On Reading Coleridge

Nosing through William Cave’s Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum historia literaria for heaven knows what purpose, in December 1801, Coleridge came upon the word μυριόνους and immediately thought of the man he was later to call ‘the greatest genius, that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our myriad-minded Shakspear.’[1]  The epithet ‘myriad-minded’ goes well with Coleridge too, not simply for the depth and range of his learning, impressive though that certainly is, but rather for the power, daring, and integrity of a mind that throughout the years of his life strove to find unity in multeity.  The record, in its bare bones, is not trifling –  ­

Author of The Ancient Mariner and other unforgettable poems.  Great literary critic, psychologist, philosopher, theologian, lecturer, journalist, constructive critic of church and state, his works comprise some twenty volumes and seventy notebooks.[2]

To read Coleridge’s work carefully, to enter into the activity of a mind so vivid, patient, and perceptive, brings the exhilaration (as Coleridge himself would have wished) of heightened awareness.  For his many-faceted work is unified by a most searching mind, and is nourished by a personal sanity and rich memory that few thinkers of comparable force have enjoyed.

We think of him dominantly and always as a poet; when he is philosophizing he brings a poet’s way of mind to questions that, being in the discursive mode, we do not think of as within the compass of poetry and which yet, in a positivist age, are not within the compass of philosophy either.  With a memory (as he said) ‘tenacious & systematizing’, his mind is also by instinct comprehensive and synthesizing.  ‘What are my motives but my impelling thoughts–’ he writes in the margins of Tetens’ Philosophische Versuche; ‘and what is a Thought but another word for “I thinking”?’  Sometimes, it is true, his thoughts would ‘crowd each other to death’.  Yet ‘The term, Philosophy,’ he says, ‘defines itself as an affectionate seeking after the truth; but Truth is the correlative of Being.’[3]  So his work does not reward us primarily with the formulated conclusions that we are perhaps too inclined to expect of philosophy and theory; rather, his work – though by no means devoid of substantial and well-thought-out theory – stands rather for that more nourishing and hazardous order that is ‘tentative and exploratory’, and is no less positive or philosophical for that.  For he was determined, as he noted at midnight on 5 April 1805, to ‘write as truly as I can from Experience actual individual Experience – not from Book-knowledge’.[4]  Books threw an intense light across his poetry and his thinking, but ‘experience’ was paramount: like Keats, he must prove everything upon the pulses.  What Coleridge meant by ‘experience’ was not simply what happened to him – in the Quantocks, at Gallow Hill and Keswick, in the Mediterranean and London – but what happened in him, as man, as poet, as thinker, as aspiring religious being; and a prominent element in his experience was the experience of making poetry and the continuous effort to see clearly and to unravel ‘the Goings-on within’.[5]  Certain arguments that had placed him ‘on firm land’ in his early thinking, he says in the first number of The Friend, ‘were not suggested to me by Books, but forced on me by reflection on my own Being, and Observation of those about me, especially of little Children’.[6]  Questions about being and knowing were in his mind inevitably linked to questions about our inner goings-on; his statement that ‘metaphysics and psychology have long been my hobby-horse’ accounts for the strength and fertility of his critical philosophy: ‘I labored at a solid foundation, on which permanently to ground my opinions, in the component faculties of the human mind itself, and their comparative dignity and importance.’[7]  His capacity for minute observation, whether it is to terminate in a poem like Frost at Midnight or in a suite of philosophical recognitions, is dynamic, formative, heuristic.

In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering thro’ the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing anything new.  Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phaenomenon were the dim Awaking of a forgotten or hidden Truth of my inner Nature / It is still interesting as a Word, a Symbol!  It is Λογος, the Creator!  <and the Evolver!>[8]

His attention, directed both inward and outward, is characteristically impetuous and (as he said of some of Wordsworth’s poetry) ‘of a sinewy strength.’

Sometimes when I earnestly look at a beautiful Object or Landscape, it seems as if I were on the the brink of a Fruition still denied – as if Vision were an appetite: even as a man would feel, who having put forth all his muscular strength in an act of pro-silience, is at that very moment held back – he leaps & yet moves not from his place. ...[9]

Many years later he could tell the young Thomas Allsop how

A naturally, at once searching and communicative disposition, the necessity of reconciling the restlessness of an ever-working Fancy with an intense craving after a resting-place for my Thoughts in some principle that was derived from experience, but of which all other knowledge should be but so many repetitions under various limitations, even as circles, squares, triangles, etc., etc., are but so many positions of space.[10]

And within a few weeks of his death

I am by the law of my nature a reasoner.  A person who should suppose I meant by that word, an arguer, would not only not understand me, but would understand the contrary of my meaning.  I can take no interest whatever in hearing or saying anything merely as a fact – merely as having happened.  It must refer to something within me before I can regard it with any curiosity or care.  My mind is always energic – I don’t mean energetic; I require in everything what, for lack of another word, I may call propriety – that is, a reason why the thing is at all, and why it is there or then rather than elsewhere or at another time.[11]

Concerned from his early years with ‘Facts of mind’; convinced, as Aristotle was, that ‘In Wonder all Philosophy began: in Wonder it ends: and Admiration fills up the interspace’; he developed a most sensitive psychological tact (a favourite word of his).  A sense of tactile immediacy lies equally at the roots of his poetry, his philosophy, his criticism, his religion.[12]  His sketch of Plato’s mind, in the Philosophical Lectures of 1818-19, is drawn with an imaginative force that, like his account of Hamlet, more than half suggests a self-portrait.

Plato began in meditation, thought deeply within himself of the goings-on of his own mind and of the powers that there were in that mind, conceived to himself how this could be, and if it were, what must be the necessary results and agencies of it, and then looked abroad to ask if this were a dream, or whether it were indeed a revelation from within, and a waking reality.  He employed his observation as the interpreter of his meditation, equally free from the fanatic who abandons himself to the wild workings of the magic cauldron of his own brain mistaking every form of delirium for reality, and from the cold sensualist who looks at death as the alone real, or life of the world, by not considering that the very object was seen to him only by the seeing powers, and what a little further consideration would have led him to deduce, that that which could make him see it must be an agent, and a power like his own, whilst that which was merely seen, which was purely passive, could have no other existence than what arose out of an active power that had produced it.[13]

To come upon vision, to see clearly and to know deeply, were for him not enough: he must make known what he had come to know.  His educative instinct – propaedeutic rather than paedagogic – is a strong impulse to affirm the nature and power of the human spirit.  Denied all the easy means of access to an attentive public, he yet wished to make the journey towards truth ‘as much easier’ to others as it had been difficult for him; he wished ‘to convey not instruction merely, but fundamental instruction; not so much to shew my Reader this or that fact, as to kindle his own torch for him, and leave it to himself to chuse the particular objects, which he might wish to examine by its light’.[14]  He wished to establish

Education of the Intellect, by awakening the Method of self-development, ... not any specific information that can be conveyed into it from without ... not storing the passive Mind with the various sorts of knowledge most in request, as if the Human Soul were a mere repository or banqueting-room, but to place it in such relations of circumstance as should gradually excite its vegetating and germinating powers to produce new fruits of Thought, new Conceptions, and Imaginations, and Ideas.[15]

If we are to follow him, we should be prepared to venture on ‘strange seas of thought’ – stranger seas perhaps than Wordsworth can have imagined when he thought of Roubiliac’s ‘marble index’ of Newton’s mind.  For one commanding element in Coleridge’s experience was his experience of making poetry, and above all the experience of making The Ancient Mariner; whereby almost at the very beginning he had drawn out of his moral nature a profound and imaginative sense of himself as an individual creature under the eye of heaven – a vision elusive, even terrifying, yet germinal, urgent, and prophetic.  From his own notebooks and letters, and from the many things reported of him by Lamb and Southey, by William and Dorothy Wordsworth, by Humphry Davy, Hazlitt, De Quincey, and Henry Crabb Robinson – from all these, and much more, we are able to move into his presence, often day by day and hour by hour; and can come to know him as a person complex yet with a childlike mind; affectionate, gregarious, and solitary; eloquent in self-revelation and at times self-pitying; hypochondriacal, and not least exuberant in self-mockery; glorious and ashamed, haunted, stricken, dismayed, triumphant; buoyant on the whole, a wonderful friend, radically fearless and most generous.  To follow him so, not only on the Mariner’s voyage which is also the voyage of his inner life, but also through all ‘the secret confessional of [his] Thought’,[16] a reader needs to be patient at times, sometimes forgiving, and more than a little Coleridgean.  There will in any case be glories and astonishments, and quiet homecomings of discovery enough.

II

Any person beginning to read Coleridge needs at least two pieces of avuncular warning.  One is to do with his reputation, or rather, with the dismissive lay estimate that neither the increasing authority of modern scholars nor the ever-accumulating mass of faithful commentary has yet managed wholly to reverse or rectify.  The other is to do with the nature and constitution of Coleridge’s writing and the form we have it in at present.

During the last thirty years of his life, Coleridge was abused, often and publicly, for being a poet manqué.  As a young man (the argument goes) he had shown exceptional promise and accomplishment as a poet, but somewhere along the line (some have suggested Dejection as the watershed) he lost the thread – through neglect of his talents, through indolence, perversity, or lack of courage – and drifted into ‘the holy jungle of transcendental metaphysics’ propped up by the dogmatic crutch of orthodox Trinitarian theology.[17]  That he became addicted to opium seems to have been quite widely known in his day, even though laudanum was then as commonplace as aspirin is to us; that Coleridge took drugs was almost the only fact that most laymen knew about him, long before drug-taking had been sanctified by a bemused idolatry of la jeunesse dorée.  His successive prose works, and even the Christabel volume, were roughly handled by reviewers, not least by his one-time admirer and friend William Hazlitt.  Except for Aids to Reflection (1825) and Church and State (1830), his works sold so slowly that he was inclined to speak of them as ‘printed rather than published’ and would repeat Milton’s phrase about ‘winding-sheets for pilchards’.  During his lifetime, his reputation as a prose writer was for gratuitous obscurity of the German sort, for whimsical archaism and oddity, for a heavy and opulent style quite unlike the snappy ‘rationalist’ manner fashionable in his day, for indirection and lack of concentrated force, for an unfocused brilliance that did little to illuminate pedantic speculations which were of little relevance to the modern temper.[18]  One anonymous reviewer, during Coleridge’s lifetime, did not hesitate to accuse him of neglecting his wife and children; and Coleridge had been dead only two months when De Quincey published the first of a series of articles drawing attention to ‘a singular infirmity besetting Coleridge’s mind’: an alleged habit of literary plagiarism.  To those who made no effort to read his writings carefully, his work seemed an abortive curiosity (like Kubla Khan), ruinous, redeemed only by one great poem that had had no progeny.

A view much like this had lively currency through the second half of the nineteenth century: it gathered weight from Irving Babbitt’s dismissal of all things ‘romantic’, was firmly (and a little patronisingly) expressed by T. S. Eliot as a young man, and is still categorically implied in F. R. Leavis’s angry proposition that it is a scandal that Coleridge’s work should be considered worthy of serious examination in a university.[19]  A few incidental passages in the Biographia, it was reluctantly conceded, were of more than common interest – the bit about the origin of Lyrical Ballads and the much-disputed distinction between Fancy and Imagination.  Otherwise all that mattered was The Ancient Mariner and half a hundred pages of ‘pure gold’ scattered elsewhere.[20]  Prominent in this pervasive parody are two items: Thomas Carlyle’s eloquent and malicious portrait of Coleridge at Highgate in the Life of John Sterling; and the closing sentence of E. K. Chambers’s industrious but obtuse biography written more than a century later: ‘So Coleridge passed, leaving a handful of golden poems, an emptiness in the heart of a few friends, and a will-o’-the-wisp light for bemused thinkers.’[21]

As Francis Jeffrey said (anonymously) of Wordsworth’s Excursion: ‘This will never do!’  The relation between poet and philosopher in Coleridge is a question of prime and central importance, not easy of blunt solution.  The question of alleged plagiarism – a hare that has given plenty of vigorous exercise to greyhound historians of ideas – is matter not only for minute study of the intellectual and documentary evidence but also for sensitive psychological investigation.[22]  We may still say with Coleridge that ‘The axioms of the unthinking are to the philosopher the deepest problems as being the nearest to the mysterious root and partaking at once of its darkness and its pregnancy.’[23]  But a counter-current had set in, during Coleridge’s lifetime and shortly after: in two remarkable (but little-known) essays of Henry Nelson Coleridge (1821 and 1834)[24]; in the tribute of a gifted young contemporary, F. D. Maurice (in the second edition of The Kingdom of Christ, 1842); in John Stuart Mill’s essay of 1840 which – from a more limited and less sympathetic angle of vision than Maurice’s – found Coleridge (with Bentham) one of the two great seminal minds of the age;[25] in the careful editing of his work by members of his family beginning immediately after his death; and even during his lifetime in the sudden interest in his work in New England that led to the only collective edition of his work we have.  None of those things was decisive, however.  We now know that Coleridge’s influence was profound and pervasive, though largely anonymous and subterranean.  A more accurate and subtle understanding had had to wait upon the editing of major works and large quantities of manuscripts.  The dismissive and contemptuous view, once fashionable, is no longer seriously tenable – not since the publication of J. L. Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu (1927, 1930), I. A. Richards’s Coleridge on Imagination (1934), Kathleen Coburn’s Inquiring Spirit (1951), and Humphry House’s Clark Lectures of 1951-2; and William Walsh’s Coleridge: the Work and the Relevance (1967) is only the most catholic of a number of detailed studies that have been fertilised by the text of the Collected Letters and by the text and notes of the Notebooks.  What has been crystallizing as a ‘new’ appreciation of Coleridge is well represented by the other essays in this volume.  Many-sided and short of definitiveness, it is not a doctrinal position to which conformity is either invited or expected.  Whatever it is, it is informed by the presence of Coleridge himself as a person, as imaginative intelligence; informed too by the ambience of his poetic-philosophical way of mind, and by his personal need to struggle as he did in his thinking, striving to make his work, if not shapely, certainly life-giving.

His published work being what it is, the demands on a reader or expositor are often severe.  The difficulty is intrinsic, as he himself said about the difficulty in grasping ‘the transcendent or genetic philosophy’:

One and perhaps the greatest obstacle ... arises in the tendency to look abroad, out of the thing in question, in order by means of some other thing analogous to understand the former.  But this is impossible – for the thing in question is the act we are describing – Cohesion, for instance – and by this all coherents & all particular forms of cohesion are to be rendered intelligible, not it by them.[26]

So the first question, about Coleridge’s reputation and how to find a just starting-point that might secure for us ‘that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’[27], has already led to the second question, about the state and availability of Coleridge’s work.  Part of the difficulty here is the sheer quantity and minuteness of the material, even if we exclude (as we cannot) the variety and scope of ancillary and related material.  Coleridge often accused himself of constitutional indolence; the charge is not easy to support.  The Collected Coleridge edition will comprise sixteen titles in about 22 volumes; the Collected Letters will make six thick volumes, the Notebooks another five large volumes of text and five of commentary.  Even by 1815 Coleridge might well say: ‘By what I have effected, am I to be judged by my fellow men; what I could have done, is a question for my own conscience.’[28]  And part of the difficulty arises from the variable quality of the published texts themselves, which run all the way from deliberately cavalier work like Joseph Cottle’s to the refined and scrupulous editions that are now beginning to appear; and in between, still and for some time to come, the texts we have to use most, often textually imperfect, weak or uneven in annotation and critical apparatus, and poorly indexed, if indexed at all.

The Canon

For bibliographical purposes Coleridge’s writing can be considered in two divisions: poetry and prose.  Within each of these divisions we can recognise canonical works (published in book form by Coleridge in his lifetime) and sub-canonical works (published after his death, and varying from virtually complete works in manuscript to groups of fragmentary materials later rationalised by editors).

POEMS: Coleridge published three early volumes of verse: Poems on Various Subjects (1796), Poems ‘Second Edition’ (1797), and Poems ‘Third Edition’ (1803).  Poems 1797 includes much of the 1796 Poems but has several additions (including some poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd) and is substantially a new book: Poems 1803 leaves out the Lamb and Lloyd poems and includes most of the 1797 poems, but the selection and arrangement were supervised by Lamb in Coleridge’s absence.  ‘Fears in Solitude’, ‘France: an Ode’, and ‘Frost at Midnight’ were published together in a 24-page pamphlet in 1798: and in that same year The Ancient Mariner and three other poems were included anonymously in Lyrical Ballads.  (The Ancient Mariner, extensively revised for the 1800 edition, remained in Lyrical Ballads, with the author’s name unacknowledged, until the 1805 edition was superseded by Poems in Two Volumes (1807).)  Except for the verse translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein (1800) and the three editions of his verse drama Remorse (1813), Coleridge published no poems in book form until the Christabel, Kubla Khan, and Pains of Sleep volume in 1816, which, despite savage reviews, ran to three editions in that year.  Before Christabel was published, Coleridge had prepared in 1815 the materials for his collective edition, published in 1817 as Sibylline Leaves.  The poems in the Christabel volume were not included, but here The Ancient Mariner first appeared under its author’s name, enriched with an important marginal gloss; and the critical introduction projected for Sibylline Leaves turned into Biographia Literaria.  After that he made no collection con amore.  Poetical Works in three volumes followed in 1828, including Remorse, the Wallenstein translation, and Zapolya (separately published in 1817), as well as the contents of the Christabel volume; it was handsomely printed by William Pickering with the new Aldine device of a dolphin enfolding an anchor.  This edition, hastily prepared in trying circumstances, was printed in only 500 copies.  Another edition, only slightly revised, followed in 1829.  When the 1834 edition was being prepared Coleridge was dying and the editorial work was largely, if not wholly, done by his nephew-son-in-law Henry Nelson Coleridge.  The Poetical Works in their successive editions become more and more cumulative; yet, if the 1834 edition included a number of juvenilia and occasional verses that Coleridge had earlier rejected, it also included a number of interesting ‘late’ poems beyond those collected in 1828.[29]

After Coleridge’s death, Henry Nelson, Sara, and Derwent Coleridge clarified and extended the canon of poems, particularly in the editions of 1844 and 1852; and R. H. Shepherd made further additions in his anonymous four volume Poetical and Dramatic Works of 1877.  The work of that generation culminates in two editions prepared by close friends and drawn from the rich cumulus of family manuscripts and records: James Dykes Campbell’s The Poetical Works (Macmillan 1893 &c) based on the 1829 text, and Ernest Hartley Coleridge’s The Complete Poetical Works (2 vol. Oxford 1912) based on the 1834 text.  Campbell’s edition, of which his S. T. Coleridge: A Narrative of the Events of his Life (1894) is the splendid by-product, is the more companionable of the two, with its two-column layout, interesting appendixes, and intelligent but unobtrusive notes.  E. H. C.’s edition, with its stronger textual and bibliographical bias, is for the time being the essential scholar’s edition, though from the critical point of view it needs to be supplemented with Campbell’s notes.[30]  In both editions the poems are arranged chronologically, a method that Coleridge himself approved but never used.  The fact that both editors devote separate sections to epigrams, poetic fragments, first drafts, adaptations, and the like points to the extremely intricate problems that face any attempt to collect all Coleridge’s poetical works into a single arrangement.[31]  Even E. H. C.’s work has been overtaken by standards of technical scholarship and a view of Coleridge that he could not have foreseen; yet these two editions, each in its own way, remain models of care, skill, and devotion; and fortunately both continue to be kept in print.

PROSE: Coleridge was an even more unlucky author with his prose works than with his poems: only Aids to Reflection (1825) and Church and State (1830) received a second edition in his lifetime.  Five ephemeral pamphlets issued in 1795 were not reissued; nor was his first periodical The Watchman (10 numbers, 1796).[32]  His first major prose work, The Friend, was issued in 28 numbers from June 1809 to March 1810, was reissued in volume form with supplementary matter in 1812, and again in three volumes in 1818, so revised and expanded as to be virtually a new work.[33]  In April 1816 Coleridge had taken up residence with the Gillmans in Highgate and celebrated his new circumstances with an impressive series of publications.  In 1816 The Statesman’s Manual (the first Lay Sermon) was published shortly after the Christabel volume; in 1817, Biographia Literaria (with Sibylline Leaves, both of which had been practically complete by the end of 1815), and the second Lay Sermon (‘Blessed are ye that sow beside all waters’); in 1818 the general introduction to the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, ‘On Method’ (which was turned into the Essays on Method in the 1818 Friend after Coleridge had withdrawn from the encyclopaedia project), and two pamphlets in support of Sir Robert Peel’s bill against the mistreatment of factory children.  After that, Coleridge concentrated upon trying to complete the ‘Opus Maximum’ and only two prose works were to follow: Aids to Reflection (London 1825, New York 1829, London 1831) and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830, two editions).[34]

To sketch out the history of the Coleridge prose canon is no difficult matter; but the tidiness of the account gives little hint of the nature of the work itself or of the skill that was needed on the part of editors (and is still needed) to present these works as ‘living educts’ of his imagination and of his whole way of mind.[35]  If every piece of Coleridge’s writing had been composed with the secure self-confidence that brought The Ancient Mariner into existence, and if every piece of his prose had been written in fortunate circumstances with the sure prospect of a sympathetic reading, his collected works might well have the orderly self-containedness of Goethe’s oeuvre, or at least the sequential self-definition of Eliot’s or Valéry’s or Yeats’s essays, or of Hazlitt’s writings or even Carlyle’s.  Many factors militated against the security of his single prose works: The Friend, written ex improviso in its first version and carefully revised seven years later, is probably, despite its somewhat miscellaneous character, the least unsatisfactory; the Biographia was written quickly (though from materials long meditated) under conditions of extreme personal difficulty; Aids to Reflection, like the Biographia, changed and grew under his hand while he was writing it.  A second edition would have allowed him to revise, as he did with Church and State, and reconsider, as he did with The Friend.  When he sent corrected copies of Sibylline Leaves and the Biographia to Tom Poole he said: ‘so wildly have they been printed, that a corrected Copy is of some value to those, to whom the works themselves are of any.’[36]  Nevertheless Coleridge was an inveterate reviser and corrector of his own writing; he annotated several copies of the 1818 Friend, H. N. C. and Sara worked from an annotated copy of the Biographia (now lost), and marked or annotated copies of practically all his works have survived.  The early editors made good use of Coleridge’s notes and corrections; and many more of these remain to be brought into focus in the Collected Coleridge.  But we shall never have Coleridge’s final considered view on any of his books.  Less than a month before he died, Coleridge said:

The metaphysical disquisition at the end of the first volume of the Biographia Literaria is unformed and immature; it contains the fragments of the truth, but it is not fully thought out.  It is wonderful to myself to think how infinitely more profound my views now are, and yet how much clearer they are withal.  The circle is completing; the idea is coming round to, and to be, the common sense.[37]

But he never rewrote that section and it is clear that he did not tell H. N. C. what his revision would have been.

When Mill wrote his essays on Bentham and Coleridge in 1840 he had before him a substantial part of Bowring’s collective edition of Bentham’s writing.  He had no corresponding edition of Coleridge; if he had, one can imagine that he could have given a rather less stereotyped account of Coleridge than he did.  In fact, Mill would not have had long to wait.  Immediately after Coleridge’s death, members of his family made it their duty not only to restore all the major works to circulation in the best editions they could construct, but also to complete and methodize writings that they recognised would enhance the still-ambiguous reputation of their distinguished forebear.  Their desire to make the best showing they could for Coleridge is understandable: it led them to rewording and excisions that we now find inadvisable, and to the silent fusion of disparate materials that we now consider injudicious.  But their work was affectionate, careful, and intelligent; informed by motives beyond literary piety or archaeological obsession, their work preserves a living connexion with the man himself.[38]

In his will Coleridge named Joseph Henry Green, his philosophical collaborator, as his literary executor.  At the time of his death it was agreed that Henry Nelson Coleridge, who had married Coleridge’s daughter Sara in 1829, should be responsible for editing and reissuing the published work and for preparing fragmentary and uncollected material, particularly of the literary sort, at his discretion; Green would look after the philosophical manuscripts.[39]  H. N. C. was no stranger to Coleridge or his ways of working or his manuscripts: since 1822 he had been collecting from his uncle’s conversation the material that was to be published by John Murray in two volumes in 1835 (Specimens of the Table Talk of the late S. T. Coleridge), a favourite with Coleridge readers ever since its first appearance; and he had been largely responsible for collecting and editing the Poetical Works of 1834, and had written for the Quarterly Review the most perceptive account of Coleridge’s poetry ever written by a contemporary.[40]  So members of Coleridge’s family became the first careful editors of his work: his nephew Henry Nelson Coleridge (born the year Lyrical Ballads was first published) and his wife Sara, who was Coleridge’s only daughter; then his youngest son Derwent, two years younger than Sara; and after Derwent had died, Coleridge’s grandson Ernest Hartley.

With remarkable industry H. N. C. and Sara published a number of volumes in rapid succession, all of them except the Table Talk under William Pickering’s imprint: after Table Talk* (2 vol, John Murray, 1835), Literary Remains* appeared (Vol I and II in 1836, III in 1838, IV in 1839); then On the Constitution of Church and State with The Statesman’s Manual and Lay Sermon (1839), Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit* (1840), Poetical Works (1842), Aids to Reflection (1843), and The Friend (1844).  H. N. C. had died in 1842 when the new edition of The Friend was complete and work on Biographia Literaria well under way.  Sara continued the work, publishing the Biographia, with H. N. C.’s valuable ‘Biographical Supplement’ and her own scholarly and dignified introduction, in 1847.  S. B. Watson’s edition of the Theory of Life* (from manuscript) was published independently in 1848.  In 1849 Sara published Notes and Lectures Upon Shakespeare and some other Old Poets and Dramatists*, extracted from Literary Remains II with some additions: this was to prove an important book for Coleridge’s reputation as literary critic and for the development of Shakespeare criticism altogether.  Essays on his own Times*, a three-volume selection of Coleridge’s contributions to newspapers and periodicals, followed in 1850, the last of the series to be published by Pickering.  Thereafter the new editions were taken by Edward Moxon, the beauty of whose printing almost tempts us to forget that he destroyed all but some sixty volumes of Charles Lamb’s ‘ragged regiment’.  Sara and her brother Derwent prepared a new edition of the poems and dramatic works, but Sara had died before the Poetical Works was published in 1852.  Derwent continued with a new edition of the two Lay Sermons (1852) and the Dramatic Works (1852); then Notes on English Divines* (2 vol, 1853) extracted mostly from Literary Remains III and IV, and Notes Theological, Political, and Miscellaneous* (1853), from Literary Remains with some interesting additions – the last two intended, with Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare, to form a comprehensive and methodical arrangement of the marginalia; and finally, Aids to Reflection (1854).

Here the history of Coleridge’s American reputation may be considered: it was to bring several American scholars and writers to visit him in Highgate in the last years of his life.  Remorse was published in New York in the year of its first London appearance (1813); perhaps the poems had wider early currency than the first American edition of Sibylline Leaves in 1827 would suggest.  Before Coleridge’s death, understandably, a steady and increasing demand for the poems had been established.  The response to the prose is more unexpected: it seems to have been more vigorous in the United States than in England.  Biographia Literaria had its first New York edition in 1817 (the year of first publication) and other editions followed in 1834 and 1843, and a reprint of the H. N. C. and Sara edition in 1848.  Table Talk and the Theory of Life had American editions also in the year of first publication, in New York 1835 and Philadelphia 1848; and Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840) appeared in a Boston edition in 1841.  In 1846 a one-volume Works of Coleridge in Prose and Verse (546 pages) was published by an anonymous editor in Philadelphia and sold so well that it was reissued at about three-yearly intervals for some time.  The most significant event, however, was the publication of Aids to Reflection in Burlington in 1829 with a long ‘Preliminary Essay’ by the Rev. James Marsh.  James Marsh, born in 1794, was President of the University of Vermont from 1826 to 1833, and then, until his death in 1842, professor of philosophy.  He was responsible for the edition of the Aids; The Friend followed in 1831 and the Statesman’s Manual in 1832, both with a Burlington imprint.  A student of Marsh’s, William Shedd, born in 1820 and graduated at the University of Vermont in 1839, became professor of English literature after Marsh’s death (1845-52) and persisted in the enthusiasm for Coleridge that Marsh had stimulated.  After leaving the University of Vermont for a theological career that later placed him on the staff of the Union Theological Seminary from 1862 until his death in 1893, he published in seven volumes with a New York imprint The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1853).  Significantly there is a long (and rather cloudy) introductory essay on Coleridge’s ‘Philosophical and Theological Opinions’; the emphasis on Literary Remains is reversed – the first volume is devoted to Aids to Reflection and The Statesman’s Manual, the poems are relegated to the last volume.  This collection is more complete than is commonly supposed: it comprises all the canonical and sub-canonical works in their latest London editions – including Literary Remains, Table Talk, the Theory of Life, and a little new material.  It is the only collective edition so far published.  Reissued with titlepages dated 1854, 1858, 1860, 1863, 1868, 1871, 1875 (all presumably the first printing), it was reprinted in 1884 with a ‘Complete Index’ by Arthur Gilman.  Beyond Shedd’s edition there are reprints in the Bohn library, usually plain texts in a small format not disagreeable to read; and Thomas Ashe did some useful and original work in the Bohn editions of Table Talk (1884), and of the Miscellanies, Aesthetic and Literary including the Theory of Life (1885).  But few scholars of Coleridge have been able to manage without Shedd.

In 1895, twelve years after Derwent Coleridge’s death, Ernest Hartley Coleridge published two volumes of Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge*, and an important small volume – beautifully designed and printed – of extracts from the manuscript notebooks under the title Anima Poetae*.  His edition of the Complete Poetical Works (1912) brings the family editing to a close.  Not only did they edit diligently; they treasured up manuscripts, books, and transcripts; and these, most of them now preserved in permanent collections, make it possible for us to verify their work and to venture beyond it.

In the editorial work of this century, manuscripts have been, as they were for E. H. C., of paramount importance.  The poems have always been kept in print in various forms, and editions and reprints of The Ancient Mariner are almost beyond numbering.  The prose had had no such currency.  The Nonesuch selection edited by Stephen Potter in 1933 marked and stimulated a growing interest in the prose as well as in a range of poems beyond the ‘big three’.  R. J. White’s selection of The Political Thought of Coleridge (1938) and his telescoped but intelligently edited versions of the two Lay Sermons in his Political Tracts of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley (1953) drew attention to Coleridge’s contemporaneity as a social and political thinker, and H. St J. Hart made a new edition of Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit in 1956.  Biographia Literaria, caught between the monisms of the New Criticism and a new Aristotelianism that saw itself as ‘anti-romantic’, received no serious editorial attention after Shawcross’s edition (1907) and was accorded (with a few notable exceptions) only polite lip-service until about ten years ago.  Alice D. Snyder’s edition of the essay On Method (1934) places almost as much emphasis on manuscript fragments as did her earlier book Coleridge on Logic and Learning (1929); collectanea rather than editions, these represent a tentative foray into the jungle of Coleridge’s philosophical manuscripts.  T. M. Raysor’s two volumes of Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism (1930, revised 1960) clarify and extend Sara’s work largely through the use of manuscript sources – an important improvement in content and arrangement even if the presentation is below the technical standards now considered necessary.  His volume of Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism (1936), mostly marginalia but selected with a strong anti-theological bias, draws upon originals as far as possible, includes new materials, and goes well beyond Literary Remains and Notes Theological, Political, and Miscellaneous in accuracy.  R. Florence Brinkley’s Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century (1955), restricted somewhat by the artificial limits of its theme and by the exclusion of Shakespeare, brings together an ambitious quantity of material (with varying degrees of authority) from marginalia, notebooks, miscellaneous manuscripts, and printed sources in order to establish for Coleridge’s philosophical and aesthetic thinking a broader reference than Kant and Schelling.

All these in various ways show the extreme difficulty of piecing together Coleridge’s manuscripts in any particular area as a direct statement of his thinking: there are always severe problems of chronology and the problem of defining an area is almost invincible.  The greatest success has been achieved where (as in the cast of the Shakespeare materials) precise topical definition is possible, and where (as with the letters and notebooks) the manuscripts define themselves as a distinct group.  The only substantial addition to the prose canon in this century is Kathleen Coburn’s edition of the 1818-19 Philosophical Lectures* (1949), ingeniously reconstructed from a shorthand transcript with the interpolation of material from contemporary notebooks and published writings: and the notes to this edition include a valuable selection of unpublished marginalia, particularly on Tennemann and Kant.  Earl Leslie Griggs’s two volumes of Unpublished Letters (1932) was the forerunner to the comprehensive edition of Collected Letters that started appearing in 1956; the difference between the two editions is the difference in the quality of manuscript sources used.  With the publication of the first pair of volumes of the Notebooks in 1957, edited by Kathleen Coburn, ‘Coleridge redivivus’ becomes a real possibility.  Here we see the closing of the process initiated by Lowes’s Road to Xanadu (1927) and affirmed with modest clarity by Miss Coburn in Inquiring Spirit: A New Presentation of Coleridge (1951).  Though there have been very few additions to the prose canon since the twenties, the methodical exploration of manuscripts has transformed and renewed our knowledge of Coleridge and our attitude to him and his work.  The change is well summarised by Miss Coburn: ‘In 1934 the Nonesuch Press compendium of Coleridge’s prose and verse had seemed to suffice; thirty years later nothing less than a collected edition, as nearly complete as may be, seems adequate.’[41]

Every editor of Coleridge runs headlong into the fact that when Coleridge’s mind is active, unity is always implicit.  The unifying force of that ‘tenacious & systematizing’ mind is so pervasive as to defy all attempts to deal with his work a little at a time, to divide and conquer like an army occupying hostile territory or a conscientious legatee taking over as inheritance a huge ramshackle estate.  To isolate any part of his work from all the rest, even for convenience or for the sake of method, for orderly distinction rather than division, is extremely difficult; and to index a Coleridge work a person almost needs to be Coleridge.  Beyond the canonical and sub-canonical works with their intricate tendrillings in every direction, there are the manuscripts – letters, notebooks, marginalia, those folio volumes of miscellaneous material in the British Museum acquired from E. H. C., and the files and volumes of manuscripts and transcripts at Victoria College, Toronto.  Like Mallory’s Everest, they are there.  A notebook entry, written when the lectures were at last finished, shows us Coleridge in relation to these materials:

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 struggling 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 – 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 –[42]

As he himself notices, the principle of unity in multeity obtains – not ideally, to be sure, or in every instance, but as a constant dynamic interinanimation that makes every fragment at least potentially reverberant; as though every item in this vast complex were held in a ‘subtle Vulcanian Spider-web Net of Steel – strong as Steel yet subtle as the ether’[43]; as though every item were ‘seeking, as it were asking’ for the self-realising relation that can declare that particular part an integral element in the whole.  In the sense that not every item is self-subsistent, the manuscript material is fragmentary; in another and more profound sense, the separate items are facets rather than fragments, germs implying growth rather than broken pieces that bespeak disorder or death.  To see how H. N. C. and Sara, and then T. M. Raysor, pieced together the Shakespeare criticism from lecture notes, marginalia and scattered manuscripts, newspaper reports and personal accounts is to grasp not only the difficulty but also the intricacy of the procedure – a procedure that can seldom claim finality.  The Shakespeare criticism can without undue difficulty be separated out.  Not so the magnetic field of the notebooks.  The editing of these, in scope, delicacy, and comprehensiveness, is a huge instance of the Coleridgean method called in life and shaped by the sheer nature and substance of the Coleridean materials, themselves a continuous embodiment of Coleridge’s intellectual, emotional, and imaginative activity.

III

Let us suppose that somebody wants to start reading Coleridge with the idea of getting to know his work in detail and as a whole.  What, beyond what has already been written, can be offered by way of advice?  What books may be profitably read in what order?  For a start we can take warning from Coleridge himself.  By the time he was revising The Friend – ‘the Main Pipe, from which I shall play off the whole accumulation and reservoir of my Head and Heart’[44] – he was well aware of the demands he would make on a reader.

In the establishment of principles and fundamental doctrines, I must of necessity require the attention of my reader to become my fellow-labourer.  The primary facts essential to the intelligibility of my principles I can prove to others only as far as I can prevail on them to retire into themselves and make their own minds the objects of their stedfast attention.  But, on the other hand, I feel too deeply the importance of the convictions, which first impelled me to the present undertaking, to leave unattempted any honourable means of recommending them to as wide a circle as possible.[45]

A few years later, in a marginal note on Southey’s Life of Wesley, he remarked upon the ‘obtruded purpose of the Friend or the Aids to Reflection; in which the aim of every sentence is to solicit, nay, tease the Reader to ask himself, whether he actually does or does not, understand distinctly?  Whether he has however reflected on the precise meaning of the word, however familiar it may be both to his ear and his mouth?’[46]  Yet these demands apply not only to the prose works, to whatever is more or less discursive, speculative, theoretical, metaphysical; they apply also to his poems.  The immense importance of Coleridge’s experience of making poetry of the first order – The Ancient Mariner particularly – can hardly be too strongly pressed: it is a shaping principle in his psychology, in his critical theory and practice, in his metaphysics, in his struggle with Kant’s philosophy.  If our sense of Coleridge’s poetry is casual, shallow, or attenuated, we shall probably fail to experience in all his work the energy and specificity of his peculiarly tactile and lyrical intelligence.[47]

In constructing Aids to Reflection upon a series of ‘Aphorisms’, Coleridge defined the word aphorism as ‘determinate position’ (giving the etymology) and ended by saying that a ‘twofold act of circumscribing, and detaching, when it is exerted by the mind on subjects of reflection and reason, is to aphorize, and the result an aphorism.’[48]  In Coleridge’s use, an aphorism is intended to initiate and guide further reflection.  In this sense, three statements of Coleridge’s may be of value to a reader.

In all processes of the Understanding the shortest way will be discovered the last, and this perhaps while it constitutes the great advantage of having a Teacher to put us on the shortest road at the first, yet sometimes occasions a difficulty in the comprehension –/ in as much as the longest way is more near to the existing state of the mind, nearer to what, if left to myself on starting the thought, I should have thought next. –The shortest way gives me the knowledge best; the longest way makes me more knowing.[49]

Again, drawing a parallel between the growth of ‘our cognitions’ and the education of children, he writes:

There is a period of aimless activity and unregulated accumulation, during which it is enough if we can preserve them in health and out of harm’s way.  Again, there is a period of orderliness, of circumspection, of discipline, in which we purify, separate, define, select, arrange, and settle the nomenclature of communication.  There is also a period of dawning and twilight, a period of anticipation, affording trials of strength.  And all these ... will precede the attainment of a scientific METHOD.[50]

And finally, an acute insight into cognitive process altogether and also into Coleridge’s distinctive way of getting to know.

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; and find a Hare in every Nettle I make myself acquainted with.  I follow the Chamois-Hunters, and seem to set out with the same Object.  But I am no Hunter of that Chamois Goat; but avail myself of the Chace in order to a nobler purpose – that of making a road across the Mountain in which Common Sense may hereafter pass backward and forward, without desperate Leaps or Balloons that soar indeed but do not improve the chance of getting onward.[51]

Three things, it seems to me, are needed in reading Coleridge: a sense of the presence – or spell – of Coleridge’s mind-in-action, of his shaping activity; a tactile, rather than an abstractive, feeling for Coleridge materials; and, under the eye, materials fine-grained and intricate enough to ‘tease’ us into paying close attention to the particular matters in hand and to hold us from ‘the tendency to look abroad, out of the thing in question’.

No doubt, depending on the individual reader, more than one preliminary approach will be fruitful; but whatever the approach, early acquaintance with primary material is essential.  Two selective editions commend themselves: Stephen Potter’s Nonesuch edition of Select Poetry and Prose of Coleridge (1953), and I. A. Richard’s The Portable Coleridge (1950).[52]  Both offer a generous selection of poems, letters, notebook entries, and table talk, and both have topical sections devoted to politics, literary criticism, and ‘Theologico-Metaphysical’ writing.  The Nonesuch edition is the more extensive (703 pages as compared to 568) and an unusual feature is the presentation of The Ancient Mariner in the first (1798) and final (1834) versions on facing pages.  Richards’s selection of poems is outstanding for its emphasis on ‘late’ poems, that is, poems composed after about January 1807, and his introduction includes the first serious critical notice of the late poems.  Nonesuch gives more than twice as much space to letters as Richards does (Richards resolutely stops in October 1803 and gives only two letters of later date); both devote a large amount of space to literary criticism (224 pages in Nonesuch, 233 in Richards); and both are weak in marginalia.  Both were published too early to have text or references consistent with the best edition of the letters, and the notebook entries are all from Anima Poetae; but that is a state of affairs a reader of Coleridge has to get used to for some time to come.  Of the two collections, I prefer the Nonesuch edition, if only because it has almost one third more material and is a most agreeable book to handle; but Richards’s introduction to the Viking edition is much too important to miss.[53]

To read through some such comprehensive selection will acquaint a reader with ‘the great landmarks in the Map’ of the man and will nourish an affectionate (or impatient) familiarity with some flowers and gems, and with some ruins and a certain amount of underbrush.  In the preliminary phase of reading it is important to get a firm grasp on The Ancient Mariner, preferably without commentary, paying due regard to the revisions that occurred after 1798 and to the marginal gloss that first appeared (not quite complete) in 1817.  Christabel and Kubla Khan will certainly cast their spell and rouse perplexity.  Beyond the ‘big three’, the ‘conversation poems’ are important, and so is Dejection: an Ode (particularly in its relation to Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode) and the poem To William Wordsworth.  The ‘late’ poems make different critical demands, but several of them, particularly ‘Youth and Age’, ‘Work without Hope’, and the ‘Epitaph’, are moving, finely wrought, and accessible.

Given some emotional, psychological, and intellectual feeling for the country, the next step needs to be more resolute.  William Walsh’s Coleridge: The Work and the Relevance (1967) is (as far as I know) the only conspective account of the whole compass of Coleridge’s manifold activity.  With its clear explication and a penetrating commentary that shows (without over-arguing the case) how far many of Coleridge’s central concerns are concerns for our own time, this book will sharpen the reader’s perceptions for the next group of primary materials – Kathleen Coburn’s Inquiring Spirit: A New Presentation of Coleridge from his Published and Unpublished Prose Writings (1951).  This book, which seeks to remove Coleridge from ‘the special property of “the literati by profession” ’, offers recondite materials (about one third of it hitherto unpublished) under the headings of psychology, education, language, logic and philosophy, literary criticism, the other fine arts, sciences, his contemporaries, society, and religion.  The introduction is as good an introduction to Coleridge as it is to the most distinguished Coleridgean of our day; and the brief critical and bibliographical prefaces to the sections are incisive and useful.  Altogether the book is indispensable, not merely for the quality and variety of materials collected in it, but as imaging forth of Coleridge as a very sensitive, perceptive, many-sided, and intelligent man.  The book will make its demands of a reader, however; like most of Coleridge’s concentrated writing it will not be easily mastered, and at first not all parts will strike with uniform force.

The reader should now be ready for one of the delights of Coleridge scholarship – John Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu (1927, revised 1930, frequently reprinted in cloth and paperback).  Subtitled A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, this great seminal study explores ‘the enormous range of interlocked reading’ and the personal observation and experience from which these poems arose.  It is neither an account of the way the poems were written, nor an explication of their ‘meaning’.  What Lowes has done is to trace from the Gutch Memorandum Book (Notebook G) and any other available written source the verbal origins for words, phrases, and feelings that were finally embedded in the poems.  His purpose is to find actual clusters of words that we can show by documentary evidence Coleridge certainly knew, and from these to examine the transforming, selecting, and shaping functions of imagination.  A very learned textual and literary scholar, Lowes works in fascinated detail through the whole of Coleridge’s writing (as it was then available to him), and through as much of his reading as he can relevantly bring to bear.  Any reader who follows Lowes through his text and his copious notes and the 21 pages of closely printed Addenda and Corrigenda added in 1930 will be infected by Lowes’s enthusiasm, will be familiar with almost all the mainstream and most of the backwaters of Coleridge documentation, and will have learned something about Coleridge’s ‘armed vision’ and the ‘armed vision’ needed in Coleridge studies.[54]  In the end, Lowes’s psychology of poetic composition may seem less subtle than Coleridge’s performance demands.  Yet this voyage through Coleridge’s oceanic reading, this exploration of the twilight realms of Coleridge’s consciousness, is (because of the part the Gutch Memorandum Book plays in it) and invigorating introduction to the notebooks which we can now read but which Lowes himself never saw.  And The Road to Xanadu has gone far to disarm the curious assumption that in Coleridge metaphysics and abstruse learning did (or ever could) destroy the poet.

After that, two critical books may be ventured, both seminal: Humphry House’s Coleridge: The Clark Lectures 1951-52 (1953) and I. A. Richards’s Coleridge on Imagination (1934).  House’s book had better be read first.  Here a rigorous scholar of fine sensibility offers a unified view of Coleridge that takes serious account of his life and temperament, the unpublished materials (especially notebooks), and the poems.  In what sense, he asks, is Coleridge both a great artist and a great writer?  House recognised that before a complete account could be given much remained to be done, particularly in editing notebooks, letters, and marginalia.  But there is nothing tentative about his conception.  His handling of minute primary materials is a model of tact and precision; this book is as illuminating and compelling as it was when first delivered to a large Cambridge audience twenty years ago.  Richards’s book is of peculiar interest as a tribute by the man who wrote those two reluctant harbingers of the New Criticism, Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism.  Compared with one or two more recent studies of Coleridge’s theory of imagination, this book may seem exploratory (or self-exploratory) rather than definitive; but it has been very influential and it is well to pick up good influences at their source.

At this point the reader might turn to Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Kathleen Coburn (1967), a selection of fourteen critical observations written in this century.  These cover a variety of topics, and include part of I. A. Richards’s introduction to the Viking Coleridge, part of Herbert Read’s often-reprinted Coleridge as Critic, a sensitive note on patterns of sound and rhythm in Kubla Khan by Elisabeth Schneider, and not more than three essays on The Ancient Mariner.[55]  At about the same time it would be well to read the Shakespearean Criticism too, because by now (if not sooner) the Biographia Literaria will have started to loom above the threshold of attention.  From a reader’s point of view, the Shakespeare criticism leads to the Biographia and the Biographia to the Shakespeare criticism: together they form a single critical position with Shakespeare at one pole and Wordsworth at the other.

In the past thirty or forty years Biographia Literaria has received increasing attention, and so after a long period of quizzical neglect is recognised as a central document in the claim – now no longer seriously in question – that Coleridge is probably the greatest literary critic England has ever produced.[56]  The book has had an unhappy history, and its history is almost a history of Coleridge’s reputation.  Hurriedly written under pressure, carelessly printed and delayed in publication, plagued by the publisher’s error of judgement that led Coleridge to add material never intended for the book, contemptuously reviewed and in private rejected by Wordsworth, it had no hope of a second and considered edition in Coleridge’s lifetime.  Thirty years after first publication it came to a second edition in 1847, the text revised from a marked copy (now lost), enriched with notes and commentary, a biographical supplement by H. N. C. and a 180-page introduction by Sara Coleridge.  That edition was reprinted in New York in 1848 and in Shedd’s Complete Works in 1853, where it has been available ever since; but it was never reprinted in England.  A plain text has been available in the Bohn edition since 1898 and in the Everyman edition since 1906.[57]  Then in 1907, apparently out of a clear sky (unless with Saintsbury’s oblique encouragement), the Oxford University Press published a two-volume edition by John Shawcross, brother-in-law of the Wordsworth editior Ernest de Selincourt: this was to replace ‘the only annotated edition’ of 1847, ‘now long out of print’ – an edition that ‘as a whole ... does not meet the needs of the reader of to-day.’  It was more than thirty years before Shawcross’s first edition was exhausted and a photographic reprint issued in 1939; then it was reissued in 1949 and with increasing frequency since then; but not until the early 1950s was an attempt made to begin to correct the numerous literal errors in the text.  George Sampson’s self-styled ‘third edition’ (Cambridge 1920) not only ignores Shawcross but reprints less than half the book; the only fresh edition since Shawcross’s (George Watson’s Everyman edition) does not attempt Shawcross’s scope of commentary.  Shawcross’s biographical introduction is now out of date, but the extensive critical notes (incorporating much of the work of H. N. C. and Sara) are still valuable, and there is a welcome addition in the 1814 Bristol essays ‘On the Principles of Genial Criticism’ and three fragmentary essays on taste, on beauty, and on Poesy reprinted from Literary Remains.  Shawcross was much preoccupied with Coleridge’s borrowings from the German and took a more forthright view of literary influence than is any longer admissible; but he drew widely and carefully from Coleridge’s published writings (as H. N. C. and Sara had not been able to do) in order ‘to illustrate the continuity of his opinions’.  This is the edition all Coleridge scholars have to use.  It will serve until a better text, a more sensitive understanding of Coleridge’s borrowings, and a firmer command of all the Coleridge materials (both primary and critical) come together in an acceptable modern edition.

George Sampson, in printing as the ‘third edition’ only Chapters 1-4 and 14-22, with the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads and some other related documents added, accepted too literally Coleridge’s deprecatory description of the Biographia as ‘so immethodical a miscellany’, and assumed that all the gold could be extracted by simple excision.[58]  The close of Chapter 13 and most of Chapter 14 have been so often reprinted in anthologies of critical texts that Sampson’s assumption – and he was not the first to make it – was silently endorsed, and still among the uncritical is by no means dead.  I have argued elsewhere, and see no reason to change my position, that although the book is no ideal of what Coleridge wanted it to be the Biographia is a unified work, not fragmentary, not disorganized; and that the unifying theme is Coleridge’s need to arrive at a clear critical definition of William Wordsworth’s art.[59]  That the Biographia contains nothing beyond a perplexing (and unsatisfactory) distinction between Fancy and Imagination, and some interesting biographical reminiscences is a view so commonly held that one of the most obvious ‘uses’ of the book has not been nearly as widely recognized as it should be: an unsurpassed critical analysis of the art and poetry of William Wordsworth.

Biographia Literaria remains a book for personal discovery: it reaches out far beyond the expected scope of biography, aesthetics, or the philosophy of poetry.  Fortunately there is now help to be had in studies that draw the Biographia into close relation with the letters and notebooks, with The Statesman’s Manual, the Philosophical Lectures, the Theory of Life, and the Shakespeare criticism.  Richard Harter Fogle’s The Idea of Coleridge’s Criticism (1962) is an excellent topical study, and closes with an impressive Coleridgean critique of Christabel.  J. A. Appleyard’s Coleridge’s Philosophy of Literature: The Development of a Concept of Poetry 1791-1819 (1965) covers much of the same ground but in chronological sequence, and reaches some different conclusions.[60]  Neither of these books is narrowly confined, any more than Coleridge was, to literary criticism: both take due notice of Coleridge’s dominant religious and theological preoccupation from the earliest years, and of his social and political sense; and both pay due attention, as they must, to the quality and depth of Coleridge’s psychological insight and understanding.  Another book that brings Coleridge into a clear synthetic view is Richard Haven’s Patterns of Consciousness (1969).  This triad should be accurate, strenuous, and stimulating enough to arm the serious reader against the dismay that will strike him when he looks at the list of books and articles written on Coleridge since The Road to Xanadu.  But at some time a much more strenuous piece of reading should be attempted: Thomas McFarland’s immensely learned and important Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (1969).

Once this far out into the Coleridgean mental seascape we could regard ourselves as a little salty but not quite yet ancient mariners.  We need to turn back to the departure again: the letters and notebooks and marginalia – the really fine-grained primary materials that account for the steady refinement of Coleridge studies with their increasingly subtle recognitions and their clearer definition of the fruitful questions to ask.  For the first two of these, new editions are now substantially in progress.  Earl Leslie Grigg’s Collected Letters (Vol I, II 1956; III, IV 1959) bring the account to the end of 1819; the last two volumes, announced as imminent in 1968, are to be published in 1971.  Here are brought together in a careful transcription, from the original manuscripts as far as possible, all the letters that have survived in any form.  This edition provides a far better text than we have had before; it adds many new letters and gathers in the little groups of published letters that had previously taxed the memory and ingenuity of scholars.  Beyond 1819 we still turn to E. H. Coleridge’s Letters of 1895 and Griggs’s earlier Unpublished Letters, and fill in with the many other letters in manuscript and in a variety of printed sources.  It is no gesture of ingratitude to say of the Collected Letters that the treatment of classical material is less than gratifying, that the bibliographical information is a little sketchy, that the interpolated biographical commentary is sometimes unsympathetic and importunate, and the indexing perfunctory.  These are tokens of the magnitude of the task; and much the same can be said rather more strongly of Ernest de Selincourt’s edition of the Wordsworth letters.  Griggs’s edition has extended, and will continue to extend, our knowledge and understanding of Coleridge far beyond anything a reader of the published letters could have expected thirty years ago.  No student of Coleridge is well-advised to refrain from working in detail through these volumes.  Here he will find much of the man as Lamb loved to see him ‘in the quotidian undress of his mind’.  He will also find much that is central to Coleridge’s art and his thought, poured out (as his conversation was) with a large generosity of spirit, with a rare candour in self-revelation, with the startling virtuosity and exuberance of a great writer.

The notebooks, seventy in number, written to himself and for himself, are different from the letters in tune and texture.  Their range is no less than the whole conceivable range of the man and his mind, and there is nothing elsewhere in his writing, formal or private, that does not interlock with the notebooks.  Two pairs of volumes of Miss Kathleen Coburn’s edition have already been published, in 1957 and 1961 (each volume has the text in one part, the notes in the other); a third pair of volumes is now in the press.  Vol II ends with the end of 1807, Vol III with the close of the last series of lectures in March 1819; after that two more pairs of volumes and an index will follow.  Until the first volume of the Notebooks was published in 1957 we had known about them only from the few revised extracts in Southey’s Omniana (1812) with some unacknowledged additions in Literary Remains I, from the brilliant selection published by E. H. Coleridge as Anima Poetae (1895), from Alois Brandl’s imperfect transcript of the Gutch Memorandum Book (1896), and Lowes’s memorable exploration of that Notebook in The Road to Xanadu.[61]  The notebooks, as we are now coming to see them in Miss Coburn’s edition – transcribed with scrupulous accuracy, arranged as well as may be (which happens to be very well) in chronological order, provided with expository notes that place the entries in the whole context of Coleridge’s life and thought, his reading and writing, his human and historical setting – provide massive resources for discovering and rediscovering Coleridge in every conceivable state of mind from the exaltation of intellectual triumph to the nadir of humiliation and suicidal despair.  These are a treasure-house beyond any previous imagining – dramatic, human, profound, immensely fertile.  Surely there can never have been so complete and intimate a record of the mind and nature of genius except perhaps Leonard’s.  They are volumes to be read again and again, for delight and anguish as well as for study, as a tribute to the incorrigibility of the human spirit and the mysterious power of imagination and reason.

The other recognizable group of manuscript material is the marginalia – the notes that Coleridge wrote in the margins and on the flyleaves of his own (and other people’s) books.  These are very numerous and many of them have been long in print in some form or other: H. N. C. published a number of them in Literary Remains, Sara and Derwent added some more, and most of these were reprinted by Shedd; Raysor revised and added to the literary marginalia in both his collections, and Miss Brinkley made additions and revisions over a wider area; a considerable number of sets of marginalia, more or less specialised, have been published in learned periodicals and elsewhere.  The earliest extensive marginalia are rather later in date than we could have wished (there is little of substance before 1801) and a large proposition of them belong to the Highgate period.  Covering a wide range of books and subjects, and ranging from terse reactions to long reflective monologues, they represent in many cases the day-to-day, even hour-by-hour, record of Coleridge’s mind and sensibility in intimate relation to other minds.  Many of the notes have never been published; many more have never been printed fully or accurately.  As far as they can be dated with any certainty (for in many cases the same book was annotated over and over again, with notes on notes, corrections of first thoughts, new insights at a fresh reading) they stand parallel to the notebooks as a means of re-experiencing a perceptive mind in its heuristic and responsive energy.  Written on so wide a variety of books and for such various purposes, the marginalia as a whole refuse to submit to any kind of topical or chronological arrangement.  Some of the notes were written for other eyes to read, most of them not; but Coleridge considered them almost as part of his canon and hoped that at least some of them would be published.[62]  Recent critical studies of Coleridge have recognised the importance of marginalia and have put some of them to very good use.  But there is still a difficulty in finding reliable transcripts; and even when the originals can be examined, a satisfactory system of presentation and reference is often as hard to come by as an accurate reading.  So they will be collected as completely and accurately as is at present possible into some volumes of the Collected Coleridge.

The best biography of Coleridge is still James Dykes Campbell’s Narrative (1894), expanded from the biographical introduction to his edition of the Poetical Works.  Based upon his friend E. H. Coleridge’s collection of books and manuscripts, this study is well-informed, perceptive, and unsentimental.  The documentation is out of date, and we could now bring to bear a quantity of evidence that Campbell had no way of knowing.  Nevertheless it is still a very good book to read; there is nothing yet to compare with it.  Laurence Hanson’s Life of Coleridge: The Early Years (1938) is an accomplished and sensitive piece of work, much fuller than Campbell’s; but the book stops at June 1800 and has never been resumed.  E. K. Chambers’ Coleridge: A Biographical Study (1938) is at best an example of deft scholarly navigation through the manifold records of Coleridge’s life.  Unfortunately the documentation is elliptical and unhandy, the attitude imperially aloof, often scornful.  This book does not make a Coleridgean’s heart leap up.  A reader still draws most of his sense of Coleridge’s life from the letters and notebooks, and (in default of a biography more up-to-date than Campbell’s and more humane than Chambers’s) will turn to the records of his friends and associated: the journals and letters of Dorothy Wordsworth, the letters and records of Wordsworth and Lamb, of Tom Poole and Sara Hutchinson; of Southey, Godwin, the Wedgwoods, and Joseph Cottle; Humphry Davy and Daniel Stuart; De Quincey, Hazlitt, Matilda Betham, Julius Hare, F. D. Maurice, John Sterling, even Thomas Carlyle; and in the background the interminable but intelligently observant diaries of Henry Crabb Robinson.  And there is the splendid record John Keats left of his one meeting with Coleridge on Hampstead Heath.  The Armour and Howes collection, Coleridge the Talker (1940), draws a circle wide enough to include casual and obscure acquaintance.  Twenty-five years after William Hazlitt, as a man of twenty, first met Coleridge, he could still recall the sound of Coleridge’s voice.

That spell is broke; that time is gone for ever; that voice is heard no more: but still the recollection comes rushing by with thoughts of long-past years, and rings in my ears with never-dying sound.

Those who have an ear can still hear that voice – in some of the poems, in many letters, in the 1809-10 Friend, in the margins of books sometimes, in the notebooks constantly.

A scholar needs machines too.  Students of the poems are grateful to Sister Eugenia Logan for her Concordance to the Poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1940) based on E. H. Coleridge’s edition of the Complete Poetical Works.  As for bibliographies, E. H. Coleridge’s bibliography of the poems has already been mentioned (note I, p. 13 above).  The descriptive bibliography of Coleridge’s works, like some other technical branches of Coleridge scholarship, is in an imperfect state.  The most detailed descriptive bibliography of Coleridge’s works, like some other technical branches of Coleridge scholarship, is in an imperfect state.  The most detailed descriptive work was done by Thomas J. Wise in his Bibliography of Coleridge (1913).  For no reason of forgery or felony, the work is uneven and unreliable, and misleading for its dogmatic tone.  The Coleridge descriptions in his Ashley Library Catalogue (1922-36) and in his Two Lake Poets (1927) deal only with books in his own possession; some of the descriptions are marred by self-deception.  Pioneer though Wise was in author-bibliography, his methods are less systematic and complete than contemporary practice demands.  George Healey’s bibliography of The Cornell Wordsworth Collection (1957), as far as it includes Coleridge items, is a splendid model of precision and inclusiveness.  John Louis Haney’s privately printed Bibliography (1903), technically less ambitious than Wise’s work, is still much more useful, inclusive, and reliable than Wise’s scathing dismissal of the book would suggest: it contains, among a number of interesting features, the first attempt at a list of Coleridge’s annotated books (a list that can now be greatly extended) and is strong in American editions.  The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, III (1969) offers a fairly complete but immethodical checklist of biographical and critical studies to 1967, unhappily not innocent of errors and omissions.  Richard Haven will be publishing shortly a more thorough list (Coleridge 1794-1970: An annotated Bibliography).  English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research, editing by T. M. Raysor, first issued in 1950 and revised in 1956, is now being rewritten: it can be expected to give a useful account of ‘the state of the art’.

But here, at the thought of checklists of textual, biographical, and critical studies of Coleridge, the guide’s heart fails: already so much has been neglected in my account – about the philosophy, the relation to the Germans, the ‘Opus maximum’ and the ‘system’, his social and political writing, his journalism, his knowledge of Greek and Italian and music and painting; his Biblical and theological studies, his excursions into psychiatry, comparative religion, anthropology, the philosophy of history.  Here the reader must find his own way among the primary and secondary materials with the stout heart of a pearl-diver and something of the opportunist’s swashbuckling zest.  There are many memorable books and essays; and there is much dross, and for the reader some foot-slogging.  But Coleridge, himself an avid reader of Jacob Boehme, Hieronymus Fracastorius, Immanuel Swedenborg, and Giambattista Vico, and a careful reader of reports on the slave trade, the poor laws, the state of agriculture, and Animal Magnetism, would not be the person to deny that ‘a maggot may catch a Fish, and a Fish may have a Diamond Ring in its Guts ... or the Seal of Solomon’.[63]

IV

Coleridge himself has some good things to say about the readerly virtues.  A favourite maxim of his was: ‘until you understand a writer’s ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.’[64]  Jonathan Swift said: ‘When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.’  Many of the marginalia and notebook entries show that it was the same with Coleridge.

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.[65]

For the second essay in the 1818 Friend he chose a motto from Erasmus that enjoined the reader to ‘sit down to a book ... as a well-behaved visitor does to a banquet’.  But Coleridge knew well that a good reader needs something more than good manners, and liked to point out something that he picked up from the Mishnah or from Donne’s Biathanatos – that there are four kinds of readers:

1. Sponges, who absorb all they read, and return it nearly in the same state, only a little dirtied.

2. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing, and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time.

3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read.

4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit from what they read, and enable others to profit by it also.[66]

The virtues of the Mogul-diamond reader are explored elsewhere:

The conveyal of Knowledge by Words is in direct proportion to the stores and faculties of Observation (internal or external) of the person, who hears or reads them.[67]

What you have acquired by patient thoughts and cautious discrimination, demands a portion of the same effort in those who are to receive it from you.[68]

The reader, who would follow a close reasoner to the summit and absolute principle of any one important subject, has chosen a Chamois-hunter for his guide.  Our guide will, indeed, take us the shortest way, will save us many a wearisome and perilous wandering, and warn us of many a mock road that had formerly led himself to the brink of chasms and precipices, or at best in an idle circle to the spot from whence he started.  But he cannot carry us on his shoulders: we must strain our own sinews, as he has strained his; and make a firm footing on the smooth rock for ourselves, by the blood of toil from our own feet.[69]

We have encountered the Chamois-hunter figure before; we seem to be coming full circle.  ‘Alas!’, he said in The Friend, ‘legitimate reasoning is impossible without severe thinking, and thinking is neither an easy nor an amusing employment.’[70]  Now, ‘Thought and attention [are] very different Things – I never expected the former ... from the Readers of the Friend – I did expect the latter, and was disappointed.’[71]

In ATTENTION, we keep the mind passive: in THOUGHT, we rouse it into activity.  In the former, we submit to an impression – we keep the mind steady in order to receive the stamp.  In the latter, we seek to imitate the artist, while we ourselves make a copy or duplicate of his work.  ... [S]elf-knowledge, or an insight into the laws and constitution of the human mind and the grounds of religion and true morality, in addition to the effort of attention requires the energy of THOUGHT.[72]

If we are not prepared to make the first effort of attention and then engage in the activity of thinking, Coleridge’s writing will remain for us ‘for ever a sealed-up volume, a deep well without a wheel or windlass’: this, he said, would have been the fate even of Shakespeare’s ‘inexhaustible mine of virgin treasure’ but for the ‘living comment and interpretation’ of fine actors.[73]

In reading Coleridge we may often feel, as Coleridge felt in listening to ‘the mockery of logic’ by Hamlet and the clowns: that we are meeting ‘the traditional wit valued like truth for its antiquity, and treasured up, like a tune, for use’.[74]  When he chooses for his judge

               the earnest impersonal Reader

Who in the work forgets me and the world and himself

our minds turn towards his epitaph.  But they turn also to what essay written for the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana in which he explores the need for method – method initiated and shaped by an intuition of the integral nature of the thing or matter under inquiry.  When he counsels the reader of Shakespeare he also offers a paradigm for the reader of his own work.

O gentle critic!  be advised.  Do not true too much to your professional dexterity in the use of the scalping knife, and tomahawk.  Weapons of diviner mould are wielded by your adversary: and you are meeting him here on his own peculiar ground, the ground of Idea, of Thought, and of inspiration.