Abstract
Coleridge is a philosopher, radical politician, theologian, and poet whose work and nature appear tragic. His philosophical struggles—linking subject and object, unifying the fragments of life, moving from skepticism to trinitarianism—appear to compensate for his loss of poetic power and to express his suffering with drug and alcohol addiction, anxiety, and despair. Overlooked has been a concurrent side of his personality: the man of joy, whose energy radiates outward to all his activities, the precocious and passionate lover, the devoted observer of women. To shift the balance from pitying Coleridge’s failure to admiring his resilience, I consider his sensuousness, his amorousness, his desires and yearnings in love, his miraculous discovery of it, his loss ten years later, and ultimately his redefinition of love so that he can endure its absence. Eros impels his excitement about the body, his glee and pleasure, his melancholy, and his developing ethics of reverence for persons. Love is the force behind human imagination, as his stanza from “Love” in the epigraph to this book reveals, and the influence of this stanza, famous in his own time, reverberates in William Butler Yeats’s lines, the other epigraph that affirms how love lives within, spreads outward, and generates human creativity.
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Notes
J. C. C. Mays, “Editor’s Introduction,” Poetical Works 1, part 1, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series LXXV, 2001), p. xc.
George Felton Mathew in “European Magazine” (1816), in Coleridge, The Critical Heritage, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), p. 241.
Collected Notebooks, 4, 5428, quoted in Michael John Kooy, Coleridge, Schiller, and Aesthetic Education (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 185.
George Whalley, Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1955), pp. 65–66, says that “he refused to consider divorce”; even the sympathetic and wise
J. Robert Barth, S. J., Coleridge and the Power of Love (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988), p. 34, writes “Divorce was for him—for religious reasons but no doubt also, unconsciously, for psychological reasons—out of the question, so a separation was arranged.”
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, ed. George Gibian (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970), pp. 256–258, part 3, ch. 13, where Karenin starts planning how to punish his adulterous wife.
A curious example of the excision of Coleridge’s adult erotic life is Jean H. Hagstrum, Eros and Vision: The Restoration to Romanticism (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1989), p. 75: “To penetrate, for example, the full reasons why Coleridge denied the existence of Cupid as a separate being would take more space than we have, but it might help us understand the shuddering withdrawals that everywhere characterize his private utterances about love” (my italics).
In an essay, Beth Lau, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Frankenstein,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, ed. Nick Roe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 207–223.
Ashley Cross, “From Lyrical Ballads to Lyrical Tales: Mary Robinson’s Reputation and the Problem of Literary Debt,” SIR 40, 4 (Winter, 2001), 571–605.
In Anya Taylor “Coleridge, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and the Difficulties of Loving,” PQ 79, 4 (Fall, 2000), 501–522, I describe the real young women who surround him in his later years and play his interlocutors in the mini-drama “The Improvisatore.”
H. J. Jackson, “Coleridge’s Women, or Girls, Girls, Girls Are Made to Love,” SIR 32, 4 (Winter, 1993), 577–600, regales us with Coleridge’s many women associates, but believes that Coleridge never met a woman whom he thought was his intellectual equal. Jackson acknowledges wittily that even she is ultimately one of the women who mop up after Coleridge.
Julie Ellison, Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding (Ithaca and London: Cornell, 1990), pp. 103–216, argues that feminine, French, and trivially minute styles were interchangeable terms in Coleridge’s criticism.
Gurion Taussig, Coleridge and the Idea of Friendship 1789–1804 (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 2002), pp. 93 and 97.
Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), excitingly reveals the chthonian powers magically at work in Coleridge’s great supernatural poems, but finds these powers abasing the passive poet, who is drained, dominated, raped, and silenced as “a tongueless male heroine,” a “coy maid half yielding to her lover,” and “the woman wailing for her demon-lover” (p. 344).
These foundational texts are Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (New York: Viking, 1989) and Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804–134 (New York: Pantheon, 1998);
Stephen Potter, Minnow Among Tritons: Mrs. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s letters to Thomas Poole 1799–1834 (Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press, 1934);
Molly Lefebure, The Bondage of Love: A Life of Mrs. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Victor Gollancz, 1986);
George Whalley, Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1955);
Sara Coleridge, Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge ed. by her daughter (New York: Harper & Bros, 1879);
Bradford Keyes Mudge, Sara Coleridge: A Victorian Daughter, Her Life and Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989);
Kathleen Coburn, Inquiring Spirit (rept. 1951; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979);
Robert Barth, Coleridge and the Power of Love (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989);
Anthony John Harding, Coleridge and the Idea of Love: Aspects of Relationship in Coleridge’s Thought and Writing (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974);
John Beer, Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence (London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press, 1977);
Tim Fulford, Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, DeQuincey and Hazlitt (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, 1999);
Julie Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 1993); Beth Lau, Fellow Romantics: Male and Female British Writers 1790–1830 (forthcoming);
Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990);
Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) and Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981);
Mary Ann Perkins, Coleridge and the Logos (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994);
Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Kant, Politics, & Persons,” Polity 14, 2 (Winter, 1981), 205–221;
David Clark, “Heidegger’s Craving: Being-On-Schelling,” Diacritics 27, 3, 8–33.
Leigh Hunt (in 1828), in Richard W. Armour and Raymond F. Howes, Coleridge the Talker: A Series of Contemporary Descriptions and Comments (rept. 1940; New York and London: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1969), p. 266.
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© 2005 Anya Taylor
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Taylor, A. (2005). Coleridge and Women’s Psychology. In: Erotic Coleridge. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403979179_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403979179_1
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