Maximum Recluse

Seems otiose, penning a 'round-up of 2015' post for a blog such as this, however common such round-ups appear to be in Blogdom today. Still, I suppose I could jot a few things down, state-of-the-union-wise, where my Coleridge dabblings are concerned.

So: EUP published my Biographia Literaria edition in 2014. I've spent much of 2015, when I wasn't doing other things, putting together a follow-up edition of Coleridge's Lectures on Shakespeare, and much of this blog has been involved in detailing my progress, as an online jotting-pad and notebook as well as a place for the trying-out of various ideas and passages. I also did some other things here, including readings of various Coleridge poems. The most notable of this latter kind of post are:

'Kubla Khan': What Happens Next?

Is this a previously-undiscovered Coleridge poem? (Spoiler: almost certainly not)

'Recollections of Love' (written 1808-17, published 1817)

The Latin 'Ad Vilmum Axiologum' (1807): Sex, Betrayal and Ariosto. Quite a combo.

Nocte Gelu: 'Frost at Midnight' and Genesis 31.

'When absent soon to meet again' (1810)

Some thoughts on 'Christabel'

Coleridge's Epitaph.

And a couple more posts on neo-Latin poetry: this one on Coleridge's reaction to the 'Ode on the Eucharist' 

... and this one, on Coleridge's 'Verecundia' poem.


So where have we got to? Well, I now have the whole Lectures on Shakespeare, text plus introduction, more or less finished; which is good news since the end of the month is when the press expect delivery of the TS. Just a couple more runs-through for polishing, typo-spotting and so on, and we're done.

So what next? Well, my conversations with the Press have involved three future titles in this series, although how many of them see the light of day depends on several factors (not least, EUP's willingness to continue publishing volumes of Coleridge, which in turn will depend upon how well these two are received critically, and how well they sell). The three are editions of Aids to Reflection, On The Constitution of Church and State and Poems. I've also floated the notion, though tentatively, of an edition of The Friend: tentatively because this would be both big (and so expensive to publish) and of limited popular appeal, I think. Of course, Aids to Reflection, though it was STC's single most popular volume through the 19th-Century, is of fairly limited readerly reach today; and much though I'd like to edit it, the Press may be cautious about greenlighting that one. We'll see. I hate to get pushy, but it would help me enormously if you could see your way to ordering copies of these two books—I mean the Biographia ed, and the forthcoming Lectures on Shakespeare volume—for your University, College or even Public Library. I say so not because it will benefit me financially (really, it won't) but because it'll make it easier for the Press to continue with the whole series.

And looking beyond that, there are two projects I'd really quite like to undertake, which I'm going to dub Thing 1 and Thing 2, not least because of their capacity for playfully and creatively upending my life for quite a stretch of time, a prospect I contemplate somewhere between 'I'm the goldfish in the bowl' and 'I'm the Cat in the Hat'. So, Thing 1 would be: to produce a ‘completed’ version of Coleridge’s Logosophia, his 'Opus Maximum'.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what that is (so please indulge my samsplaining): Coleridge referred many times to his big book, his life's work, which was to sum-up and express in a single place the whole of his thought about God and art and philosophy. He worked on this off and on through the last three decades of his life, under various titles: ‘Logosophia’, ‘Assertion of Religion’; ‘The Great Work’, ‘Magnum Opus’, ‘Opus Maximum’. He never finished it, although at his death he left a great quantity of draft material relating to it, with more that can be extracted from his Notebooks, conversation and his other works (especially the Biographia Literaria, a work which Coleridge several times describes only a ‘vestibule’ or preliminary work to the Logosophia). There was talk of Henry Nelson Coleridge completing and publishing the Logosophia in the years after STC’s death, but that came to nothing. In fact, the first publication of any of this material was Thomas McFarland’s 2002 edition for the Princeton Collected Coleridge under the ‘Opus Maximum’ title.

McFarland's volume really is an extraordinary scholarly achievement; though even its most fervent admirers would, surely, not deny that it makes for hard reading. Partly this is because McFarland is so scrupulous about recording the scrappy MS jottings as they have come down to us, complete with crossings out and variants and so on. But then, after all, it is unfinished. At any rate, the passages as presented in this 2002 version hardly cohere at all.

So what I would like to do is bring together a titivated version of this material with relevant stuff from Notebooks and Marginalia etc. to produce a ‘finished’ or at least plausibly stitched-together book, something readable and coherent and that did the things Coleridge hoped the project would do; and publish it together with an introduction contextualising the whole undertaking and summing up Coleridge’s prose. It would be a synthetic exercise, in several senses of that word, but, I think, a valuable one nonetheless.

This, though it looks dangerously hubristic (I know, I know), is positively small-scale compared to Thing 2. And yet, Thing 2 is the one that refuses to let-go its claws from my imagination. It is: to produce a completed edition of Wordsworth's The Recluse. Now, the odds of me ever doing this are small, and the odds of a reputable publisher agreeing to put it out smaller; but I have to say it doesn't seem to me altogether a forlorn hope. After all, we have somewhere between a third and a half of the actual Recluse, and quite a good idea of how Wordsworth wanted it completed: man, nature and society, three parts. 'Home at Grasmere' would kick us off, in Spring; The Excursion would fill the middle slot, with Summer. Clearly the final section, on 'society' would begin in Winter. Wordsworth talked about the whole as a 'Gothic church', with The Prelude as the 'ante-chapel' or 'portico'; that gives us a sense of the architectonics of the whole. I'm confident I could rustle up convincing-enough pastiche-Wordsworthian blank verse, and would enjoy doing so.

That's Kenneth Johnston's diagrammatic representation of Wordsworth's unfinished epic, from Stephen Gill's very good Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth (1999).

Wait a moment, though. Perhaps this project isn't as insane as it first appears. The point of the exercise would not be produce the 'actual' final version of The Recluse, of course; that would indeed be foolish thing to suggest. And I'm not daft enough to assume people are interested in reading my pseudo-Wordsworthian blank verse for its own sake. The point, from a scholarly and critical perspective, would be twofold. One would be to challenge the notion that fragmentariness is somehow integral to The Recluse as a work of art, the sense often expressed by critics that this epic was not only unfinished but unfinishable. I don't think that's right, and I'd like to argue the case contra the critical 'apotheosis of the fragment' as the essence of Romanticism. And secondarily, related to that: there could be merit less in the exercise of 'completing' The Recluse, and more in the critical self-reflection of somebody engaged in such an exercise. That might open new avenues, hermeneutically and critically, into Wordsworth's life's-work, don't you think?

No?

Ah well. You're probably right. Merry Christmas, everyone.