The Rimes (and Reason) of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) is surely our second most notable English opium eater, after Thomas de Quincey, though certainly the one whose artistic productions are the more celebrated. How fortunate for us that his natal day falls today, in order that we may contemplate his dark and mysterious works during the Halloween season?

“Kubla Khan” (1797) is one of the few poems I’ve committed (part of) to memory, but I’m sure many can say that. Coleridge’s poetic sense is almost alchemical, how he is able to steer between precise effects and accessibility to the reader. Like his friend and colleague Wordsworth, he is not difficult to wrestle with at the literal level, yet there is so much to contemplate that lies beyond the veil of what he has written. I feel like Poe owes him a debt as to dream-like mood, though not so much as to style. His second best known is the eerie, allegorical “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, written around the same time and published in the Lyrical Ballads (1797), the volume he co-authored with Wordsworth.

The latter poet makes us think more of the natural than the supernatural, yet Coleridge was interested in both, and that is the true essence of Romanticism: individual perception of the outer and inner worlds. The son of a clergyman, Coleridge had a lifelong fascination with theology and the philosophies of the empirical and idealist thinkers of his age. He would be instrumental in introducing Kant to the English-speaking world, and in reviving appreciation for Shakespeare (in particular the flawed but metaphysically penetrating Hamlet). He was as interested in the process of evoking effects and experiences in readers, as in the doing of it. He read and reviewed Gothic writers like Ann Radcliff, copied Thomas Gray in his youth, and worked on a translation of Goethe’s Faust.Most believe that (like most of the projects he turned a hand to) this latter was left unfinished and unpublished, although a few years ago Oxford University Press released an unattributed work that stimulated debate about whether it might have been Coleridge’s. Coleridge also read deeply and widely in demonology, which influenced his third well-known (and yet unfinished) supernatural work “Christabel”. With its encounter with a beautiful but vaguely malevolent female visitor, the poem is though to have influenced Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, just as “Ancient Mariner” seems (to me) to presage such things as Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and the shipboard sequence in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. “Christabel” is also said to have triggered something like a fit in Percy Shelley, resulting in the famous house-party contest in Switzerland the most famous product of which was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The Orientalism (which I use here as a term of term art) of “Kubla Khan” creeps into pop culture; I think of it in connection to things like Lost Horizon and Chandu the Magician.

The deceptively simple directness of Coleridge’s “Conversational Poems” like “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” and “The Nightingale” and several others are said to have influenced not only his friend and collaborator Wordsworth (the influence was mutual), but also Keats and Shelley.

One of Coleridge’s first cohorts was Charles Lamb, whom he had known since boyhood. After the death of his father, an Anglican clergyman and schoolmaster, he was sent to a charity school in London, where a strict schoolmaster taught him Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and such poets as Shakespeare and Milton. In the early ’90s he attended Cambridge, where he became affiliated with Robert Southey,with whom he wrote the play The Fall of Robespierre and cooked up a scheme for a Utopian community to be established in America, which would operate under a principal they called “Pantisocracy” (egalitarian rule, and communal ownership of property). The Pantisocracy scheme was devised with a third poet friend Robert Lovell. Remarkably, all three poets married three sisters, the Frickers, Sarah, Edith and Mary. They were clearly very committed to utopianism! But not really, the plan eventually fell apart, and Coleridge and his wife later separated.

For a time, Coleridge became involved in Unitarianism, and even preached, lectured, and published sermons and tracts. Eventually he returned to the Church of England and was influential in reforming it. His metaphysical speculations were influential on Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became a friend. His great (unfinished) philosophical work The Opus Maximus occupied him from 1819 to 1823, and has thus reached the bicentennial of its existence this year.

Perhaps his most influential work outside the poems is his book of literary criticism, the Biographia Literaria (1817). Originally intended as an argument justifying his own poetry, it gave us the immortal and useful phrase “suspension of disbelief.” Other lasting coinages from Coleridge’s pen include, “water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink” and “a sadder and a wiser man”, both from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.

As may be imagined, Coleridge addiction to opium made his life a trial, and he struggled with it for decades. To it may be attributed his works unfinished, and a certain amount of disorder in his private life. He lived largely on the generosity of others, though it must be added not strictly as charity, for even then he was widely acknowledged to be a national treasure. He was 61 at the time of his death.

I am a HUGE fan of the illustrator Gustave Doré; in 1875 the French artist illustrated an edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner that was influential on H.P. Lovecraft. A highly recommended pathway in to this work for those who are not habitual readers of Romantic poetry. In 1954 Kenneth Angermade a film called Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome that obviously owes a debt to “Kubla Khan”. The comic book character Namor the Sub-Mariner was inspired by “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.

Contemplating Coleridge is its own reward, but working on this post has yielded an unexpected side benefit, as uncanny as anything in the pages of the poet/philosopher. That has to do with my discovery of the existence of a composer by the name of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, an almost exact contemporary, and whose life was just about as fascinating. I’ll make you wait for his story, although, I assure you that if you seek out and explore his story today you will not be disappointed.