New in the sense of hitherto unnoticed. This is only speculative, but on balance I'd say these verses are by Coleridge. See what you think.
So, my starting point was this eight-line political squib, which certainly is by Coleridge: ‘The Taste of the Times’:
Some whim or fancy pleases every age;J. C. C. Mays in his edition of the Poetical Works has this as #384, and records in the headnote that ‘the only known text of the poem is a transcript by John Taylor Coleridge in his Commonplace book, subscribed “S.T.C.”’
For talents premature ’tis now the rage.
In Music how great Handel would have smil'd
T' have seen whole crowds enraptur'd with a child!
A Garrick we have had in little Betty,
And now, we're told, we have a Pitt in Petty.
All must allow, since thus it is decreed.
He is a very Petty Pitt indeed.
Being curious I checked, and Mays is right: this poem appeared in the Morning Post 25th February 1807. I wasn’t able to find an actual copy of the paper, short of paying a hefty subscription for full access to the British Newspaper Archives database, but I did find a copy of the anthology The Spirit of the Public Journals 1807: Being an Impartial Selection of the Most Ingenious Essays and Jeux D'Espirit That Appear in the Newspapers and Other Publications, Volume 11 (1808), a publication which selected and reprinted choice verse and prose from a range of British papers. And there is Coleridge’s poem, subscripted ‘From the Morning Post’, and with a few variants from the version Mays, following JTC, prints:
Some whim or fancy pleases every age;The child singer famous for performing Handel was Maria Poole, later Mrs Dickons, who was only six years old when she started performing, and who, engaged by Covent Garden in the 1790s, drew large crowds. The reference to ‘Betty’ is to a famous child actor who first trod the boards in December 1804 at the age of 13: William Henry West Betty (1791 -1874), known as ‘the Young Roscius’. Betty's father auditioned the boy before Michael Atkins, manager of the Belfast Theatre, who said ‘I never dared to indulge in the hope of seeing another Garrick, but I have seen an infant Garrick in Betty.’
And talents premature are now the rage.
In music how great Handel would have smil'd
T' have seen whole crowds in raptures with a child!
A Garrick we have had in little Betty,
And now, we're told, we have a Pitt in Petty.
All must allow, since thus it is decreed.
He is a very Petty Pitt indeed.
So far so trivial: nice to trace the poem (though it is a very minor piece of Coleridge), and to have a text closer, even if only in small ways, to what STC actually wrote.
But here's the kicker: because, as you can see from the screenshot at the head of this post, The Spirit of the Public Journals prints ‘The Taste of the Times’ as a twofer, together with a similarly light-hearted political squib, ‘The Safety of the Country’:
— — Non deficit alter Aureus;
et simili frondescit virga metallo.
When Richmond's great Duke long ago sallied forth,
He entrench’d the whole country—south, east, west, and north;
For he held that this mis’rable nation of ours
Must be sav'd by mud walls, palisadoes, and towers.
Next Windham, with projects and crotchets quite new,
Comes forward (for he will be Quixotting too)
And with Crawfurd, as Sancho and Dapple to back him,
He defies all the windmills on earth to attack him;
Our army, which cost us such trouble to train,
He begs to set free, to enlist them again;
Our militia, he thinks, to our strength may conduce,
If, to make them more strong, you their numbers reduce;
While the poor volunteers, those unfortunate elves!
He dresses in green—to be kill'd by themselves:
And their leaders—whom fortune and rank may make prouder,
He mentions as proper provision for powder.
Jack Tar, who has heard them these projects discuss,
Exclaims— “Let them leave but the ocean to us;
We care not a jot what these lubbers are a’ter—
They shall find that the land shall be sav’d by the water.”
MILITARIS
Is this Coleridge too? JTC didn't think it worth copying-out into his memorandum book (perhaps it was too long; or perhaps he just didn't like it. It's not as witty as ‘The Taste of the Times’, I think). The target of this satire is William Windham, a member, like Petty, of the the Ministry of All the Talents in 1806–7. As Secretary for War and the Colonies, Windham undertook various reforms of the army (specifically, he abolished the ballot for the militia to ensure that it was staffed with volunteers rather than impressed men, and he limited service in the Army to seven years, hoping thereby to attract more recruits. This poem, clearly, thinks both measures bad ones.) The Latin epigraph is from Vergil, Aeneid 6:144-45 ‘[when the first bough is torn off], a second also of gold soon follows, and a new twig shoots forth leaves of the same metal.’ Though, as you can see, the poet has added a non to the start of this quotation, negating it: so once the first twig is torn off, no golden bough succeeds.
The pseudonym ‘Militaris’ is not one that Coleridge uses elsewhere, but so far as I can see neither did anyone else. I've searched for other poems by ‘Militaris’ and can't find any, either in the Morning Post (which can be searched at the British Newspaper Archives, although if you actually want to access the results of your search you need to pay them a subscription fee), or in any other publication of the period. And STC did use a variety of pseudonyms. It doesn't seem impossible to me that he might pick this name for a squib directed at the Secretary of State for War.
My main point is that the approach of both poems is the same: pick a member of the Ministry of All the Talents, then make fun of them by riffing on their name. In the first poem, it's ‘Petty’, as ‘petty’, ‘Pitt-y’ and ‘Betty’; in the second one ‘Windham’, as ‘Windmill’ and so to ‘Tilting at Windmills’, Don Quixote and all the rest (‘Dapple’, mentioned, is Sancho Panza's mule; Colonel Crawfurd was an MP and soldier who backed Windham's reforms in the House). What's funny about Petty is that he is so young. What's funny about Windham is that he's so Quixotic.
It really does seem that these two poems go together. So if the first is by Coleridge, then isn't it possible the second is too?
Postscript Nov 28th: I got a surprising, or at least surprising to me, amount of pushback on this post, given that it is (a) up-front about its speculative, unprovable nature (if I had proof, I'd take this to a scholarly journal, not bury it in an obscure blogpost), and (b) not, I thought, claiming very much. This poem is a squib, like many that Coleridge wrote, not a new sonnet by Shakespeare or a new epic by Blake after all. Even if I could prove it was by Coleridge it wouldn't shift the way anyone thought about him by so much as a hair's breadth. Nonetheless, amongst the reactions from colleagues and others was included a quantity of disbelief, suspicion and even hostility, including the insistence that Coleridge could never have written a poem so rubbish. I was told that only "non-scholars" are interested in this kind of thing, and a Joyce specialist colleague emailed me with a story about how an amateur American Joyce-fan of his acquaintance had visited the Martello Tower in Dublin where he met a bookseller who conned him out of a large sum of money by flogging him an atlas of Homer's Greece, complete with handwritten annotations, that (he said) was the copy Joyce used writing Ulysses. It's possible such a reaction is something I have earned. I don't know though. A chat with my friends Francis Spufford and Alan Jacobs alerted me of a couple of salients: one, that there has been (I think Alan is right about this) a narrowing of our sense of what literary scholarship means, at least in Anglo-American literary-scholarly circles, such that now we tend to think we're only doing our job as a literary critic if we're writing critical, interpretative, theoretical articles or monographs, with a pronounced downgrading in status of textual and bibliographic work. But Alan also pointed out that I made this discovery in Google Books. To quote him: ‘I don't think many of our colleagues understand just how massive the trove is — partly because it’s not nearly as useful for texts still in copyright and texts with pre-19th-century conventions of orthography and typesetting. A 19th-century guy like you is right in the sweet spot for Google Books use, but I don't think the value of the corpus is widely understood (even by 19th-century scholars). I really do think that if you had said that you discovered the poem on a visit to the BL you’d have received a more respectful response.’ It's also possible that my colleagues assumed I was indeed making a claim on a par with ‘a new sonnet by Shakespeare! look!’ than I, actually, am. Oxfordians and their ilk have much to answer for. The thing is, Coleridge is unusual in being a major poet the bulk of whose actual output is, by any reasonable assessment, crap, frankly. I'm not sure non-Coleridgeans quite get that about him. I blogged on this question a while ago, actually.
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