The New Lifetime Reading Plan

And now that I have said ali this, an open confession of my dislike of Wordsworth, I must make two obvious statements far more to the point. The first is that he wrote some great verse, though I think virtually ali of it is contained in his long poetical autobiography, The Prelude, plus "Tintem Abbey," "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," "Michael," "Resolution and Independence," "Ode to Duty," and a scattering of superb son- nets and shorter lyrics.

The second statement is that he opened the eyes of poets and ordinary human beings to the possibilities of a fresh approach to nature, to the life of feeling, and to the English language. With Coleridge, he diverted the course of English and American poetry. He helped to release it from conven- tionality, stock epithets, city-pent emotions. His famous defi- nition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" arising from "emotion recollected in tranquillity" is limited and partial. But as a corrective to the petrifactions of the eighteenth century it was badly needed. For ali its excesses, the romantic protest has proved valuable to the Western tradition.

It is probable that Wordsworth will become more impor- tant as a historical event than as a poet. But he is great enough in both categories to warrant some acquaintance. After ali, this humorless, mentally and emotionally straitened egomaniac in a few short years did write verse that helped to "cleanse the doors of perception."

C.F.

65

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

1772-1834

The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, Biographia Literaria, Writings on Shakespeare

In a moment of self-forgetfulness Wordsworth called Coleridge "the most wonderful man" he had ever known. Shelley hailed him as this "hooded eagle among blinking owls." His good friend the essayist Charles Lamb spoke of him as "an Archangel a little damaged" and of his "hunger for eternity." The scholar George Saintsbury ranked Coleridge, as literary critic, with Aristotle [13] and Longinus. Mill [72] remarked, "The class of thinkers has scarcely yet arisen by whom he is to be judged," and many thoughtful students feel the statement, made over a century ago, still stands. Such judgments could be multiplied by the score.

They were made about the greatest might-have-been in English literature. For the fact is that Coleridge^ reputation and influence are both far more imposing than his work. His mind, a Tuscarora for depth, a Pacific for vastness, was never quite able to pull itself together. Though the Biographia Literaria comes nearest to it, he wrote no single, complete prose masterpiece. Like Wordsworth^, much of his verse, though more intensely felt, is balderdash. Of the three poems

by which as a poet he will live, only The Ancient Mariner is a finished whole. Often ranked as the finest Shakespearean critic who ever wrote, he never imposed order on his mass of essays, lectures, notes, and conversational remarks.

At no time in his incoherent life did Coleridge show any notable common sense. There are many men, often of the highest order of mind, who should be exempted from the pres- sures of normal living. Coleridge was one of them. He had no capacity for marriage, little for fatherhood, not much for earn- ing his board and lodging. He tried soldiering, preaching, peri- odical journalism, lecturing, even foreign service under the governor of Malta. During his latter years he wasted part of what might have been productive energy in incessant and apparently uniquely brilliant monologues. ("The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind.") Tortured by neuralgia and other ills, plus intense melancholy, he sought relief in laudanum and became an addict. For the last eighteen years of his life, withdrawn from his wife, he lived under the medicai care of a kindly friend, James Gillman.

In a sense the "person from Porlock" who is said to have interrupted him as he was writing down the dream-dictated lines of Kubla Khan (modern scholarship is skeptical of this story) was a real-life reflection of his own inner disorder. He was continually interrupting himself. His mind was too active and associative for him to complete any project. His whole life is like a mass of notes, undigested, erratic, sometimes baffling, sometimes profound, rich in wonders.

The fruitful association with Wordsworth produced the Lyrical Ballads, to which Coleridge contributed his lone undis- puted masterpiece, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Here, as also in the unfinished Kubla Khan and Christabel, he success- fully compelled "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith" and so contributed to the mainstream of romanticism. That magic, eerie note he never again quite sounded.