Abstract
‘The Nightingale’, which appeared in Lyrical Ballads (1798) with the subtitle ‘a Conversational Poem’, is the only one of his poems to which Coleridge himself ever applied this particular epithet. However, following a suggestion made in 1925 by G. M. Harper,1 twentieth-century readers have generally grouped together six poems composed between 1795 and 1798 as Coleridge’s Conversation Poems: ‘The Eolian Harp’, ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’, ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’, ‘Frost at Midnight’, ‘Fears in Solitude’ and ‘The Nightingale’. Although arguments have sometimes been made to extend the canon to include other poems — notably, ‘Lines Written at Shurton Bars’ (1795), ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (1802), and ‘To William Wordsworth’ (1807)2 — majority opinion has resisted any such extension.
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Notes
G. M. Harper, ‘Coleridge’s Conversation Poems’, Quarterly Review, ccxliv (1925) 284–98.
‘To William Wordsworth’ has attracted a number of supporters: see R. H. Fogle, ‘Coleridge’s Conversation Poems’, TSE, v (1955) 103
and Max F. Schulz, The Poetic Voices of Coleridge (Detroit, 1963; rev. edn 1964) p. 73
The case for ‘Lines Written at Shurton Bars’ is argued vigorously by Geoffrey Little, ‘Lines Written at Shurton Bars …: Coleridge’s First Conversation Poem?’, Southern Review (Adelaide), II (1966) 137–49.
On the general characteristics of the Conversation Poems, see (in addition to the works cited in note 2 above) the following: R. A. Durr, ‘“This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison” and a Recurrent Action in Coleridge’, ELH, xxvi (1959) 514–30
M. F. Schulz, ‘Oneness and Multeity in Coleridge’s Poems’, TSE, ix (1959) 53–60
A. S. Gérard, ‘The Systolic Rhythm: the Structure of Coleridge’s Conversation Poems’, EIC, x (1960) 307–19
enlarged and repr. as ch. 2 in Gérard’s English Romantic Poetry: Ethos, Structure, and Symbol in Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats (Berkeley, Calif., and London, 1968) pp. 20–39
J. D. Boulger, ‘Imagination and Speculation in Coleridge’s Conversation Poems’, JEGP, lxiv (1965) 691–711
F. Garber, ‘The Hedging Consciousness in Coleridge’s Conversation Poems’, TWC, iv (1973) 124–38.
The original version of ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798) ended with a six-line coda which Coleridge dropped in all later printings because, he said, the lines destroyed ‘the rondo, and return upon itself of the Poem’ and because ‘Poems of this kind of length ought to be coiled with its’ tail round its’ head’: quoted in B. Ifor Evans, ‘Coleridge’s Copy of “Fears in Solitude”’, TLS, 18 Apr 1935, p. 255.
For the history of the ouroboros emblem (i.e. a coiled serpent with its tail in its mouth), see H. B. de Groot, ‘The Ouroboros and the Romantic Poets: a Renaissance Emblem in Blake, Coleridge and Shelley’, English Studies (Amsterdam), l (1969) 553–64.
Humphry House, Coleridge: The Clark Lectures 1951–52 (London, 1953; repr. 1969) p. 79.
Before Coleridge’s close relationship with the Wordsworths, which began in the late spring of 1797 (by which time ‘The Eolian Harp’ and ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’ had already been composed), perhaps the most important influence on Coleridge was Charles Lamb: see George Whalley, ‘Coleridge’s Debt to Charles Lamb’, E&S, xi (1958) 68–85.
Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Denham’, in Lives of the English Poets, 2 vols (London, 1906; repr. 1964) i 58.
M. H. Abrams, ‘Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric’, in Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1970) pp. 201–29.
On the tradition of Augustan loco-descriptive poetry, see Robert A. Aubin’s compendious survey, Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England (New York, 1936).
For the 1803 text of ‘The Eolian Harp’, see Coleridge’s Verse: A Selection, ed. William Empsom and David Pine (New York, 1973) pp. 103–4.
Coleridge’s image of ‘Music slumbering on its instrument’ is perhaps an echo of Keats’s description of Poetry as ‘might half slumbering on its own right arm’ in ‘Sleep and Poetry’, line 237: see John Barnard, ‘An Echo of Keats in “The Eolian Harp”’, RES, xxviii (1977) 311–13.
For detailed analysis, see: H. J. W. Milley, ‘Some Notes on Coleridge’s “Eolian Harp”’, MP, xxxvi (1938–9) 359–75
M. H. Abrams, ‘Coleridge’s “A Light in Sound”: Science, Metascience, and Poetic Imagination’, PAPS, cxvi (1972) 458–76
and W. H. Scheuerle, ‘A Reexamination of Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp”’, SEL, xv (1975) 591–9
H. Nidecker, ‘Notes marginales de S. T. Coleridge en marge de Kant et de Schelling, transcrites et annotées’, Revue de littérature comparée, vii (1927) 529.
John Beer, Coleridge the Visionary (London, 1959; repr. 1970) p. 92.
See also Beer’s Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence (London, 1977) p. 67.
Coleridge’s joy is not simply a reading of our own feelings into nature. ‘It is rather’, as Dorothy Emmet says, ‘the possibility of entering into a deep rapport with something in the world beyond us, seeing it with such loving sympathy that we make, as Coleridge says, the “external internal, the internal external” and out of this comes the possibility of the creation of imaginative symbolism. But the first condition of such creation is that we should be able not only to look, but to love as we look’ — ‘Coleridge on the Growth of the Mind’, in Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1967) p. 173.
See Geoffrey Yarlott, Coleridge and the Abyssinian Maid (London, 1967) pp. 95–6
and Ronald C. Wendling, ‘Coleridge and the Consistency of “The Eolian Harp”’, SIR, viii (1968–9) 26–42
Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (New York, 1961; rev. edn Ithaca, NY, and London, 1971) p. 200.
The phrase is discussed by Richard T. Martin, who in ‘Coleridge’s Use of “sermoni propriora”‘, TWC, iii (1972) 71–5, argues that Coleridge’s use of the term was influenced by its appearance in John Foster’s Essay on … Accent and Quantity (1762).
The querulous egotism of the poem is discussed by Jill Rubenstein in ‘Sound and Silence in Coleridge’s Conversation Poems’, English, xxi (1972) 54–60, esp. pp. 56–7.
Richard Haven, Patterns of Consciousness: An Essay on Coleridge (Amherst, Mass., 1969) p. 56.
Michael Schmidt, ‘Coleridge: “This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison”’, Critical Survey, vi (1973) 47.
Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (London, 1955; repr. 1976) pp. 72–3.
and, as Mario L. D’Avanzo has suggested, the lime-tree bower itself (although certainly a description of Poole’s arbour at Stowey) is also an adaptation of Prospero’s ‘lime grove’ in Act v of Shakespeare’s The Tempest: see ‘Coleridge’s “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison” and The Tempest’, TWC, i (1970) 66–8
Reeve Parker, Coleridge’s Meditative Art (London and Ithaca, NY, 1975) p. 127.
Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (London and New York, 1957; repr. 1972) p. 46.
Walter de la Mare, ‘Night’, from Memory and Other Poems (1938): The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare (London, 1969) p. 378.
Carl R. Woodring, Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge (Madison, Wis., 1961) p. 192.
E. P. Thompson, ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’, in Power and Consciousness, ed. C. C. O’Brien and W. D. Vanech (London and New York, 1969) p. 167.
Coleridge: The Critical Heritage, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson (London, 1970) pp. 47–8.
Reginald Waiters, Coleridge (London, 1971) p. 26.
They are Prose that in a frolic has put on a masquerade Dress of metre & like most Masquerades, blundered in the assumed character’: quoted by B. Ifor Evans, in TLS, 18 Apr 1935, p. 255.
For the printing history (which is quite complex) of the volume, see D. F. Foxon, ‘The Printing of Lyrical Ballads, 1798’, The Library, 5th ser. ix (1954) 221–41.
Not all readers would accept that the substitution of ‘The Nightingale’ for ‘Lewti’ was made in order to preserve the anonymity of Lyrical Ballads: see John E. Jordan, Why the Lyrical Ballads? (London and Berkeley, Calif., 1976) pp. 42–5.
For a discussion of this Notebook entry in its context, see George Whalley, ‘Coleridge’s Poetic Sensibility’, in Coleridge’s Variety: Bicentenary Studies, ed. John Beer (London, 1974; Pittsburgh, 1975) pp. 4–7.
Robert Mayo, ‘The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads’, PMLA, lxix (1954) 494.
R. H. Hopkins, ‘Coleridge’s Parody of Melancholy Poetry in “The Nightingale: a Conversation Poem, April 1798”’, English Studies (Amsterdam), xlix (1968) 436–41
Alun Jones, ‘Coleridge and Poetry: the Conversational and other Poems’, in S. T. Coleridge (Writers and their Background series), ed. R. L. Brett (London, 1971) pp. 104–5.
Derek Roper argues that Coleridge probably found the form ‘blosmy’ (line 84) — so spelled in all editions of the poem until 1828 — in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (II 821) or ‘Parlement of Foules’ (line 183): Lyrical Ballads 1805, ed. D. Roper (London, 1968) p. 325.
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© 1983 John Spencer Hill
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Hill, J.S. (1983). The Conversation Poems. In: A Coleridge Companion. Literary Companions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-03798-8_2
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