Abstract
This chapter situates the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the context of his lifelong interests in all things bardic, Gothic, and Northern. Edward Jones and Iolo Morganwg are read in light of their influence on Coleridge and on their own merits. Coleridge’s concept of European culture as a legacy of Gothic liberty is traced from his school days to his lectures on literature in 1818. Finally, the chapter explores Coleridge’s keen self-consciousness regarding mediation: his explicit awareness of the ineluctable alterations produced when a poem is translated from one form to another. The chapter ends with a new reading of “Kubla Khan” as a poem that dramatizes the pathos of the desire to touch the distant bardic past.
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- 1.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream”, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 16, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001), book I, part 1, p. 514.
- 2.
Coleridge, “School Exercises”, in Collected Works, vol. 11, Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995), p. 8.
- 3.
Coleridge, “Memoranda for a History of English Poetry”, in Shorter Works, p. 108.
- 4.
Coleridge, letter to Robert Southey, July 1803, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1956–1971), vol. 2, p. 955. Although Coleridge did not learn Welsh, his son Derwent did. Cherry Durrant, “Coleridge, Derwent (1800–1883)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, hereinafter cited as ODNB.
- 5.
Coleridge, letter to George Coleridge, November 28, 1791, in Letters, vol. 1, p. 17. The brackets appear in the published edition of Coleridge’s letters.
- 6.
Coleridge, letter to Mary Evans, February 13, [1792], in Letters, vol. 1, p. 27.
- 7.
Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, Merton Christensen, and Anthony John Harding, 5 vols. (New York: Pantheon, 1957–2002), vol. 1, item 383 (1799). One of the many unrealized projects he hoped to produce one day was an “Edition of Collins & Gray with a preliminary Dissertation”. Notebooks, vol. 1, item 161 (1796). See also item 174 (1795–1796).
- 8.
However much Coleridge borrowed from Friedrich Schlegel and others in his 1818 lectures, they are also full of original content reflecting his lifelong interests. On the lectures having “helped to establish the comparative study of literature in Britain”, see R. A. Foakes, introduction, Coleridge, Collected Works, vol. 5, Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature, ed. Foakes (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987), book 2, p. 33.
- 9.
Coleridge, Lecture 1, in Lectures, book 2, p. 53, 54. Coleridge used the term “Goth” to apply to the Northern nations generally: “But as the name has since acquired a much more extensive and promiscuous application, I shall use the words, Goths and Gothic, for the whole of this North-Westward Branch […]”. Lecture 2, in Lectures, book 2, p. 71. For a concise account of “Gothicist discourses” in Great Britain, see Robert W. Rix, “Romancing Scandinavia: Relocating Chivalry and Romance in Eighteenth-Century Britain”, European Romantic Review 20, no. 1 (January 2009): 3–20.
- 10.
Coleridge, Lecture 2, in Lectures, book 2, p. 75.
- 11.
Thomas Tyrwhitt, for instance, called Otfrid “the earliest Rimer that is known in any of the modern Languages”. “An Essay on the Language and Versification of Chaucer”, in Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, ed. Tyrwhitt, 5 vols. (London: T. Payne, 1775–1778), vol. 4, p. 53.
- 12.
Pembroke College Library, University of Cambridge, Thomas Gray, Commonplace Book, 3 vols., vol. 2, p. 771.
- 13.
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, book 1, p. 208. Also of interest in this regard is Coleridge’s poem “The Blossoming of the Solitary Date-Tree”, three stanzas of which are his English adaptation of medieval German love poetry by the Minnesingers. See Poetical Works, book I, part 2, p. 808–813.
- 14.
Coleridge , Lecture 1, in Lectures, book 2, p. 60. See also Coleridge’s essay in the March 17, 1796 issue of the Watchman where he explained that “The religion of the earlier inhabitants of Germany taught the being of a supreme God, master of the universe, to whom all things were submissive and obedient […]”. Collected Works, vol. 2, The Watchman, ed. Lewis Patton (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970), p. 91.
- 15.
Coleridge, Lecture 2, in Lectures, book 2, p. 79, 80.
- 16.
The cultural differences appear to account for the ultimate military outcome as well. Of the conflict between the Romans and the Germanic peoples, Coleridge found that “the contest could not long be doubtful between a free nation, fierce in the enthusiasm of a warlike superstition, and the timid slaves of Rome, accustomed to crouch beneath every libertine or tyrant that oppressed them”. Watchman, p. 89.
- 17.
Coleridge, Lecture 3, in Lectures, book 2, p. 90–91.
- 18.
Although it is sometimes said that Coleridge began writing the “Monody” at the age of thirteen, the evidence is incomplete. In a letter of May 27, 1814 to Joseph Cottle, Coleridge included four lines of verse preceded by the claim that “when a mere Boy I wrote these Lines”. In a letter of April 22, 1819 to William Worship, he included the same four lines, now under the title “Lines composed in his 13th year, part of a school exercise”. Letters, vol. 3, p. 499 and vol. 4, p. 937–938. By themselves, the lines in question refer to the fear of death and not at all to Chatterton; they first appeared in print in the 1829 edition of the “Monody” and do not appear in any earlier manuscript of the poem. In the letter to Worship, the lines are followed by eight other lines “On the same subject, but composed two years later, namely between 15 and 16”. Here, too, the subject is not Chatterton. Aware of the misrepresentations Coleridge told himself and others, no editor of Coleridge has ever accepted these eight lines (from the poem “What Is Life?”) as being written so early: they first appear in a notebook item by Coleridge from October 1804.
- 19.
The history of the poem’s many editions has been carefully studied. The 1834 revisions are widely thought to be the result of Hartley Coleridge’s editing. See I. A. Gordon, “The Case-History of Coleridge’s Monody on the Death of Chatterton”, Review of English Studies 18, no. 69 (January 1942): 49–71; Arthur Freeman and Theodore Hofmann, “The Ghost of Coleridge’s First Effort: ‘A Monody on the Death of Chatterton’”, The Library, 6th ser., 11, no. 4 (1989): 328–335; and Mays , ed., Coleridge, Poetical Works, book II, part 1, p. 166–171.
- 20.
The first four volumes of Tyrwhitt’s five-volume edition of The Canterbury Tales were published in 1775, his edition of Rowley in 1777.
- 21.
Thomas Chatterton, “Battle of Hastynges”, in The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Donald S. Taylor, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971), vol. 1, p. 36.
- 22.
Chatterton, “Bristowe Tragedie or the Dethe of Syr Charles Baldwin”, in Works, vol. 1, p. 6.
- 23.
The notable exception in Chatterton’s œuvre is the early poem “The Tournament”, some lines of which behave in ways that may resemble the metrical irregularity found in Spenser’s February Eclogue and later in Coleridge’s Christabel. George Saintsbury called the resemblance to the latter “accidental”. Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1906–1910), vol. 2, p. 522.
- 24.
See, for example, Paul Magnuson, “Coleridge’s Discursive ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’”, Romanticism on the Net 17 (February 2000), http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2000/v/n17/005900ar.html. On Chatterton’s death as an accidental drug overdose, see Nick Groom, “Chatterton, Thomas (1752–1770)”, ODNB.
- 25.
Coleridge, “Monody on the Death of Chatterton”, in Poetical Works, book I, part 1, p. 139–144, l. 23.
- 26.
David Fairer, “Chatterton’s Poetic Afterlife, 1770–1794: A Context for Coleridge’s Monody”, in Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, ed. Nick Groom (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1999), p. 233.
- 27.
Groom, although without regard to bardism per se, has similarly interpreted Coleridge’s Chatterton as a political radical: “But the ‘Monody’ also entertains revolutionary politics, in which Chatterton is portrayed as a Christ-like messiah summoned to rally political radicals.” Groom, “Love and Madness: Southey Editing Chatterton”, in Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism, ed. Lynda Pratt (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006), p. 22.
- 28.
Gray, “The Bard. A Pindaric Ode.”, in Poems, new ed. (London: J. Dodsley, 1768), p. 71.
- 29.
Coleridge, “Monody on the Death of Chatterton”, in Chatterton, Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and Others, in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: B. Flower, 1794), p. xxviii.
- 30.
Trevor Herbert, “Jones, Edward (1752–1824)”, ODNB.
- 31.
Edward Jones, dedication to Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards (London, 1784), n.p.
- 32.
Jones, p. 1.
- 33.
Jones, p. 27.
- 34.
As we saw in Chapter 3, the origins of this legend are no older than the seventeenth century.
- 35.
Jones, p. 20.
- 36.
Jones, p. 3.
- 37.
Jones, p. 10.
- 38.
Jones, p. 4.
- 39.
The only noticeable difference from Gray is that Conan’s name has been replaced by that of Rhudd Fedel (now “Vedel” in the English), the warrior whom the “Conan” lines were about in the original text of Y Gododdin.
- 40.
Jones, p. 7.
- 41.
Jones, p. 31. The OED credits the Relicks with the earliest use of “pennill” and its plural, “pennillion”.
- 42.
Jones, p. 10.
- 43.
Jones, p. 30.
- 44.
Jones, p. 31.
- 45.
Jones, p. 13. Jones reports encountering Gruffudd’s bardic codifications in Charles Burney’s 1776 history of music and John Rhydderch’s 1728 Welsh grammar Grammadeg Cymraeg, where they do indeed appear in one form or another. My own attempts to find these statutes in collections of Welsh laws were unsuccessful. I instead found claims by modern scholars that these rules were of later origin: “It was part of the traditional lore of the Welsh bards that Gruffudd ap Cynan had made certain regulations to govern their craft, and his name was used to give authority to the ‘statute’ drawn up in connection with the Caerwys eisteddfod of 1523. There is nothing to substantiate this tradition […].” Thomas Parry, “Gruffudd ap Cynan (c. 1055–1137)”, Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Earlier scholars warned that “the proof is not satisfactory”. John Rhys and David Brynmor-Jones, The Welsh People (New York: Macmillan, 1900), p. 254.
- 46.
Jones, p. 30.
- 47.
Coleridge, letter to John Thelwall, May 13, 1796, in Letters, vol. 1, p. 214. Coburn tells us that Iolo “presented to Coleridge” a copy of his Poems Lyric and Pastoral. Coburn, ed., Notebooks, vol. 1, notes to item 174.
- 48.
Robert Southey, letter to Henry Taylor, January 24, 1827, in The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey, 6 vols. (London: Longman, 1849–1850), vol. 5, p. 285. Herbert Wright’s 1932 essay on Iolo’s literary relations provides a helpful guide to many of the places in Southey’s œuvre where he addressed or invoked Iolo. Wright, “The Relations of the Welsh Bard Iolo Morganwg with Dr. Johnson, Cowper and Southey”, Review of English Studies 8, no. 30 (April 1932): 129–138.
- 49.
Coburn wrote in 1957 that “Williams had more influence on the early romantics, especially Coleridge and Southey , than has been recognized.” Coburn, ed., Notebooks, vol. 1, notes to item 605. Too little attempt has been made to trace this influence. Damian Walford Davies has tantalizingly assembled the evidence to show that Wordsworth , too, may have crossed paths with Iolo and may have known his work but admits, “There remains no firm evidence” that they in fact met. Walford Davies, “‘At Defiance’: Iolo, Godwin, Coleridge, Wordsworth”, in A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), p. 148.
- 50.
The Gorsedd is described in detail in a long introductory essay to the 1792 edition of the collected works attributed to Llywarch Hen. Although the volume is edited by William Owen Pughe, the essay was written with acknowledged assistance from Iolo. The Heroic Elegies and Other Pieces of Llywarç Hen, Prince of the Cumbrian Britons, ed. Pughe (London: J. Owen, 1792).
- 51.
Prys Morgan, “Williams, Edward [pseud. Iolo Morganwg] (1747–1826)”, ODNB.
- 52.
Iolo Morganwg, Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, 2 vols. (London: J. Nichols, 1794), vol. 2, p. 7.
- 53.
Iolo, “An Account of, and Extracts from, the Welsh-Bardic Triades”, in Poems, vol. 2, p. 226.
- 54.
For a thorough treatment of Iolo’s tribulations in bringing this collection to print in London, see Mary-Ann Constantine, “‘This Wildered Business of Publication’: The Making of Poems, Lyric and Pastoral (1794)”, in A Rattleskull Genius, ed. Jenkins, Chapter 6.
- 55.
Iolo, “Ode; Imitated from the Gododin of Aneurin , an ancient British Bard, who wrote about the Year 550”, in Poems, vol. 2, p. 11.
- 56.
Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight”, in Poetical Works, book I, part 1, p. 452–456.
- 57.
On Iolo’s possible influence on Wordsworth’s poetry, see Walford Davies, Presences That Disturb: Models of Romantic Identity in the Literature and Culture of the 1790s (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), Chapter 4.
- 58.
Iolo, “Stanzas Written in London in 1773”, in Poems, vol. 1, p. 14.
- 59.
Iolo, “Escape from London”, in Poems, vol. 2, p. 35. The quotation appears in both Welsh and English.
- 60.
Iolo, “Escape from London”, p. 36. To Iolo, the restorative return to the places of youthful memories is not a poetic conceit but an autobiographical fact: “In 1777, I returned to London, and soon after into Wales; and a restoration to the scenes of youth preserved and heightened my passion for poetry.” Vol. 1, p. xvii.
- 61.
William Wordsworth, “My heart leaps up when I behold”, in Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983), p. 206.
- 62.
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, [1971] 1973), p. 12.
- 63.
For more on eighteenth-century conceptions of the early Welsh Church as uncorrupted, primitive Christianity, see Sarah Prescott, Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), Chapter 1.
- 64.
The full title is “Ode on the Mythology of the Ancient British Bards, In the Manner of Taliesin, Recited on Primrose Hill at a Meeting of British Bards, On the Summer Solstice of 1792, and ratified at the subsequent Autumnal Equinox and Winter Solstice”.
- 65.
Iolo, Advertisement to “Ode on the Mythology”, in Poems, vol. 2, p. 194.
- 66.
Iolo, “Ode to the British Muse”, in Poems, vol. 2, p. 9.
- 67.
Iolo, “Ode on Converting a Sword into a Pruning Hook”, in Poems, vol. 2, p. 161.
- 68.
Iolo, “Ode on Converting”, p. 162.
- 69.
Iolo, “Ode on Converting”, p. 167.
- 70.
Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams, the Bard of Glamorgan; or, Iolo Morganwg, B.B.D. (London: Charles Gilpin, 1850), p. 134.
- 71.
On the influence of American travel writings on Coleridge and Southey’s scheme, see Tim Fulford, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture, 1756–1830 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), Chapter 7. For an argument that “pre-Hispanic Peru provided Southey with another positive model for Pantisocracy”, see Nigel Leask, “Southey’s Madoc: Reimagining the Conquest of America”, in Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism, ed. Pratt, p. 140–141.
- 72.
My argument that bardism was a major influence on Pantisocracy does not depend on the dating of Southey’s and Coleridge’s first encounters with Iolo or his poetry. While no one is certain when they first met, no one has dated their first meeting any earlier than 1795, the year after the scheme was conceived. Even so, there is reason to think they would have known of him and his writings by 1794. Iolo had earlier contributed to the Gentleman’s Magazine on such topics as Welsh bardism (1789) and Prince Madoc (1791). His 1794 poetry collection was reviewed widely that year in the Analytical Review, Critical Review, Gentleman’s Magazine, and Monthly Review. Constantine , p. 137. Closer to home, Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, whose father was patron to both John Parry and Evan Evans, is listed as a subscriber to Iolo’s collection for two copies. Wynn’s younger brother Charles was Southey’s schoolfriend and future patron. According to Pratt, “The idea of a Welsh Pantisocracy had been suggested” by Charles. Pratt, “Southey in Wales: Inscriptions, Monuments and Romantic Posterity”, in Wales and the Romantic Imagination, ed. Walford Davies and Pratt (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), p. 87.
- 73.
Nor did Coleridge reserve the word exclusively for his own scheme, as his notebook records later in the decade: “Gerald Groot, born 1340 founded a sort of pantisocratic Society of literary Christians in Deventer, who lived without property & maintained themselves.” Notebooks, vol. 1, item 375 (1798–1799).
- 74.
Southey, letter to Edith Fricker, c. January 12, 1795, in The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford, and Ian Packer (Romantic Circles Electronic Edition, 2009–ongoing), www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters; Coleridge, letter to Robert Southey, November [13], 1795, in Letters, vol. 1, p. 163–173.
- 75.
Gwyn A. Williams, Madoc: The Making of a Myth (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987), Chapter 3. On the Madoc legend in the eighteenth century and Romantic era, see also Caroline Franklin, “The Welsh American Dream: Iolo Morganwg, Robert Southey and the Madoc Legend”, in English Romanticism and the Celtic World, ed. Gerard Carruthers and Alan Rawes (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). Although not a real person, Madoc has an entry in the ODNB under the heading “Madog ab Owain Gwynedd (supp. fl. 1170), supposed discoverer of America”, by J. E. Lloyd and revised by J. Gwynfor Jones.
- 76.
Williams, Madoc, Chapter 4.
- 77.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Meriwether Lewis, January 22, 1804, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, 20 vols. (Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903), vol. 10, p. 441.
- 78.
Wright , p. 136. “That it might be as accurate as possible, he himself [William Owen Pughe] and Edward Williams the Bard did me the favour of examining it.” Southey, Poetical Works: 1793–1810, vol. 2, Madoc, ed. Lynda Pratt (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004), note to part 1, book xi, p. 300. Southey claimed to have been interested in Prince Madoc as early as 1789, thus before he met Iolo. Southey, unused draft preface to Madoc, p. 571.
- 79.
Southey later noted that these “lines of Madoc were intended as a memorial of my respect for him”. Letter to Elijah Waring, March 14, 1827, in Waring, p. 87.
- 80.
On the textual and political differences between Southey’s 1790s manuscript versions of the poem and its 1805 publication, see Pratt’s introduction to Southey, Madoc. On the “use by Robert Southey of the Welsh myth of Madoc to justify the British Empire”, see Caroline Franklin, p. 83.
- 81.
Waring, p. 37.
- 82.
Iolo, preface to Poems, vol. 1, p. xi–xii.
- 83.
See also Iolo’s poem “Sonnet , to Hope, On resolving to emigrate to America” in Poems, vol. 2, p. 186.
- 84.
Iolo, “Address to the Inhabitants of Wales […]”, in Poems, vol. 2, p. 68.
- 85.
Iolo, “Address ”, p. 54–55.
- 86.
Iolo, “Address ”, p. 67.
- 87.
Southey, Madoc, p. 77.
- 88.
The influence between Cottle and Coleridge with regard to the Edda seems to have been reciprocal: the first sentence of Cottle’s introduction unmistakably borrows from the first sentence of Coleridge’s Watchman essay of March 17, 1796.
- 89.
A month after the publication of Amos’s book, Wordsworth wrote to Joseph that he had received the book “by the hands of Coleridge”. Letter to Joseph Cottle, December 13, 1797, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, Chester L. Shaver, Mary Moorman, and Alan G. Hill, 2nd ed., 8 vols (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967–1993), vol. 1, p. 196.
- 90.
Amos Cottle, Icelandic Poetry, or the Edda of Saemund (Bristol: Joseph Cottle, 1797), p. xi.
- 91.
Cottle, p. xix.
- 92.
Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 1, item 170 (1796).
- 93.
Coleridge, Watchman, p. 92.
- 94.
Odin was widely believed at the time to have been a real historical person. One place where Coleridge could have encountered the historical claim that Odin had been deified for inventing an alphabet is the first dissertation in Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, 3 vols. (London: J. Dodsley, 1774–1781), vol. 1.
- 95.
Coleridge’s modern editors tell us that, by the time he wrote the fragment, he knew Norse content from at least three sources: Percy’s 1770 Northern Antiquities, Cottle’s volume, and the 1787 dual Icelandic–Latin edition of the Edda published in Copenhagen and which Cottle had used. Jackson and Jackson, eds., Coleridge, Shorter Works, p. 66.
- 96.
In the lectures of 1818, Coleridge, borrowing from Schlegel , cast other medieval figures as great collectors and mediators of national vernacular poetries: Theodoric the Great, Charlemagne, and Alfred the Great of England. See especially Lecture 2, p. 75.
- 97.
Coleridge, “Sæmund the Wise”, in Shorter Works, p. 66. I have suppressed the crossed-out words in the manuscript.
- 98.
Coleridge, “Sæmund the Wise”, p. 67.
- 99.
Paula McDowell, “Mediating Media Past and Present: Toward a Genealogy of ‘Print Culture’ and ‘Oral Tradition’”, in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
- 100.
Coleridge, “Sæmund the Wise”, p. 67.
- 101.
Coleridge, “Sæmund the Wise”, p. 68.
- 102.
Dating Coleridge’s composition of “Kubla Khan” is notoriously difficult. Mays gives the “three most likely possibilities” as September to November 1797, May 1798, and October 1799. See his extended discussion in Coleridge, Poetical Works, book II, part 1, p. 669–671.
- 103.
Quoted in David Armitage, “Samuel Purchas (bap. 1577, d. 1626)”, ODNB.
- 104.
Because of ambiguities created by Purchas’s editing, one could easily mistake the source of the passage in question as being William of Rubruck’s travelogue. My own research confirms, by finding the source sentence in Polo and not in Rubruck, that it is, without doubt, from Polo . Donald Pearce has identified the edition used by Purchas as Frampton’s 1579 English translation of Polo. Pearce , “‘Kubla Khan’ in Context”, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 21, no. 4 (autumn 1981): 565–583, p. 576. Coleridge’s editors, including Coburn and Mays , do not mention Polo in connection with either “Kubla Khan” or Coleridge’s reading of Purchas. John Livingston Lowes, in his book-length study of the origins of “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, says, in a footnote, only that he crossed the Gobi Desert and that “Marco Polo’s travels found a place in Purchas His Pilgrimes”. Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), p. 489n.
- 105.
There has long been scholarly uncertainty as to which edition of Purchas Coleridge used. The question is material because the passage is much altered in the 1625 edition as opposed to earlier editions. There can be no question that Coleridge’s rendering of the sentence follows that of the earlier editions much more closely than it does the 1625 edition. While Coburn is correct in her annotations to Coleridge’s Notebooks that he consulted the 1625 edition in 1804, I cannot join her inference that he therefore must have used that edition when he wrote “Kubla Khan” several years earlier. Coburn, ed., Notebooks, vol. 1, notes to item 1840 (1804). Lowes, despite professing agnosticism in the matter, points out that Wordsworth owned the 1617 edition and wonders if Coleridge had borrowed it. Lowes , p. 360.
- 106.
Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimages (London, 1617), p. 472.
- 107.
Here is the passage as it appeared in the English translation of Polo used by Purchas: “Departing three dayes iourney from this Citie, between the Northeast and ẏ North you shall come to a Citie called Liander, which Cublay Cane buylded. In this Citie is a maruellous goodlye Pallace made of Marble and flint ftones, called pedras viuas, al gilded wyth gold, and neare to this Pallace, is a wall which is in compasse fiftéene miles, and within this wall be faire riuers, Wels, and gréene Meadowes, where the great Cane hath plentie of all kinde of wilde foule and beastes, for to finde his Hawkes, called Faulcons, and Gerfaulcons, that bée there in mew, which be at sometimes more than 40,000. ẏ which many times he goeth thyther to sée.” Marco Polo, The Most Noble and Famous Trauels of Marcus Paulus, trans. John Frampton (London: Ralph Newbery, 1579), p. 49.
- 108.
One result is the word “Xanadu”, which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was coined by Coleridge. Purchas consistently renders the name as two syllables spelled either “Xamdu” or “Xandu”.
- 109.
Facts about the transmission of Marco Polo’s travels come from three sources: N. M. Penzer, introduction to Marco Polo, The Most Noble and Famous Travels of Marco Polo Together with the Travels of Nicolò de’ Conti, trans. John Frampton, 2nd ed. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1937); Donald Beecher, “John Frampton of Bristol, Trader and Translator”, in Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period, ed. Carmine G. Di Biasi (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006); and Peter Jackson, “Marco Polo and His ‘Travels’”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 61, no. 1 (1998): 82–101.
- 110.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “fold”, a word from Old English, as “An enclosed piece of ground forming part of a farm, as a farm-yard.”
- 111.
Coleridge, Lecture 2, in Lectures, book 2, p. 75.
- 112.
Oliver Farrar Emerson, “The Earliest English Translations of Bürger’s Lenore: A Study in English and German Romanticism”, Western Reserve University Bulletin, n.s., 18, no. 3 (May 1915): 1–120, p. 10.
- 113.
Coleridge, letter to Mrs. S. T. Coleridge, November 8, 1798, in Letters, vol. 1, p. 438. Less than two years later, in a letter to William Taylor about Taylor’s translation of “Lenore”, Coleridge recounted a debate with Wordsworth about Bürger and claimed never to have “thought Bürger a great poet”. Letter to Taylor, January 25, 1800, in Letters, vol. 1, p. 566.
- 114.
William Taylor, “Lenora. A Ballad, from Bürger”, Monthly Magazine, or British Register, March 1796, p. 135–137.
- 115.
E. I. M. Boyd, “The Influence of Percy’s ‘Reliques of Ancient English Poetry’ on German Literature”, Modern Language Quarterly 7 (1904), 80–99, p. 83–84. For the versions by Percy and Ramsay (the latter not mentioned by Boyd), see Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (London: J. Dodsley, 1765), vol. 3, p. 128–131; and Allan Ramsay, The Tea-Table Miscellany: or, A Collection of Choice Songs, Scots and English. In Four Volumes, 10th ed. (London: A. Millar, 1740), p. 324–325.
- 116.
Walter Scott, The Chase, and William and Helen: Two Ballads, from the German of Gottfried Augustus Bürger (Edinburgh, 1796).
- 117.
The poem’s tripartite structure may also echo Gray. J. C. C. Mays has observed that three sections of “Kubla Khan” mimic “the turn, counter-turn and stand of the Pindaric ode”. Coleridge’s Experimental Poetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 108.
- 118.
See, for example, Lowes , p. 373–374; or Mays , ed., Coleridge, Poetical Works, book I, part 1, p. 510.
- 119.
Wordsworth , “The Solitary Reaper”, in Poems, in Two Volumes, p. 185, l. 17.
- 120.
These lines have also been described as conditional. See, for example, Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), p. 206; or Gregory Leadbetter, Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 196. I call them subjunctive to emphasize that they are necessarily contrary to fact: there is no condition that would empower Coleridge—as Coleridge himself understood—to revive the song.
- 121.
The influence between Gray and painting was reciprocal. In a footnote to line 19 of “The Bard”, Gray claimed that “The image was taken from a well-known picture of Raphaël, representing the Supreme Being in the vision of Ezekiel”, specifically his c. 1518 painting Ezekiel’s Vision. Gray, Poems, p. 56. In a 1756 letter, Gray named this painting and Parmigianino’s Moses Breaking the Tables of the Law (c. 1531), “wch comes still nearer to my meaning”, in connection with the poem. Gray, letter to Edward Bedingfield, August 27, 1756, in Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1935), vol. 2, p. 477.
- 122.
F. I. McCarthy, “The Bard of Thomas Gray: Its Composition and Its Use by Painters”, National Library of Wales Journal 14, no. 1 (1965): 105–113.
- 123.
The engraving of Loutherbourg’s drawing in Jones’s Relicks is by Charles Hall and Samuel Middiman. Thomas Jones’s 1774 oil painting of the Bard resignedly turning from the scene of the devastation makes a sorrowful contrast to Loutherbourg’s Bard as muscleman.
- 124.
Iolo , “Escape from London”, p. 39.
- 125.
Gray, “The Descent of Odin”, p. 89. As Mays points out, Coleridge also borrowed from this poem the phrase “wond’rous boy” in his 1796 poem “Lines on Observing a Blossom”. Mays, ed., Coleridge, Poetical Works, book I, part 1, p. 256. In Gray’s poem it refers to Váli, who would avenge Balder’s death. Coleridge used it to refer to Chatterton .
- 126.
The weaving of the circle three times also echoes the depiction of Druidic practices in William Mason’s 1759 dramatic poem Caractacus: “Circle, sons, this holy ground; / Circle close, in triple row”. Mason, Caractacus, a Dramatic Poem (London: J. Knapton and R. and J. Dodsley, 1759), p. 9. Nor was Coleridge the only poet to imagine a bardic performance as a “symphony”. Southey’s Madoc, which Coleridge read in manuscript before its 1805 publication, also tells of a Welsh bard, “his flaxen locks / Wreathed in contracting ringlets waving low”, performing a “symphony” in “the Circle of the Ceremony”. Madoc, part 1, book 11, l. 81–82, 91, 173.
- 127.
Coleridge, epistle to Thomas Poole, preface to “Ode on the Departing Year”, in Poetical Works, book I, part 1, p. 304.
- 128.
These lines first appeared in the 1796 edition of the “Monody” and were thus not part of the version published in the 1794 edition of Chatterton’s Rowley poems.
- 129.
Purchas, p. 472.
- 130.
To be clear, the pathos I am talking about is that produced by the modern awareness of mediation, which emerged in the eighteenth century, and not simply mourning for the loss of archaic poetry or traditional culture. On the eighteenth-century “pathos” of loss in Scotland, see Ian Duncan, “The Pathos of Abstraction: Adam Smith, Ossian, and Samuel Johnson”, in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004). Mourning cultural loss was not new to the eighteenth century. See, for instance, Philip Schwyzer on Wales: “To sixteenth-century Welsh scholars, their nation’s history had the appearance of a succession of bibliocausts.” Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), p. 81.
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Strabone, J. (2018). Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Other Bardic Poets: Thomas Chatterton, Edward Jones, Iolo Morganwg, and Odin. In: Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95255-0_4
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