous reconnaissance into terra incognita: it has the same lyrical quality as a feat of solitary rock-climbing.  For the writing is informal, vivid, and direct.  The notes might have been written with a lecture in mind, but the dominant tone is set by Coleridge’s sense of Lamb’s imaginative presence.  His perceptions are heightened by affection and by the certainty of sympathetic response; and since Lamb was a person to whom Coleridge could be candid, even confessional, some of the notes refract into areas of personal intimacy that one would not have expected to find outside the Notebooks.

The notes fall pretty evenly through the divisions of the text: 19 on the Songs and Sonnets, 16 on the Satires and Anatomy, 8 on the Letters, and (perhaps a little surprisingly) 14 on the elegies and memorials written on Donne’s death.  The notes can also be seen to cluster at various levels of response: some arise from his personal relationship with Lamb and other individuals; some carry echoes of his own poems; there are critical perceptions of Donne’s intention and art, and critical reflections of substance; there is detailed scrutiny of difficult points of interpretation, analysis of the versification, tentative emendations of the text.  It is along these topical lines, rather than in the order of the printed text, that I wish to examine the notes.

Three notes are addressed to Charles Lamb, or refer to him.

[3] N. B.  Tho’ I have scribbled in it, this is & was M^r Charles Lamb’s Book, who is likewise the Possessor & (I believe) lawful Proprietor of all the Volumes of the “Old Plays” excepting one.

Lamb had accused Coleridge of not returning the third volume of Dodsley’s Old Plays at this time: the one containing The White Devil, Green’s Tu Quoque, and The Honest Whore.  The matter was never satisfactorily settled; it later very nearly led to a serious falling-out, and is mentioned – not without a cutting-edge – in “The Two Races of Men.”

[15 among the notes on “Song” (“Sweetest Love”)]  N.B. Spite of Appearances, this Copy is the better for the Mss. Notes.  The Annotator himself says so.  S.T.C.

Lamb agreed.  At the very time that Coleridge was writing these notes on Donne, he returned Lamb’s copy of Samuel Daniel, and Lamb wrote back: “I wish every book I have were so noted.  They have thoroughly converted me to relish Daniel ... Your notes are excellent.  Perhaps you’ve forgot them.”[xli]  In “The Two Races of Men” he was to celebrate Coleridge under his dragoon’s name of Silas Tompkyn Cumberbatch, “matchless in depredations.”

If they heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S.T.C. – he will return them ... with usury; enriched with annotations, tripling their value.  I have had experience.  Many are these precious MSS. of his – (in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the originals) in no very clerkly hand – ...

The third note is the very last in the book, on a back flyleaf.

[62] I shall die soon, my dear Charles Lamb!  and then you will not be vexed that I had bescribbled your Book.  2 May, 1811.

A similar statement was written in a notebook in the spring or summer of 1808, in Lamb’s Daniel on 10 February 1808, in Lamb’s Beaumont and Fletcher in October 1811, and Lamb speaks of another (in another copy of Beaumont and Fletcher?) dated 17 October 1811 and although the original has not been found Lamb could hardly be so circumstantial about a date from memory.  Since the breach with the Wordsworths in the early autumn of 1810, Coleridge had been in acute personal distress; in May 1811 the quarrel, never to be completely healed, was reaching a critical bitterness.  His health was seriously affected; some time between 1808 and 1811 he had been reading Donne’s Biathanatos – “A declaration of that paradoxe, or thesis, that Self-homicide is not so Naturally Sinne, that it may never be otherwise.”  On 3 May 1811 he had moved into the household of John Morgan, returning only in the daytime to his lodgings in the Courier office.  This note is the only hint at this time of the sense of alienation that had engulfed his life for several months.  But through certain of Donne’s poems the encouraging and restoring virtue of love seems to have come to him.  Was he thinking of Sara Hutchinson when he read in “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day”

Oft a flood

Have we two wept, and so

Drown’d the whole world, us two, ofte did we grow,

To be two Chaosses, when we did show

Care to ought else

Coleridge underlined the word “Chaosses” and wrote:

                                                [19]     When I love thee not

                                                   Chaos is come again.

“Love’s Deity” (“I long to talk with some old lovers ghost”), with the line “I must love her that loves not me” seems to have reminded him – if it was ever far from his mind at this time – of Sara Hutchinson’s withdrawal from him, and may have recalled the closing couplet of “The Pains of Sleep” –

                                    To be beloved is all I need,

                                    And whom I love, I love indeed

for he has written beside the poem

[22] But for the last Stanza, I would use this poem as my Love-creed.

When he read in Donne’s letter of 7 January 1630, To my honored friend G. G. Esquire, the words: “It hath been my desire (and God may be pleased to grant it) that I might die in the Pulpit, if not that, yet that I might take my death in the Pulpit, that is, die the sooner by occasion of those labours”, he notes:

[46] This passage seems to prove that Donne retained thro’ life the main opinions defended in his Biathanatos – at least, this joined with his dying command that the Treatise should not be destroyed tho’ he did not think the Age ripe for it’s Publication, furnishes a strange presumption of his perseverance in the defensibility of Suicide in extreme cases.

Then, at the very end of the book again, at the top of the flyleaf above the not saying “I shall die soon,” Coleridge has written a group of letters in florid capitals:

[61]                                         C H L R T T

                                                   A E O

and below this word

                                                       LATCH.

This, as every crossword puzzle worker will recognise at once, is an attempt to form an anagram on the name Charlotte.  This Charlotte is Charlotte Brent, the younger sister of Mrs Mary Morgan.  Coleridge had known John Morgan since his early days in Bristol in 1795.  Late in 1807, after Morgan had married Mary Brent and Mary’s sister was living with them, Coleridge renewed the acquaintance; from then until he took up residence with the Gillmans in Highgate in 1816, the four lives were closely interwoven.  While the Donne notes were being written, Coleridge had left his rooms in the Courier office and joined the Morgans in Hammersmith.  The Morgans, often themselves in financial difficulty, gave him a home through his darkest years; and Morgan was – if anybody was – the “onlie begetter” of the Biographia Literaria.  In December 1807 Coleridge had published, over the thinly disguised signature SIESTI, a desolate poem entitled “To Two Sisters” – that is, Mary and Charlotte: this had given offence to two other sisters, Sara Hutchinson and Mary Wordsworth.  Coleridge was a keen anagramatist.  “Asra” was his name for Sara Hutchinson, to keep her distinct from Sarah his wife and Sara his daughter; he even sometimes turned Hutchinson into “Shōnthinu.”  A notebook entry for October 1812 provides two outlandish names, “Yram” and “Ettolrach” – Mary and Charlotte spelled backwards.  These are biographical matters that I do not wish to explore now; but they show what unexpected things can turn up in the marginalia.

There are connections with Coleridge’s own poems.  In the letter “To Sir H.G.” he marked the words “And when we get any thing by prayer, he gave us before hand the thing and the petition,” and wrote down two lines from “Frost at Midnight”:

                        [43] Great omnipresent Teacher!  He shall mould

                                The spirit, and by giving make it ask.

He must have been quoting from memory: the word “omnipresent” is “universal” in all other versions.  But, alert to the possibility that Coleridge has his own poems in mind, we notice that (in 37) he has corrected two readings in “The Calm,” citing “1st edit.” as his authority; and we are reminded that, in view of his early interest in Donne, those two vivid sea-pieces “The Storm” and “The Calm” may have played some part in the composition of The Ancient Mariner.

Then there is the matter of “The Flea,” the first poem of the Songs and Sonnets in this edition.  This has called forth a rhymed epigram entitled “On Donne’s First Poem.”

                        [4] Be proud, as Spaniards.  Leap for Pride, ye Fleas!

                              In Nature’s minim Realm ye’re now Grandees.

                              Skip-jacks no more, nor civiller Skip-Johns,

                              Thrice-honor’d Fleas!  I greet you all, as Dons.

                              In Phœbus’ Archives register’d are ye,

                              And this your Patent of Nobility!

These lines, however, were not tossed off impromptu here; there is carefully worked draft in Notebook M with several other lines more or less to this point which E. H. Coleridge mysteriously printed as three separate poems under three different dates.  In any case, one is reminded of Coleridge’s other and better-known epigram, “Donne’s muse on dromedary trots”; and then two of the notes on “Satyre III” have a familiar ring to them.  Referring to lines 69-75 he has written:

[28] Here’s Brama’s Hydraulic Packing-Engine!  a scrouge of Sense! –

and, referring to the whole poem:

[30] Knotty, double-jointed Giant!  Cramp of Strength!

The last two lines of the epigram read

                  Rhyme’s sturdy cripple, fancy’s maze and clue,

                  Wit’s forge and fire-blast, meaning’s press and screw.

The search for the precise image of force and compression has led him in Hopkins’s way into special terms – scrouge, cramp, maze, clue, even Brama’s Press.  The epigram written in Chalmers’s English Poets may well have been drafted earlier than 1818; and certainly the central images are here in 1811.  We can see too that the epigram refers not so much to Donne’s poems altogether as to the Satyres in particular.

As we move farther away from Coleridge and closer to the Donne poems, we notice in a note on “The Canonization” – “One of my favorite Poems” – a statement not unlike his remark about his movement away from Gray and Collins to the delights of metaphysical poetry.

[12] ... As late as 10 years ago, I used to seek and find out grand lines and fine stanzas; but my delight has been far greater, since it has consisted more in tracing the leading Thought thro’out the whole.  The former is too much like coveting your neighbour’s Goods: in the latter you merge yourself in the Author – you become He.

His sense of comparisons is active.  The first stanza of “Air and Angels,” he says, “reminds me of Wordsworth’s apparition-poem” [17] – that is, “She was a Phantom of delight.”  “Woman’s Constancy” raises a question:

[8] After all, there is but one Donne! & now tell me yet, wherein in his own kind he differs from the similar power in Shakespere?  Sh. was all men potentially except Milton: & they differ from him by negation, or privation, or both.  This power of dissolving orient pearls, worth a kingdom! in a health to a whore! this absolute Right of Dominion over all thoughts, that Dukes are bid to clean his Shoes, and are yet honored by it! – But, I say, in this Lordlines of opulence, in which the Positive of Donne agrees with a positive of Shakespere, what is it that makes them homoiousian indeed; yet not homoousian?  [that is, of similar yet not identical nature].

“The Indifferent” leads to a comparison with Cowley.

[11] How legitimate a child was not Cowley of Donne; but C[owley] had a Soul-mother as well as a Soul-father – & who was she? what was that? – Perhaps, sickly Court-loyalty, conscientious per accidens, a discursive Intellect naturally less vigorous, & daring – & then cowed by King-Worship.  The populousness of the activity, is as great in C. as in D; but the vigor – the insufficiency to the Poet of active Fancy without a substrate of profound, tho’ mislocated, Thinking – The Will-worship in squandering golden Hecatombs on a Fetisch, on the first stick or straw met with at rising! this pride of doing what he likes with his own – fearless of an immense surplus to pay all lawful Debts to self-subsisting Themes that rule, while they create, the moral will – this is Donne!  He was an orthodox Christian, only because he could have been an Infidel more easily, & therefore willed to be a Christian: & he was a Protestant, because it enabled him to lash about to the Right & the Left – & without a motive to say better things for the Papists than they could say for themselves.  Oh! it was the Impulse of a purse-proud Opulence of innate Power!

This sense of Donne’s largeness extends to an eager appreciation of Donne’s wit – a quality that the text books seem to tells us the Romantics despised or distrusted.  There is no extended note on wit in the Lamb copy, but there is in Chalmers.

[2] The wit of Donne, the wit of Butler, the wit of Pope, the wit of Congreve, the wit of Sheridan – how disparate things are here expressed by one and the same word, Wit! – Wonder-exciting vigour, intenseness and peculiarity of thought, using at will the almost boundless stores of a capacious memory, and exercised on subjects, where we have no right to expect it – this is the wit of Donne!  The four others I am just in the mood to describe and inter-distinguish; – what a pity the marginal space will not let me!

Coleridge was clear that wit was verbal and that metaphors are a matter of resonance rather than logic.  Henry King’s poem “To the Memory of Donne” set him thinking.

[49] This fine poem has suggested to me many Thoughts for “An apology for Conceits”, as a sequel to an Essay, I have written, called an “Apology for Puns.”

From the tone of these notes it is clear that Coleridge recognised in Donne the exceptional activity of (what he called) imagination.  A little later, in the Biographia Literaria, he was to cite two stanzas of “The Progress of the Soul” as “the legitimate language of poetic fervor self-impassioned.”

The rules of the IMAGINATION are themselves the very powers of growth and production.  The words, to which they are reducible, present only the outlines and external appearance of the fruit.  A deceptive counterfeit of the superficial form and colors may be elaborated; but the marble peach feels cold and heavy, and children only put it to their mouths.[xlii]

The estimate of Donne’s imaginative power implies an estimate of the critical resources the poems will demand; and this too guides Coleridge, even in examining possible corruptions of the text.

“All the Copies, I have ever seen, of Donne’s Poems,” he says, “are grievously misprinted.”  Not one in a thousand of his readers has “any notion how his Lines are to be read.”  It is as bad as the misprinted blank verse in early editions of Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher (we have marginalia on those too).  But, he says, we should not hasten to emend the text – not until we have decided that “no mode of rational Declamation, by pause, hurrying of voice, or apt, and some times double, Emphasis can at once make the verse metrical & bring out the sense & passion more prominently.”  [2] And on “Song” (“Sweetest Love”) he writes:

[16] This beautiful & perfect Poem proves by it’s Title “Song”, that all Donne’s Poems are equally metrical ... tho’ smoothness (i.e. the metre necessitating the proper reading) he deemed appropriate to Songs; but in Poems where the Author thinks & expects the Reader to do so, the Sense must be understood in order to ascertain the metre.

This is part of an important discovery for the reading of Donne’s poetry – and also for Hopkins’s.  One or two others have remade this discovery independently in our own time, but it was a recognition that Coleridge was peculiarly qualified to make.  The notebooks provide evidence from the voyage to Malta that Coleridge himself had an accurate sense of metrical duration that corresponds to the tonal discrimination that musicians call perfect pitch – a sense of the absolute duration of a given metrical unit (a line, say, or a certain pattern) providing a temporal matrix within which the words, finding their own unique rhetorical and dramatic values, declare in the fullest sense their meaning.  This no doubt is a clue to the versification of Christabel; it may also explain why imitations of the Christabel metre are more like a flaccid nervelessness.  The first note on this subject is the first note in the book, on the first front flyleaf; and since the shortest way is usually discovered last, it may well be the last note Coleridge wrote in the volume.

[1] To read Dryden, Pope &c, you need only count syllables; but to read Donne you must measure Time, & discover the Time of each word by the Sense & Passion. – I would ask no surer Test of a Scotchman’s Substratum (for the Turf-cover of Pretension they all have) than to make him read Donne’s Satires aloud.  If he made manly Metre of them, & yet strict metre, – then – why, then he wasn’t a Scotchman, or his Soul was geographically slandered by his Body’s first appearing there.

Turning to the Satires, where the metrical texture is at its roughest and the rhythms most rigorously mated to the sense by an almost truculent technical mastery, we find a short note at the head of “Satire III.”

[24] If you would teach a Scholar in the highest form, how to read, take Donne, and of Donne this Satire.  When he has learnt to read Donne, with all the force & meaning which are involved in the Words – then send him to Milton – & he will stalk on, like a Master, enjoying his Walk.

His admiration for Donne’s poetry and his direct grasp of the inner force and shaping of the verse have brought him within shouting distance of the closing lines of Yeats’s “High Talk”:

                                                 A barnacle goose

               Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose;

               I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on;

               Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.

The criticism proceeds also to a more minute level – details of versification, conjectures upon the possible emendation of the text, the unravelling of some difficult passages.  But we need not follow him any further.  He has laid down his first principles; the application of them will not be predictable, but it will be orderly and according to “the principles of grammar, logic, psychology.”[xliii]  All the notes could conceivably have been written at one sitting; they were obviously not made at a first reading.

A few general observations may be made.  Coleridge pays almost as much attention to three of the Satires (III, V, and VI) as to the Songs and Sonnets; he reads the Letters as letters; he reads the “Elegies upon the Author” with close attention, Latin as well as English, and weighs them up each in its own right.  In the Songs and Sonnets he has picked out “The Good-Morrow,” “Go and Catch a Falling Star,” “Woman’s Constancy,” “The Sun Rising,” “The Canonization” (“One of my favorite Poems”), “Sweetest Love” (another favourite), “Air and Angels,” “A Nocturnal on St. Lucy’s Day,” “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” “Love’s Deity,” “The Will,” “The Blossom,” “The Primrose,” and “The Relic”; and of “The Extasy” he says:

[21] I should never find fault with metaphysical Poems, were they all like this, – or but half so excellent.

Only one of the Divine Poems receives comment – “To the Blessed Virgin Mary.”  Coleridge is unaccountably silent about the Holy Sonnets.

V

A wider variety of subject matter and a wider range of Coleridge’s response could have been illustrated by selection from a number of sets of marginalia.  The tenor and quality of one set of notes, however, may provide a more legitimate basis for inference about other notes, mutatis mutandis.  If one supposes (as I do) that literary critical activity is not so much a technique of procedure as a deep-centred and subtly organised responsive grasp of the physical substance of a poem, Coleridge has shown here a good deal about the duplicity (doubleness) of the critical act; he also shows by implication how the critical act may become almost like imagination by “bring[ing] the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity.”[xliv]  These notes show how the knowing proper to criticism – or simply criticism itself – is tactile and direct, more a matter of recognition than of comparative evaluation or discursive identification.  They may also suggest why Coleridge regarded his distinction between imagination and fancy as his most prized and original discovery: it was a polarizing force in an activity that too easily loses direction.  If Coleridge’s criticism of Wordsworth’s strange and original art in the Biographia Literaria is not convincing enough evidence, the notes on Donne will indicate the quality and stature of his critical imagination as he broods over a difficult and energetic text, thinking, getting to know, knowing.  They show how value judgments are affirmative and dynamic, of the order of gesture, growing up in an intimate relation of great delicacy – a relation that heightens the attention to a most scrupulous precision, and through passivity and renunciation broadens that attention to embrace the universe that a great poem declares.  It is no accident, I am sure, that this should occur for Coleridge, as here, in the presence of poems that treat often and in various ways with love; nor is it an accident that it should take place within the compass of Coleridge’s most joyous and abiding friendship.  For such critical activity is more like love than it is like a wary and detached scrutiny.  No wonder that excellent critics are as rare as they are.

There are many reasons why I wish to see the marginalia harvested and housed.  It might at least help to satisfy a dedicated wish of Coleridge’s that he never felt had been fulfilled.

Why do I write a Book?  Because my Hands can extend but a few score Inches from my Body; because my poverty keeps those Hands empty when my Heart aches to empty them; because my Life is short, & [because of] my Infirmities; & because a Book, if it extende but to one Edition, will probably benefit three or four on whom I could not otherwise have acted; & should it live & deserve to live, will make ample Compensation for all the afore-stated Infirmities.[xlv]

Coleridge was much less concerned with understanding than with not misunderstanding.  Can it be, then, that the record of a fine and copious mind in full activity may be more fertile than the formulated conclusions it reaches?  Is the rhythm more abiding than the idea?  Is the truth a process, continuous, abiding, and always and uniquely to be rediscovered?  Coleridge in his admiration for Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, and Wordsworth, for Bruno, Kant, Plato, and Boehme, celebrated the incandescent imagination, the whole person, the transfigured man – and called it Genius.  Genius, in his view, has an indestructible life that can suffer neglect, as Donne’s work did, and yet come back into the world again as a new thing, at the touch of a revivifying mind of comparable stature.  Coleridge was always, among other things, a teacher: and it is one of the privileges of a teacher to bring into our lives from any distance in time those acts of grace which for their elegant disposition of momentous forces Coleridge ascribed to genius.  As far as Coleridge in his affectionate and perceptive communing with books was engaged in this activity, it is not well that the main portion of his harvest should remain still upon the ground.