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.