DOCSLIB.ORG

Coleridge's Capable Negativity in <Symbol Unicode="2018" Ascii

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Coleridge's Capable Negativity in <Symbol Unicode= 13.3 02 pages 199-306 Q7:Layout 1 25/10/07 13:03 Page 281 Andrew Keanie Coleridge’s Capable Negativity in ‘Dejection: an ode’ Throughout his career, Coleridge often agitation / then <almost epileptic> night- indulged his negative emotions memorably horrors in my sleep / & since then every and minutely: error I have committed, has been the immediate effect of the Dread of these bad It is a most instructive part of my life, that I most shocking Dreams – any thing to have been always preyed on by some Dread, prevent them / – all this interwoven with and perhaps all my faulty actions have been its minor consequences, that fill up the the consequence of some Dread or other on interspaces – the cherry juice running in my mind / from fear of Pain, or Shame, not between the cherries in a cherry pie / from the prospect of Pleasure / – So in my procrastination in dread of this – & childhood & Boyhood … imaginary fears of something else in consequence of that having the Itch in my Blood – then a short- procrast. &c …1 lived Fit of Fears from Sex – then horror of DUNS, & a state of struggling with madness The above notebook entry illustrates a from an incapability of hoping that I should typically choking efflorescence of Coleridgean be able to marry Mary Evans (and this unhappiness. Taken at its face value, Coleridge’s strange passion of fervent tho’ wholly ‘procrastination … & something else in imaginative and imaginary Love consequence of that procrast. &c’ meant that uncombinable by my utmost efforts with the poet considered himself incapable of <any regular> Hope – / possibly from producing great poetry. The point presents itself deficiency of bodily feeling, of tactual ideas as a question: how should Coleridge’s wealth of connected with the image) had all the effects poetic activity in later years be regarded, given of direct Fear, and I have lain for hours that he pronounced ‘The Poet … dead in together awake at night, groaning and [him]’2 in 1801? praying – then came that stormy time / and I do not wish to state categorically whether for a few months America really inspired or not the composition of ‘Dejection: an ode’ Hope, & I became an exalted Being – then should be thought of as marking a decisive came Rob. Southey’s alienation / my turning-point in Coleridge’s career, shaping all marriage – constant dread in my mind his future activity (or inactivity); nor do I wish respecting Mrs Coleridge’s Temper, &c – and to decide whether or not the poem should be finally stimulants in the fear and prevention thought of simply as an important episode, of violent Bowel-attacks from mental only partially related to what came before or 13.3 02 pages 199-306 Q7:Layout 1 25/10/07 13:03 Page 282 282 Romanticism after. To do either would impose on me a had a tinglingly sensitive imagination which, heavier burden of proof than I am able to when it received sense impressions from the assume in the space available to me here. outside world, could produce poetry as But it is worth observing that in ‘Dejection’, organically as ‘the Leaves of a tree’.9 Any Coleridge’s thinking revolved around a anxieties in Keats about the past or the future prodigious paradox: the fact that even as he could not, claimed Keats, contaminate the pronounced himself dead as a poet he was at purity of his contemplation: ‘nothing startles the same time exhibiting his continuing poetic me beyond the Moment’. When, say, ‘a life by his verbal facility and imaginative play. Sparrow c[a]me before [his] Window [he] With J.C.C. Mays’s argument in mind, that t[oo]k part in its existence and pek[ed] about Coleridge was capable of making his negative the Gravel’.10 According to Richard Woodhouse, emotions poetically ‘viable’,3 I will argue that Keats had only to see a billiard ball, in order to ‘Dejection’ involves the first conscious, explicit ‘conceive … that it may have a sense of delight and formal enactment of what I will call from its own roundness, smoothness volubility Coleridge’s capable negativity, which should & the rapidity of its motion’.11 Keats could be compared, but not confused, with Keats’s accept that truth was beauty and beauty truth negative capability.4 I will concentrate on the without attempting to square the circularity of version of the poem published in the Morning the idea, and without any non-poetic obeisance Post, 4 October 1802,5 because, in my view, to what S.T. Coleridge’s son, Hartley, would call it marks how Coleridge ceremonially ‘The dull arithmetic of prison’d sadness’.12 discontinued competing with Wordsworth Coleridge, ‘incapable [in Keats’s view] of as a poet,6 by displaying publicly his essential remaining Content with half-knowledge’,13 difference from (and possibly his superiority announced in ‘Dejection’ that he could not to) Wordsworth, despite the latter’s gaze14 profitably: ‘It were a vain endeavour, / productiveness. ‘Dejection’ is not simply the Though I should gaze forever’ (III. 42–3). In gesturing of a poet who is really dead. What, if Coleridge’s intellectual/imaginative hothouse anything, died? One may be inclined to answer (the poetic fragments, the philosophical that question with a shade of decadent humour theories, and the notebook entries) the natural if one recalls J.K. Huysmans’ character, des production of poetry had apparently become Esseintes, hosting a sombre, formal ‘dinner in impossible. Coleridge felt, or said he felt, he had pious memory of the host’s (temporarily) lost squandered his energy in dilatory speculation virility’. Like Huysmans’ knowingly (like ‘a kind of St Vitus’ Dance, eternal activity ‘regulation phraseology [in des Esseintes’] without action’15), when he ought to have used letters summoning relatives to attend the it to compose poetry. Notoriously, his obsequies of a defunct kinsman’,7 ‘Dejection’ unfinished projects outnumbered his finished has an oddly persuasive life of its own. The projects: paradox of Coleridge’s imaginative protestation of poetic death can be solved rather than simply I should not think of devoting less than stated: the news of the poet’s death was greatly 20 years to an Epic Poem. Ten to collect exaggerated. materials and warm my mind with Whereas Keats’s negative capability (like universal science. I would be a tolerable Wordsworth’s ‘wise passiveness’8) involves Mathematician, I would thoroughly know passive achievement, Coleridge’s capable Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and negativity involves the eccentric reactivation of Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, his negated imagination. Keats claimed that he Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine – 13.3 02 pages 199-306 Q7:Layout 1 25/10/07 13:03 Page 283 Coleridge’s Capable Negativity in ‘Dejection: an ode’ 283 then the mind of man – then the minds of the management of his deficit of self the biggest men – in all Travels, Voyages and Histories. challenge.21 The way in which Coleridge So I would spend ten years – the next five to managed that deficit continues to challenge the composition of the poem – and the last readers. Nora Meurs has said that ‘“Dejection: five to the correction of it.16 an ode” inaugurated a turning point in [Coleridge’s] thinking, by prompting the self- He anticipated, not acquired, the comprehensive preservative shift to “abstruse research”.’22 17 knowledge necessary for the production of his Whether or not the poem did mark a turning ‘Epic Poem’. point in Coleridge’s career, it was certainly a ‘Dejection’ shows Coleridge crossing a public admission of personal disarray. But if 18 shadowline of the emotions. In September there is any truth in J. Appleyard’s view that 1801, he had apprised Tom Poole of his feeling Coleridge ‘paradoxically invokes the of isolation from his family: imaginative gift he is denying’,23 then it is My family – I have wholly neglected them – likely that the poet of ‘Dejection’ had more I do not love them – their ways are not my than a ‘sole resource’ or an ‘only plan’ (VI. 91). ways, nor their thoughts my thoughts – I ‘Dejection’ is not primarily Coleridge’s have no recollections of childhood connected formal recognition of his inability to win ‘from with them, none but painful thoughts in my outward forms … / The passion and the life, after years – at present …19 whose fountains [were] within’ (III. 45–6). Nor does the poem primarily amount to his public By the time he came to write ‘Dejection’, he application (to himself) for permission (from recognized that he had to stop prevaricating, himself) to jettison the self-protective clutter speculating and deceiving himself and face the of ‘Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry …’. In truth about himself: his gift was unspecific, and ‘Dejection’, Coleridge recognized in himself he could never satisfy his mind’s enormous, the ubiquity of his melancholy. He had already deleterious need to keep moving, as it dragged privately recognized that ubiquity (‘I write with it the uncongenial tangle of ‘abstruse melancholy, always melancholy’24), but once research’ (VI. 89) and negative personal he publicized it, he could then publicly harness emotions. The reminder of self hanging over it, and therefore ply his own (recognizably not Coleridge had to be integrated with his diffuse Wordsworth’s) trade. In documenting (albeit intellectualism in some way, because the former impressionistically) the error of his younger clamoured for more attention than he, his self’s ways (‘Fancy [had] made [him] dreams of family, friends and editors could satisfy. The happiness’ [VI. 79], and ‘hope [had] gr[o]w[n] process of integration was not one that could round [him], like the twining vine’ [VI.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • On the Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection,” in Es- Says, Moral and Political, 2 Vols
    Notes Introduction 1. Robert Southey, “On the Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection,” in Es- says, Moral and Political, 2 vols. (1817; London: John Murray, 1832), II, 82. The identity of Junius remained a mystery, and even Edmund Burke was suspected. For an argument that he was Sir Philip Francis, see Alvar Ellegård, Who Was Junius? (The Hague, 1962). 2. Byron, “The Vision of Judgment” in Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–92), VI, 309–45. 3. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Ro- mantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 13. 4. See Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1980). 5. Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 23–24. 6. Jerome J. McGann, Towards a Literature of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 39. 7. McGann, Towards a Literature of Knowledge, p. 39. 8. McGann, “Literary Pragmatics and the Editorial Horizon,” in Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory, ed. Philip Cohen (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1991), pp. 1–21 (13). 9. Marilyn Butler, “Satire and the Images of Self in the Romantic Period: The Long Tradition of Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris,” in English Satire and the Satiric Tradition, ed. Claude Rawson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 209–25 (209). 10. Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 12–13. 11. Gary Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
    [Show full text]
  • Saving Sarah Fricker: Accurately Representing the Realities of the Coleridges’ Marriage
    Saving Sarah Fricker: Accurately Representing the Realities of the Coleridges’ Marriage Saving Sarah Fricker: Accurately Representing the Realities of the Coleridges’ Marriage Cori Mathis Abstract The Lake Poets circle was prolific; they wrote letters to each other constantly, leaving a clear picture of the beginning and eventual decline of the marriage between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Sarah Fricker Coleridge. Coleridge also was fond of chronicling his personal life in his work. Coleridge’s poetry and prose clearly show that, though he may have come to regret it, he originally married Sarah Fricker for love and was very happy in the beginning of their relationship. The problem with their marriage was that they were just fundamentally incompatible, something that was not Sarah Fricker’s fault—she was a product of her society and simply unprepared to be a wife to someone like Coleridge. Unfortunately, scholars have taken Coleridge’s letters as pure truth and seem to have forgotten that every marriage has two partners, both with their own perspectives. This reflects a deliberate ignorance of Coleridge’s tendency to see situations quite differently from how they actually were. Because of this tradition, Sarah Fricker Coleridge is often portrayed as difficult at best and a harridan at worst. It does not help that she attempted to help her husband’s reputation by the majority of their letters that she possessed—one cannot see her side as clearly. In this essay, I hope to prove that she was simply an unhappy wife, married to a poetic genius who had decided she was the impediment to his happiness while she only wanted to keep their family together and safe.
    [Show full text]
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge ƒ Father Anglican Vicar
    CONTEXT Samuel Taylor Coleridge Father Anglican vicar. Moved to London when was young. There attended at school - “Frost at Midnight” Devon, England (1772-1834) 62 XVIII England & France at war. Coleridge as a political radical an important young poet (Wordsworth, Southey) Lyrical Ballads revolution (1798). Coleridge contribution with Wordsworth ROMANTIC ERA (England) Natural speech over poetic Ornament, Emotion over Abstract thought, Natural beauty over Urban sophistication Coleridge = IMAGINATION, relation between NATURE & MIND as it exits as a separate entity “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” Married in 1795. In 1799, met Sara Hutchinson, fell deeply in love. Became an opium addict “Kubla Khan” Moved w/ the surgeon to preserve his health: composed many of his important non-fiction works Biographia Literaria Coleridge is remembered primarily for the poems wrote in his 20s. ANLYSIS Wordsworth’s idealization of nature, on human joy vs. Coleridge’s musical effects over the plainness of common speech The fragility of the child’s innocence by relating his own urban childhood “Frost at Midnight” The division between own mind and the beauty of the natural world “Dejection: An Ode” “Nightingale” Privileges weird tales, bizarre imagery over the commonplace “Rime” (later Shelley) feelings of alienation The stereotype of the suffering Romantic genius, often charact. by drug addiction: figure of the idealist THEMES (3) 1 The Transformative Power of the Imagination active imagination a vehicle for transcending unpleasant circumstances
    [Show full text]
  • ABSTRACT Genius, Heredity, and Family Dynamics. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and His Children: a Literary Biography Yolanda J. Gonz
    ABSTRACT Genius, Heredity, and Family Dynamics. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his Children: A Literary Biography Yolanda J. Gonzalez, Ph.D. Chairperson: Stephen Prickett, Ph.D. The children of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hartley, Derwent, and Sara, have received limited scholarly attention, though all were important nineteenth century figures. Lack of scholarly attention on them can be blamed on their father, who has so overshadowed his children that their value has been relegated to what they can reveal about him, the literary genius. Scholars who have studied the children for these purposes all assume familial ties justify their basic premise, that Coleridge can be understood by examining the children he raised. But in this case, the assumption is false; Coleridge had little interaction with his children overall, and the task of raising them was left to their mother, Sara, her sister Edith, and Edith’s husband, Robert Southey. While studies of S. T. C.’s children that seek to provide information about him are fruitless, more productive scholarly work can be done examining the lives and contributions of Hartley, Derwent, and Sara to their age. This dissertation is a starting point for reinvestigating Coleridge’s children and analyzes their life and work. Taken out from under the shadow of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, we find that Hartley was not doomed to be a “child of romanticism” as a result of his father’s experimental approach to his education; rather, he chose this persona for himself. Conversely, Derwent is the black sheep of the family and consciously chooses not to undertake the family profession, writing poetry.
    [Show full text]
  • Coleridge's Imperfect Circles
    Coleridge’s Imperfect Circles Patrick Biggs A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Literature Victoria University of Wellington 2012 2 Contents Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 4 Note on Abbreviations 5 Introduction 6 The Eolian Harp 16 This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison 37 Frost at Midnight 60 Conclusion 83 Bibliography 91 3 Abstract This thesis takes as its starting point Coleridge’s assertion that “[t]he common end of all . Poems is . to make those events which in real or imagined History move in a strait [sic] Line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion” (CL 4: 545). Coleridge’s so-called “Conversation” poems seem to conform most conspicuously to this aesthetic theory, structured as they are to return to their starting points at their conclusions. The assumption, however, that this comforting circular structure is commensurate with the sense of these poems can be questioned, for the conclusions of the “Conversation” poems are rarely, if ever, reassuring. The formal circularity of these poems is frequently achieved more by persuasive rhetoric than by any cohesion of elements. The circular structure encourages the reader’s expectations of unity and synthesis, but ultimately these expectations are disappointed, and instead the reader is surprised by an ending more troubling than the rhetoric of return and reassurance would suggest. Taking three “Conversation” poems as case studies (“The Eolian Harp,” “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” and “Frost at Midnight”), this thesis attempts to explicate those tensions which exist in the “Conversation” poems between form and effect, between structure and sense.
    [Show full text]
  • A Poetics of Dissent; Or, Pantisocracy in America Colin Jager
    A Poetics of Dissent; or, Pantisocracy in America Colin Jager Theory and Event 10:1 | © 2007 To know a bit more about the threads that trace the ordinary ways and forgotten paths of utopia, it would be better to follow the labor of the poets. -- Jacques Ranciere, Short Voyages to the Land of the People The past can be seized only as an image, which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. -- Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History 1. "Pantisocracy" was an experiment in radical utopian living, invented in England in the closing years of the eighteenth century by a couple of young poets, never put into practice, and described in later, more sober years with a mixture of embarrassment and shame by the poets and their friends, and with sanctimonious anger by their enemies. In the essay that follows I will interpret Pantisocracy as an example of what I call a "poetics of dissent" -- that is, a literary strategy that makes possible a dissenting politics. Immediately, however, it needs to be made clear that both "literary" and "politics" are understood broadly here; indeed, the politics I pursue is simply the possibility of speaking in a certain way. Moreover this essay bears a complicated relationship to a systematic exposition or exegesis, for although certain thinkers -- Derrida, Ranciere, Benjamin, Hardt and Negri -- appear here, I employ them opportunistically. The goal is to describe Pantisocracy in such a way as to create an historical "image" (in Benjamin's sense of the word) of dissent.
    [Show full text]
  • Revisiting Coleridge's Figure of 'My Pensive Sara'
    ‘Restore me to Reality’ Revisiting Coleridge’s Figure of ‘My pensive Sara’ Catherine E. Ross ____________________________________________________________________________________________ A relation (always social) determines the terms and not the reverse. Michel De Certeau 1 y Pensive Sara’ is the name Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb ‘M habitually used to refer to the poem that we now call ‘The Eolian Harp.’ STC often quoted portions of this lyric in his letters and told friends in 1796 it was ‘my favorite of my poems.’2 Today, speaking for the majority of critics, Paul Magnuson has aptly labeled ‘The Eolian Harp’ ‘one of Coleridge’s most important and romanticism’s most seminal poems.’3 Scholars cite various reasons for ‘The Eolian Harp’s pride of place: among them are its inaugural expression of the ‘grand Romantic idea of the ‘One life’ ’;4 its depictions of the Romantic imagination at work;5 and its innovative and distinctive conversational structure.6 While these and other commentaries on the poem have made important contributions to critical understanding of this text, none, to my mind, has looked carefully or kindly enough at Coleridge’s original representation of the character who signals the crisis at the heart of the narrative, the speaker’s beloved, if pensive, Sara. To revisit and perhaps resuscitate the figure of ‘Sara,’ I shall focus upon certain events, relationships, and texts in Coleridge’s life that date from 1790 to 1796, the years leading up to and including the composition and publication of the earliest version of ‘The Eolian Harp’ in Poems on Various Subjects (1796).
    [Show full text]
  • A Dark Ecology of Performance: Mapping the Field of Romantic Literary Celebrity Through Gothic Drama
    A Dark Ecology of Performance: Mapping the Field of Romantic Literary Celebrity through Gothic Drama Brian R. Gutiérrez A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2017 Reading Committee: Marshall Brown, Chair Juliet Shields Raimonda Modiano Program Authorized to Offer Degree Department of English 2 ©Copyright 2017 Brian R. Gutiérrez 3 University of Washington Abstract A Dark Ecology of Performance: Mapping the Field of Romantic Literary Celebrity through Gothic Drama Brian Robert Gutiérrez Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Emeritus Marshall Brown Comparative Literature Gothic drama reached a height of popularity in the 1790s, partly due to celebrity actors like Sarah Siddons. Yet we know very little about the relationship between the many writers of gothic dramas and the celebrity apparatus. Although critics such as Richard Schickel regard literary celebrity as strictly a twentieth century phenomenon, recently other scholars have been arguing for a broader historical view. Richard Salmon, for instance, has cited photography, investigative journalism, and the phenomenon of authors being interviewed at their homes as evidence of the machinery of celebrity culture operating in the 19th century; David Higgins and Frank Donoghue have argued for the importance of periodical writing in the 18th and 19th centuries, and Claire Brock and Judith Pascoe have pointed out the feminization of fame and public theatricality in the Romantic period. And Tom Mole, in addition to examining the career of Lord Byron in the context of celebrity culture, has recently edited a collection of essays on the material and discursive elements of celebrity culture from 1750 to 1850 to provide a “synoptic picture of celebrity.” 4 Yet the most popular and profitable literary genre of the Romantic era has remained a stepchild of criticism, the victim of a disjuncture between literary critical study of dramatic texts and historical study of performance culture.
    [Show full text]
  • Coleridge and the Fears of Friendship, 1798 Felicity James
    Coleridge and the Fears of Friendship, 1798 Felicity James ____________________________________________________________________________________________ his paper focusses on the slim quarto volume produced by Joseph T Johnson in autumn 1798, Fears in Solitude, written in 1798, during the alarm of an invasion; to which are added France, an Ode, and Frost at Midnight. My aim is to reconstruct some of the structures of dialogue inside and outside the volume, the correspondences and conversations surrounding and shaping the poems. These poems form, in themselves, part of a public speech act: they construct and defend Coleridge’s position in 1798, as he began to reconsider his role as a patriot. ‘France: an Ode’ was, after all, entitled ‘The Recantation’ when it was first published in the Morning Post on 16 April 1798, and Erdman has shown that here Coleridge was mirroring the oscillations of the editor, Daniel Stuart, as he moved away from sympathy with France. The volume is thus in dialogue with national preoccupations: it also reflects heightened local tensions and patriotic feeling. On a personal level, it intersects with Coleridge’s own statements of intent, forming a kind of commentary or companion piece to radical articles such as the January 1798 ‘Queries’, reprinted in the Morning Post from the ‘Watchman’ two years previously: 1. Whether the wealth of the higher classes does not ultimately depend on the labour of the lower classes? 2. Whether the man who has been accustomed to love beef and cleanly raiment, will not have stronger motives to labour than the man who has used himself to exist without either? 3.
    [Show full text]
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
    27 OFTEN DOWN, BUT NEVER OUT SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834) n his quest for a livelihood, in his family life, and in his response to the Enlightenment, the Ipoet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the contrary of the lesser writer Sydney Smith. His gi- ant weeping willow overshadows Smith’s modest hawthorn, and his letters, unlike Smith’s, are the letters of an unhappy man. Coleridge’s troubles begin in childhood. In 1781, on the threshold of his ninth year, the death of his father, the Vicar of Ottery in Devon, leaves him in the charge of his brother George. After be- ing schooled at Christ’s Hospital, he goes up to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he distinguishes himself as a scholar; falls in love with Mary Evans, whose mother tends him with maternal affection when he is ill; and indulg- es in enough wayward behaviour to pile up debts he cannot pay. During a three-year period beginning when he is eighteen, he lapses from chastity in his association with loose women. In despair and shame, resisting the temptation of suicide, he enlists in the dragoons, or light cavalry, under the name Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. His friends and family succeed in trac- ing him, and after much difficulty his brothers George and James procure his discharge, ostensibly on the grounds of his insanity. Soon after returning to Cambridge, Coleridge meets Robert Southey, and the two young poets, both radicals, concoct a scheme only a little less hare-brained than the flight into the military. With other enthusiasts, they will found a Utopian colony in the United States of America to practise pantisocracy (the rule of all as equals) and aspheterism (commonality of property).
    [Show full text]
  • The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge
    The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge is one of the most influential, as well as one of the most enigmatic, of all Romantic figures. The possessor of a precocious talent, he dazzled contemporaries with his poetry, journalism, philosophy and oratory without ever quite living up to his early promise, or overcoming problems of dependency and drug addiction. The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge does full justice to the many facets of Coleridge’s life, thought and writing. Specially commissioned essays focus on his major poems, including ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Christabel’, his Notebooks, and his major work of non-fiction, the Biographia Literaria. Attention is given to his role as talker, journalist, critic and philosopher; to his politics, his religion, and his reputation in his own times and afterwards. A chronology and guides to further reading complete the volume, making this an indispensable guide to Coleridge and his work. lucy newlyn is Fellow and Tutor in English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. She is an authority on Coleridge and Wordsworth, and has published exten- sively on English Romanticism. Her publications include Coleridge, Words- worth and the Language of Allusion (1986), ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Romantic Reader (1993), and Reading, Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (2000), all with Oxford University Press. Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 CAMBRIDGE COMPANIONS TO LITERATURE The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy The Cambridge Companion to the Classic edited by P. E. Easterling Russian Novel The Cambridge Companion to Old English edited by Malcolm V.
    [Show full text]
  • Robert Southey John Spalding Gatton University of Kentucky
    The Kentucky Review Volume 4 Number 1 This issue is devoted to a catalog of an Article 8 exhibition from the W. Hugh Peal Collection in the University of Kentucky Libraries. 1982 Catalog of the Peal Exhibition: Robert Southey John Spalding Gatton University of Kentucky Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you. Recommended Citation Gatton, John Spalding (1982) "Catalog of the Peal Exhibition: Robert Southey," The Kentucky Review: Vol. 4 : No. 1 , Article 8. Available at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review/vol4/iss1/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Kentucky Libraries at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Kentucky Review by an authorized editor of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Robert Southey An intimate of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and their neighbor at Keswick, Robert Southey (1774-1843) merits the title of "Lake mb. Poet," but being also prolix and prolific, he remains forever saddled l- with the Byronic rhyming epithet of "mouthey"; never collected, his writings would fill upwards of one hundred volumes. His longer poems, though little read today, earned the admiration of uch contemporaries as diverse as Scott, Shelley, and Macaulay. His prose, which evidences an unexpected simplicity and frankness, ater impressed even Byron as "perfect." ge Born in Bristol, Southey attended London's Westminster School, where he roomed with Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, a lifelong friend and a future Member of Parliament.
    [Show full text]