Fifteen in Fifteen: Coleridge

2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge may not be the best poet I’ve ever read, but of all the poets I have read, he is certainly my favourite.

This may take a little explaining. In brief, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a Romantic poet writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was a contemporary and close friend (at least initially) of William Wordsworth, and spent a number of years living with the Wordsworths in the Lake District. Unhappily married, he was in love with Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, Sara Hutchinson, who did not apparently return the sentiment. He was often troubled with ill-health, which only became worse once he became addicted to laudanum, the opium-based painkiller prescribed to cure this. He loved the countryside, whether the Lakes or the Quantocks in Somerset (where he lived initially with his wife), and in youth often walked ridiculous distances (40 miles in one day from Stowey to Bristol, and back again the next day, what’s more). He had an interest in politics, studied philosophy as a hobby, and authored articles, books and lectures. He was a poet throughout his life.

Much of what I know about Coleridge comes from reading Richard Holmes’ excellent two-volume biography about his life. It’s certainly true that once you’ve spent 925 pages getting to know a person, they will always hold a special place in your heart, and undoubtedly the context I got from Richard Holmes helps me to understand Coleridge’s work better. Yet this is not the reason I feel oddly as if this poet who died almost two hundred years before I was born is one of my much-loved friends. Read his poetry, and I defy you not to feel the same. His work comes across as personal and immediate – read his Letter to Sara Hutchinson, the original poem from which the more well-known Dejection: An Ode was then written. Read Frost at Midnight. Read This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, read Constancy to an Ideal Object, read An Ode To The Rain. Read, even, the famous preface to Kubla Khan. Coleridge was unafraid to put himself into his work in a way that seems honest and uncrafted, but which belies the effort and poetic skill which these poems must have taken.

These more personal poems are less well-known than Coleridge’s epic poetry – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel – and perhaps deservedly so, as these ballads show Coleridge working at the height of his poetic powers, despite the fact that two of them are unfinished. They are poems I admire Coleridge for. But it’s outside of these poems that I feel I really meet him. Whenever I read Coleridge, I will find something new – maybe an acute observation that makes me laugh, as in The Nightingale when he accuses the poet who first called the nightingale’s song “melancholy” of being miserable about something else, “and so, poor wretch! filled all things with himself, / And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale / Of his own sorrow”. Or maybe my own conflicted feelings about returning briefly to a place I have loved dearly (“The Transientness is poison in the wine!”). Coleridge lived and loved and thought and suffered, and the words he wrote to talk about it let me share my own experience of life with him.

I owe Coleridge a great deal – his poetry was some of the first I read when my interest revived several years after English Literature GCSE, and it was partly through Coleridge that I discovered that reading poetry could be quite good fun. I’m now less of a fan of Romantic poetry – I’ve never got on with Wordsworth, I have trouble seeing the point of Keats, and even with Coleridge I find the style and phrasing overblown in some places, impenetrable in others. His poetry might not be my favourite poetry, but nevertheless, he is still my favourite poet. When I’m travelling with Coleridge, I can never quite feel alone.

Incidentally, if anyone else wants The Rime of the Ancient Mariner thoroughly ruined for them, try reading Hunt Emerson’s cartoon version. Featuring an alcoholic Hermit and a rather cute albatross, I would highly recommend it to anyone tempted to take poetry too seriously.