Abstract
The exact point at which Wordsworth met Coleridge is not easy to determine. The evidence (based largely on reminiscences written many years later) suggests that the two men attended a public meeting on the slave trade at Bristol in the late summer of 1795, and that they met (probably with Southey and Edith Fricker) in a lodging-house, where Wordsworth read his poems, including the current version of ‘Salisbury Plain’.1 Wordsworth, writing to William Mathews in late October, said,
Coleridge was at Bristol part of the time I was there. I saw but little of him. I wished indeed to have seen more — his talent appears to me very great. WL (1787–1805) 153
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Notes
William Law, A Demonstration of the Gross and Fundamental Errors (&c) (1769), p. 209 (Works, IV).
See Lane Cooper, ‘The power of the eye in Coleridge’ (1910, reprinted in his Late Harvest (Ithaca, N.Y., 1952), p. 75).
For further accounts, see Robert Damton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass., 1968) and my Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence, Ch. iv.
H. W. Piper, The Active Universe (1962), pp. 61–74.
See above p. 33.
Ibid., 77–8, quoting Exc. iii 808–12.
Enid Welsford, Salisbury Plain (1966), pp. 57–65.
John Jones, The Egotistical Sublime (1954), pp. 76–8.
De Quincey, ‘Lake Reminiscences from 1807 to 1830’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1839, VI (N.S.), 94. See my Wordsworth in Time (1979) ch. ix.
R. Mayo, ‘The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads’, PMLA, 1954, LXIX, 486–522. Reprinted in Wordsworth, ‘Lyrical Ballads’, Casebooked. A. R. Jones and W. Tydeman (1972), pp. 79–126. Cf. John E. Jordan, Why the ‘Lyrical Ballads’? (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976), Ch. v.
Margaret Drabble, The Garrick Year (1964), p.222. For a Victorian counterpart, cf. Mrs Transome in George Eliot’s Felix Holt who when young ‘had been thought wonderfully clever and accomplished, and had been rather ambitious of intellectual superiority … had laughed at the Lyrical Ballads and admired Mr Southey’s Thalaba’. (Ch. i, Cabinet ed., I, 40).
E. Darwin, Zoōnomia (1794–6), II, 359. See my Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence, pp. 50–7, 74–7.
Godwin, Political Justice (2nd ed., 1796), I, p. 130.
See J. L. Lowes, The Roadto Xanadu (1927), pp. 493, 553;
S. Heame, Journey… to the Northem Ocean (1795), pp. 223–4; 346.
Colin Clarke, Romantic Paradox (1963), pp. 44–53.
J. G. Zimmermann, On Solitude (translated 1797), pp. 197, 177, 102.
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© 1978 John Beer
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Beer, J. (1978). A Link of Life?. In: Wordsworth and the Human Heart. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08710-5_3
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