Abstract
This introductory chapter establishes the main argument of the book: that when Coleridge alludes to other poets, he does not merely pay homage or indicate a stylistic preference, but incorporates the ideas of other texts, sometimes in order to repurpose them. Political developments in Coleridge’s thinking can be understood by investigation of the uses he makes of his poetic influences.
The chapter discusses Coleridge’s eclectic political radicalism in the 1790s and argues that Whiggism made an important contribution to Coleridge’s intellectual framework. The book posits that the influence of Whig poetry upon both Coleridge’s poetic practice and his political thinking has been neglected. The introduction explains why the book focuses on Coleridge’s engagement with the work of Mark Akenside, William Lisle Bowles, Thomas Percy, William Cowper, and John Thelwall, justifying these as his most significant poetic influences. The introduction finishes by outlining the structure and arguments of the rest of the book.
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Notes
- 1.
S. T. Coleridge, ‘The Recantation, An Ode’, Morning Post, 16 April 1798, pp. 2–3.
- 2.
Genesis 1.2.
- 3.
Coleridge, ‘The Recantation,’, Morning Post, 16 April 1798, p. 2.
- 4.
Coleridge’s poetic practice has received renewed attention. See J. C. C. Mays, Coleridge’s Experimental Poetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), which tracks the progress of Coleridge’s experimental impulses throughout his career; and Ewan James Jones, Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), which considers the relationship in Coleridge’s verse between philosophy and poetic form.
- 5.
S. T. C., ‘Sonnets. No. I. To the Honourable Mr. Erskine’, Morning Chronicle, 1 December 1794, p. 3.
- 6.
Coleridge’s first published poem may have been ‘The Abode of Love’, which was printed in the World and then in Cambridge Chronicle, both in 1790, signed ‘S. T. C.’ (PW I.1, p. 28, II.1, pp. 25–26). ‘On a Lady Weeping’ appeared in the Weekly Entertainer in 1792 (PW II.1, pp. 64–66). Some other short poems had appeared in 1793 or 1794 before the ‘Sonnets on Eminent Characters’, mostly in the Morning Chronicle and the Cambridge Intelligencer (see PW II.1, pp. 20–155).
- 7.
Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley and Others, in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Lancelot Sharpe (Cambridge: printed by B. Flower, for the Editor; and sold by the Printer; by J. and J. Merill and W. H. Lunn, Cambridge; by the Book-sellers of Bath and Bristol; and by Egerton, Military Library; Edwards, Pall-Mall; Deerett, Picadilly; and Deighton, Holborn, London, 1794), pp. xxv–xxviii.
- 8.
<?IndexRangeStart ID="ITerm30"?>For the claim that the Coleridge’s poems of the late 1790s constituted a withdrawal from politics see David Aers, Jonathan Cook, David Punter, ‘Coleridge: Individual, Community and Social Agency’, in Romanticism and Ideology: Studies in English Writing 1765–1830 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 82–102, (pp. 82, 93, 98); and Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 25–26. For the alternative case which places Coleridge’s retirement poetry within an oppositional tradition, see Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 13, 27–33, 39; Tim Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 15–16, 194–195; and Chap. 7, below.<?IndexRangeEnd ID="ITerm30"?>
- 9.
See New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), I, pp. 40–41, 70–72, 85–86.
- 10.
S. T. C., ‘Sonnets on Eminent Characters. No. IX. To William Godwin, Author of “Political Justice”’, Morning Chronicle, 10 Jan 1795, p. 3.
- 11.
<?IndexRangeStart ID="ITerm68"?>See the account of this radical, Dissenting milieu in Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 88–117. See also Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 77–85; Ian Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 131–172; Morton D. Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 91–153; and Daniel White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006), pp. 119–151<?IndexRangeEnd ID="ITerm68"?>.
- 12.
<?IndexRangeStart ID="ITerm82"?>In February 1795, Coleridge wrote to George Dyer that Southey ‘is Christianizing apace—I doubt not, that I shall present him to you right orthodox in the heterodoxy of Unitarianism’ (CL I, p. 153). Coleridge described Wordsworth as ‘a Republican & at least a Semi-atheist’ in May 1796 (CL I, p. 216), but two years later was claiming that ‘he loves & venerates Christ & Christianity—I wish, he did more’ (CL I, p. 410). To Thelwall, he defended the claim that Christianity was ‘a religion for Democrats’ (CL I, pp. 282–285).<?IndexRangeEnd ID="ITerm82"?>
- 13.
Coleridge also makes use of the scholarship of the theologian William Warburton. See Lects. 1795, pp. 132–136&n, 154&n.
- 14.
John T. Miller, Ideology and Enlightenment: The Political and Social Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York; London: Garland, 1987), pp. 50–88, 113–121; Leask, pp. 10–39; John Morrow, Coleridge’s Political Thought: Property, Morality and the Limits of Traditional Discourse (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990); Pamela Edwards, The Statesman’s Science: History, Nature, and Law in the Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 2, 6–10, 26–27, 44, 51–54, 76, 81, 84–86, 90.
- 15.
Coleridge may have known Harrington’s work only indirectly through Lowman at this point, but by 1800, he possessed a copy of Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) and it proved formative in the development of his ideas about the proper relationship between property and political power. See John Miller, pp. 61–67, 86, 99–100, 119, 212–214; Leask, pp. 29–37, 48; Morrow, pp. 29–31, 41, 50–61, 79–82; Peter J. Kitson, ‘“The electric fluid of truth”: The Ideology of the Commonwealthsman in Coleridge’s The Plot Discovered’, in Coleridge and the Armoury of the Human Mind: Essays on the Prose Writings ed. by Peter J. Kitson and Thomas N. Corns (London: Cass, 1991), pp. 36–62; Peter J. Kitson, ‘“Our Prophetic Harrington”: Coleridge, Pantisocracy and Puritan Utopia’, Wordsworth Circle, 24.2 (Spring 1993), 97–102; and Edwards, pp. 6–10.
- 16.
Morrow, pp. 32–33, 68–69. See also John Miller, pp. vii–viii, 51–88.
- 17.
Butler, p. 78.
- 18.
John Colmer, Coleridge: Critic of Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 23; John Miller, p. 10; Morrow, pp. 35–36, 41.
- 19.
Colmer, p. 33; John Miller, p. 10.
- 20.
Edwards, pp. 19–20, 216, takes the idea of intellectual continuity to its extreme when she claims that Coleridge’s ‘political vision was consistent from 1795 to 1830 in its moderate pragmatic constitutionalism’. Although Edwards rightly emphasizes the consistencies in Coleridge’s work, she significantly underplays the extent of his youthful radicalism. She does not, for example, discuss Pantisocracy.
- 21.
Harriet Devine Jump, ‘High Sentiments of Liberty: Coleridge’s Unacknowledged Debt to Akenside’, Studies in Romanticism, 28.2 (Summer 1989), 207–224.
- 22.
Humphry House, Coleridge: The Clark Lectures (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953), pp. 68–69.
- 23.
William Levine, ‘The Progress Poem in Coleridge’s Political Lyrics’, Wordsworth Circle, 20.2 (1989), 68–74; Fulford, Landscape, pp. 215–236. Levine primarily discusses Coleridge in relation to William Collins, whom I judge to be less important to Coleridge than was Akenside.
- 24.
Harold Bloom, ‘Coleridge: Anxiety of Influence’, Diacritics, 2.1 (Spring 1972), 36–41, (p. 37).
- 25.
See, for example, Kelvin Everest, Coleridge’s Secret Ministry: The Context of the Conversation Poems 1795–1798 (Brighton: Harvester, 1979), p. 32; Wylie, p. 95.
- 26.
Raimonda Modiano, ‘Coleridge and Milton: The Case against Wordsworth in the Biographia Literaria’, in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria: Text and Meaning, ed. by Frederick Burwick (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), pp. 150–170 (p. 152).
- 27.
Bloom, p. 38.
- 28.
Bloom, p. 40.
- 29.
In making this claim, I am agreeing with H. R. Rookmaaker, whose own discussion of Akenside’s influence is not substantial enough to rectify this fault and largely focuses on Akenside as a philosophical source for Neoplatonism, rather than as an influence on Coleridge’s poetics. (H. R. Rookmaaker, Towards a Romantic Conception of Nature: Coleridge’s Poetry up to 1803 (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins B. V., 1984), pp. 15–20, 32, 37, 39, 42, 46, 71, 100, 128).
- 30.
See John Beer, Coleridge the Visionary (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959), pp. 131–133; J. A. Appleyard, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Literature: The Development of a Concept of Poetry, 1791–1819 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 38; George Dekker, Coleridge and the Literature of Sensibility (London: Vision Press, 1978), pp. 118–120, 153–155; Everest, pp. 191–192; Wylie, pp. 83–84, 139; and David Fairer, Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 186–187.
- 31.
Christopher R. Miller, ‘Coleridge and The English Poetic Tradition’, in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Frederick Burwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 515–533.
- 32.
Chris Townsend, Philosophical Connections: Akenside, Neoclassicism, Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 36–47, discusses Akenside’s influence on the development of Coleridge’s philosophical blank verse about nature, but he does not touch on the politics, which, I argue, are crucial.
- 33.
‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, in The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. by Duncan Wu, 9 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), IX, pp. 95–109 (p. 107).
- 34.
Judith Thompson, ‘An Autumnal Blast, a Killing Frost: Coleridge’s Poetic Conversation with John Thelwall’, Studies in Romanticism, 36.3 (Fall 1997), 427–456; Judith Thompson, John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle: The Silenced Partner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Damian Walford Davies, Presences That Disturb: Models of Romantic Identity in the Literature and Culture of the 1790s (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), pp. 193–240; Gurion Taussig, Coleridge and the Idea of Friendship 1789–1804 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), pp. 177–213. Michael Murphy has suggested how Thelwall might have influenced ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ (Michael Murphy, ‘John Thelwall, Coleridge, and The Ancient Mariner’, Romanticism, 8.1 (April 2002), 62–74). Roe, Jon Mee, and John Bugg have all posited a Coleridgean response to the tradition of prison poetry, of which Thelwall’s was a notable example (Nicholas Roe, The Politics of Nature, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2002), p. 127; Jon Mee, ‘“The Dungeon and the Cell”: The Prison Verse of Coleridge and Thelwall’, in John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, ed. by Steve Poole (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), pp. 107–116; John Bugg, Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), pp. 74–78). Roe documented Coleridge’s relationship with Thelwall as indicating the extent of his radical commitments (Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge. pp. 145–158; Nicholas Roe, ‘Coleridge and John Thelwall: The Road to Nether Stowey’, in The Coleridge Connection, ed. by Richard Gravil and Molly Lefebure (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 62–80). Duncan Wu demonstrated how Thelwall’s criticisms shaped Coleridge’s poetry and how their apparent literary values were politically inflected: an insight which has been extended by Fairer’s work (Duncan Wu, ‘Coleridge, Thelwall and the Politics of Poetry’, Coleridge Bulletin, n.s. 4 (Autumn 1994), 23–44; Fairer, pp. 236–259). Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, pp. 124–125, 147–161, focuses on how Coleridge and Thelwall differed on the concept of enthusiasm and the effect of retirement.
- 35.
Notably, Norman Fruman placed huge emphasis on Wordsworth’s ideas as directing Coleridge’s poetry, rather than Wordsworth versifying Coleridge’s concepts as Jonathan Wordsworth, and later Mary Jacobus, argued (Norman Fruman, Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel (New York: G. Braziller, 1971), pp. 265–328; Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 184–201; Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads 1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 59–62, 68).
- 36.
Lucy Newlyn, Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Language of Allusion, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Paul Magnuson, Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); and Gene W. Ruoff, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Making of the Major Lyrics, 1802–1804 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989) have shaped present understanding of the partnership by considering the two poets’ works as a dialogue.
- 37.
Jacob Lloyd, ‘The Politics of Superstition in “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere”, Osorio, and The Borderers’, Wordsworth Circle, 53.2 (Spring 2022), 222–248.
- 38.
Coleridge was a frequent reviser of his poems. See Jack Stillinger, Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
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Lloyd, J. (2023). Introduction. In: Coleridge's Political Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41877-8_1
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