George Dyer at Shakespeare's 1811-12 lectures

We know that Coleridge's friend, the important, if eccentric (and now-forgotten) poet George Dyer, was at some of the 1811-12 lectures. John Payne Collier records a post-lecture conversation at Charles Lamb's house, the evening of Wednesday 27th November 1811, in which Lamb, Hazlitt, John Rickman and Dyer discussed STC's most recent lecture. Hazlitt 'did not think Coleridge at all competent to the task he had undertaken of lecturing on Shakespeare', but Dyer disagreed: 'Dyer thought that Coleridge was the fittest man for a Lecturer he had ever known: he was constantly lecturing when in company, only he did it better' [Foakes, Lectures on Literature 1808-1819 (1987) 1:233]. Presumably he meant that Coleridge was a better lecturer in private than he had been in Scot's Corporation Hall, two days earlier, so a slightly back-handed compliment, really. But still.

Dyer himself included a reference to Coleridge's lecturing in his Poetics; Or a Series of Poems and Disquisitions on Poetry (2 vols 1812), and I don't think it has ever been noticed. Towards the end of the second volume of this work of Dyer explains that he had originally planned to include in it a discussion of the poetic imagination: 'it would have fallen in the natural course of the preceding Essay to contemplate the Imagination, as the peculiar province of Poetry, and to have shown, that she lives there under laws of her own, somewhat different from'those, by which Philosophy is governed.' But, he says, he decided to omit this discussion. Why?

When the printing of this volume was nearly finished [in late 1811], I was compelled to stop the press, and to direct my whole attention to other subjects. I was invited in the interim by my ingenious friend Mr. Charles Lambe [sic], to hear two of Mr. Coleridge's lectures. One happened to take a turn, which led Mr. Coleridge to consider Poetry, as it more immediately depends on the Imagination; and he judiciously made its characteristic difference from Philosophy, or Science, to consist, in its being the work of the Imagination. With what I heard, I was greatly delighted; but I immediately felt, that while the eloquent Lecturer had enlarged my-views, he had crippled my exertions. For I had certainly two or three more ideas, which belonged to this place; but perceiving myself in danger of going over the same ground with Mr. Coleridge, I struck out of the course: even the word, Imagination, I have studiously avoided, though naturally belonging to the place, and almost essential to my meaning. It matters not, whether what I have said is better or worse; but I gave a turn to my thoughts somewhat different from what I had meditated.

It is most probable, that Mr. Coleridge may have enforced some points in his lectures, which I did not hear, about which he and I may differ. Two people employed in thinking on similar topics, and, occasionally, perhaps, reading similar, or the same books, will naturally, and necessarily, have some sentiments in common; and, if possessed of any mind at all, they will sometimes differ. But as the whole of the volume, with the exception above mentioned, was printed off, before Mr. Coleridge's lectures commenced, it must appear, that as any harmony, or synchronism of thought, can only have been accidental, so any difference of sentiment could not have proceeded from any thing like premeditated opposition. [Dyer, Poetics, 2:213-4]

So, we know that Dyer attended two of Coleridge's lectures from the 1811-12. It is in Lecture 3 that STC makes the first brings in the idea that poetry is to be contradistinguished not from prose but from science, and using 'imagination' as the salient for true poetic inspiration: 'we must combine under the notion of true poet more than ordinary sensibility, occasioning a more than ordinary sympathy with the objects of nature or the incidents of human life. This, again, united with a more than ordinary activity of mind in general, but more particularly of those faculties of the mind we class under the names of fancy and imagination—faculties (I know not how I shall make myself intelligible) that are rather spontaneous than voluntary—they excite great activity, but such as is greatly beyond all proportion to the effects occasioned by them.'