Brothers in Lore: Fraternity and Priority in Thalaba, “Christabel,” and “Kubla Khan”

Abstract

The Annual Anthology was a product of the Bristol poetry workshop in which Southey and Coleridge took central places. Several of Coleridge’s own contributions to it, however, had originated not in the city, and not in Southey’s presence, but in Nether Stowey in Wordsworth’s. That they reached the public for the first time in the Anthology reveals the renewed importance of Southey as Coleridge’s friend and as the editor and organizer who brought the coterie’s poems to print. Southey continued to be a creative force as well, and in this chapter I examine a rather neglected period in which his and Coleridge’s mutual compositional influence had major results. I have three purposes in doing so: first, to intervene in debates about the genesis and nature of Romantic Orientalism; second, to reassess the importance of the Coleridge/Southey partnership in the careers of each and thus in Romanticism; third, to explore the uses of allusion in this partnership. If allusion served among the Bristol circle to acknowledge mutual influence and celebrate literary friendship, while obliquely satirizing enemies, it also acted, for Coleridge and Southey at the center of that circle, as a way by which each paid tribute to the published work of the other, and as a hallmark of the closeness of their creative partnership. In 1800 and 1801, however, it gradually changed to become a means of fashioning a new, lasting style, by each man’s self-definition against the other. It is this change that I intend to examine in detail.