Lowell's Coleridge

 

Lowell's History (1973) collects 366 sonnets, arranged chronologically by subject, from prehistory, King David, Solomon, Achilles, Clytemnestra, Sappho through Roman figures, Vikings, Dante, Tudors, French Revolution and on to the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries. Two of these sonnets are about Coleridge. Here's one:

Jeremy Reed notes that, unlike his earlier work, in History ‘Lowell's seizure upon the moment often leads to startlingly disordered juxtapositions. This is part of the book's strength as well as its confusions.’ He cites this sonnet:

Coleridge enters the poet's meditation in the April rain over New York in a manner so oblique and contradictory that one senses Lowell's ignition of cross-currents. New York: the rain shucks its liquid peas on the skylight, a scent of renewal that evokes for the poet how paradoxically “A newer younger generation faces/the firing squad” before Coleridge is fleshed out on the substance of the poem. [Reed, Madness: the Price of Poetry (Peter Owen 1989), 95]

Not altogether the substance of the poem, I would say: the sonnet falls into two halves, the first about Lowell on a New York fire-escape in April, thinking of Coleridge, being interrupted by a sudden shower and hurrying inside and downstairs. The rain smells sweetly, of youth, of life, which leads him by an associative inversion to think of youth and death, the young protesting the Vietnam war, and being shot down, as at Kent State. That ends line 7: the remaining seven lines characterise Coleridge in unflattering terms, but even here New York intrudes, when the portly, unstable Englishman is figured in terms of American tenpin bowling. Lowell's opener ‘Coleridge stands’ inhabits Coleridge's own self-styling: he often invoked the cross-linguistic whimsy by which his initials ‘S.T.C.’ actualised the Greek, ἐστηση, which means ‘he has stood’: he would sign his work or his letters Esteesee, or ἐστηση. He flames for his ‘one friend’—Wordsworth, we presume, although by interrupting the poem almost as soon as it has begun and inserting himself into it, Lowell is perhaps suggesting that he himself might be the friend, the heir of the earlier poet's genius. 

The Coleridge with whom Lowell empathizes is—who? A schizoid satellite of the poet's mind, the synthesis of the moment that Lowell called a blazing out, or a character of fiction? Of his concern with the unreal or the fictitious that memory and language combine to create within the given moment, Lowell justifies his method by his belief that the poet's approximation to truth is the closest we get to reality. “Unrealism can degenerate into meaningless clinical hallucinations or rhetorical machinery, but the true unreal is about something, and eats from the abundance of reality.” The subject of poetry is the “true unreal”, by which one means that area of consciousness in which inner and outer worlds find a congruity, and are heightened in their interdependency.

As Reed here suggests, we can take this sonnet not just as a poem about Lowell and Coleridge, but about Lowell as Coleridge: Lowelleridge, flaming into poetry, but under a paralysis of will, the in-voluntary imposter, characterised by his addiction (laudanum and brandy, Lowell's alcoholism and mental health issues) considered as diseases of the will. Soft-bodied, pudgy, powerful but strengthless, Esteesee has stood, but only as a tenpin stands, ready to be knocked down again. The 1820s and the 1970s, England and America—where Coleridge never came, although he planned to, his Pantisocratic scheme failing to actualise itself. The ‘alderman's stroll to positive negation’ combines a knock at Coleridge's bourgeois plumpness, his actual gait, with, as destination, the climactic phrase of his late poem ‘Limbo’ (1811, 1834). The poet describes the ‘strange place’ that is ‘not a place’ that is Limbo: in which a blind man stares sightlessly at the sightless moon. The last eight lines of this 28-line poem:

No such sweet sights doth Limbo Den immure,
Wall'd round, and made a Spirit-jail secure,
By the mere Horror of blank Naught-at-all,
Whose circumambience doth these Ghosts enthral.
A lurid thought is growthless, dull Privation,
Yet that is but a Purgatory curse;
Hell knows a fear far worse,
A fear—a future fate.—'Tis positive Negation!

In this post I suggest the blind man figures Homer, and that Coleridge is working through the Odyssey and Dante to arrive at a place of passivity, enthralment, the positive negation of the will.

The disease of the will, something Coleridge self-diagnosed and wrote about in his Notebooks, is also at the heart of ‘Coleridge and Richard II’:

His powerful imagination is tethered to ‘his dwindling will to act’. This Lowell characterises in gendered terms: ‘feminine friendism’ is quoted from Coleridge's Lectures on Shakespeare, commenting upon Richard II, Act 2 scene 2:

Queen: To please the king I did; to please myself
I cannot do it; yet I know no cause
Why I should welcome such a guest as grief,
Save bidding farewell to so sweet a guest
As my sweet Richard: yet again, methinks,
Some unborn sorrow, ripe in sorrow's womb,
Is coming toward me; and my inward soul
With nothing trembles: at something it grieves,
More than with parting from my lord the king.

It is clear that Shakspeare never meant to represent Richard as a vulgar debauchee, but a man with a wantonness of spirit in external show, a feminine friendism, an intensity of woman-like love of those immediately about him, and a mistaking of the delight of being loved by him for a love of him. And mark in this scene Shakspeare's gentleness in touching the tender superstitions, the ‘terræ incognitæ’ of presentiments, in the human mind; and how sharp a line of distinction he commonly draws between these obscure forecastings of general experience in each individual, and the vulgar errors of mere tradition. Indeed, it may be taken once for all as the truth, that Shakspeare, in the absolute universality of his genius, always reverences whatever arises out of our moral nature; he never profanes his muse with a contemptuous reasoning away of the genuine and general, however unaccountable, feelings of mankind.

This is one of those occasions, as Lowell intuits, when Coleridge is talking about himself as well as describing a Shakespearean character: famously, his account of Hamlet is a kind of autobiography. But we can also see Lowell clocking himself in the mirror, here: the king, the father-figure, and what Ian Gregson calls Lowell's ‘insinuation that his own father was not as masculine as he should have been.’ The biological father, the poetic father. Lowell styles the king looking in the mirror and seeing not himself but a shipwreck, sunk like the Titanic by ‘the white glittering inertia of the iceberg.’ I can't place Lowell's assertion that Coleridge believed ‘only blacks would cherish slavery for two thousand years’. STC was a lifelong abolitionist, who campaigned against slavery in verse and prose: for him, the history of the slave trade was “the history of one great calamity—one long continuous crime, involving every possible definition of evil; for it combined the wildest physical suffering with the most atrocious moral depravity’. [Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments (1995) 1:217]. He nowhere suggests that enslaved Africans or their descendents cherished their state. Perhaps the ‘two thousand years’ is a, somewhat obscure, reference to his belief that freedom for all slaves had to be accompanied by conversion to Christianity: Slavery constitutes ‘a body of Death into which Religion alone can awake the spirit of life,’ as he put it in a letter. Missionary work, and full conversion of the entire population of Africa to Christianity, would be the precondition of liberation: ‘The Africans are more versatile, more easily modified than perhaps any other known race. A few years of strict honest and humane attention to their interests, affections and prejudices would abolish the memory of the past, or cause it to be remembered only as a fair contrast.’ But this seems like a stretch.