Coleridge’s Experimental Poetics pp 123-150 | Cite as
Translucent Mechanics
Abstract
When Coleridge’s plays were performed during his lifetime, they reached a particularly large audience and they proved by far the most profitable of his literary enterprises. However, they have appeared increasingly marginal in the interval since, even to many who admire his work as a whole and, when I wrote about them a few years ago, it was under a title that acknowledged their uncertain standing.2 The reason for including them in the present discussion is not to repeat the case for their separate interest but to enlarge on my concluding remark, that “the plays are part of the explanation of why his better-known poems contain the strengths they do, and Zapolya situates you exactly where you need to be to read his poetical works at large.” This was not a Parthian shaft or a rhetorical flourish. Theater is a public form in a special sense, and was even more obviously so at the time Coleridge wrote. Performances did not take place in darkened auditoria, and the attention of those present was divided between the stage and those around them. The action—in this modified sense—took place in an unusually large space, and the audience comprised a mix of social strata that often proved explosive.
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Lyric Verse Poetical Work Literary Enterprise Deep Truth Ancient MarinePreview
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Notes
- 1.Edward Dorn, Gunslinger: Book II (Los Angeles, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1969), 25.Google Scholar
- 2.“Are Coleridge’s Plays Worth the Candle?” The Coleridge Bulletin N.S. No. 29 (Summer 2007). An amount of what I say below takes for granted what I said there, particularly concerning the workings of metadrama in Zapolya.Google Scholar
- 3.[Allsop,] Letters, Conversations, and Recollections (2 vols. London: Edward Moxon 1836), 1: 194–96 at 196.Google Scholar
- 4.The passage was a favorite of Coleridge’s and he recycled it in various contexts: see p. 225, note 24.Google Scholar
- 5.Wilson G. Knight, The Starlit Dome: Studies in the Poetry of Vision (1941) (2nd ed. London: Methuen, 1959), 160–78.Google Scholar
- 6.Hazlitt, for instance, asserted that some such “common sense” explanation was necessary to make sense of both parts of the poem, citing Psalms 118:22: “‘It is the keystone that makes up the arch’” (CompleteWorks of William Hazlitt ed. P. P. Howe (21 vols. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930–34), 19: 33). Coventry Patmore appears to have been the person (“as if he had reason to know it for certain”: W. M. Rossetti, diary entry for January 16, 1868 in Rossetti Papers, 296) who passed on the explanation to D. G. Rossetti, thereby to keep it alive through the 1890s. Andrew Lang was still worrying Ernest Hartley Coleridge with the suggestion in letters to him in 1907. Common sense may be said to be an ingredient of Walter Scott’s supernaturalism (as well as Wordsworth’s: see The English Parnassus: An Anthology of Longer Poems ed. Dixon and Grierson [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909], 736), but it is the glory of Coleridge’s version to transcend it.Google Scholar
- 7.Leadbetter offers a particularly good reading of the passage in Osorio/the poem in Lyrical Ballads in his Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 66–68. This is only one of many provocative readings his book contains, all of which are enlightening and not all of of which I agree with wholly. The online review by Anthony John Harding in Review 19 strikes me as very fair.Google Scholar
- 19.Harry Clarke’s illustration of these lines in the “Mariner” is surely the supreme achievement of his series. The surviving drawings have only been reproduced once in their entirety—in the special edition of Nicola Gordon Bowe’s monograph (1983)—and deserve to be better known.Google Scholar
- 20.The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1796–1817 ed. Edwin W. Marrs (3 vols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975–78) 3: 187–88.Google Scholar
- 21.Brennan O’Donnell, “The ‘Invention’ of a Meter: ‘Christabel’ Meter as Fact and Fiction,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100 (October 2001), 524 cites SW&F 1: 441 in support of the particular influence of Spenser’s February eclogue.Google Scholar
- 22.John Beer, Coleridge’s Play of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 39–52 (chapter 4), has some particularly insightful remarks on the irrational prejudice that compromises this poem. A similar prejudice against the influence of Roman Catholicism, after visiting Malta and Sicily, upset the balance sought in some poems written in the 1820s.Google Scholar
- 31.George M. Ridenour “Source and Allusion in Some Poems of Coleridge,” Studies in Philology 60 (1963), 76–79 specifically.Google Scholar