Coca-Coleridge

 

"The Safety of the Country" (1807): A New Coleridge Poem?

 

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;
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.

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.”’ 

The joke here concerns the extreme youth of Lord Henry Petty, who, though only 25, was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Greville's ‘Ministry of All the Talents’, the government which succeeded the death of Pitt in January 1806. Coleridge returned to England from Malta on the 17th August that year and presumably wrote the poem thereafter. Mays adds, shrewdly, ‘it is likely that the poem was copied from a contemporary newspaper which has not been traced.’

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;
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.

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.’   

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?

Astounding Novel by John Coleridge!

 John Coleridge? Any relation, I wonder? Alas, no.

‘John Coleridge’ was one of the pseudonyms used by the US author brothers Earl Andrew Binder (1904-1966), who was born in Austria-Hungary and came to the US in 1910, and Otto Oscar Binder (1911-1975), who was the more active (and ultimately better known) of the two; after approximately 1934, when Earl became inactive as a writer, Otto continued to sign himself Eando Binder, so that some Eando Binder books – they were all published after 1940; several contain pre-1935 material – are collaborative and some by Otto alone. Together the brothers wrote eleven stories as John Coleridge and one as Dean D O'Brien, while Otto alone also wrote as Gordon A Giles and, later, as Ione Frances (or Ian Francis) Turek (forms of his wife's maiden name), did some work under the name Will Garth, and finally published a couple of novels under his own name. A third brother, Jack Binder was an illustrator who did much of the early drawing for Captain Marvel, which was regularly scripted by Otto. The brothers all retained the German pronunciation of their surname, with a short i.

Still: STC was certainly interested in ‘the life beyond ...’  

Water, Water Everywhere ...

 

Could these be Coleridge's most famous lines?

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink. [Ancient Mariner (1834 version), lines 119-122]

Where did they come from? Out of Coleridge's pure imagination, perhaps. Still: ‘it is scarcely practicable for a man,’ as he once noted, ‘to write in the ornamented style on any subject without finding his poem, against his will and without his previous consciousness, a cento of lines that had pre-existed in other works’ [Griggs (ed), Coleridge: Collected Letters (1956-71), 3:469-70].

We know that Coleridge read Angelo Poliziano, or Politian (1454-94). He talks about him in Church and State [CC 10:64] and variously in the Marginalia and Notebooks [374, 1673, 2670]. And in the Biographia he mocks George Canning for plagiarising some Poliziano in his university prize-winning poem Iter ad Meccam, ‘The Pilgrimage to Mecca’:

‘In the Nutricia of Politian, there occurs this line:

“Pura coloratos interstrepit unda lapillos.”

Casting my eye on a University prize poem, I met this line:

“Lactea purpureos interstrepit unda lapillos.”

Now look out in the Gradus for purus, and you find, as the first synonyme, lacteus; for coloratus, and the first synonyme is purpureas. I mention this by way of elucidating one of the most ordinary processes in the ferrumination of these centos.’ [Biographia, ch 1]

Centos again. Coleridge's mind was running on questions of plagiary, advertent or inadvertent. The first line of Latin quoted there (it's from Poliziano’s Rustica rather than his Nutricia, but who's counting) means: ‘the pure stream goes murmuring over little coloured pebbles’. The plagiarised line means: ‘the milk-white stream goes murmuring over the little purple pebbles.’ Canning capped his time as a student at Oxford by winning the poetry prize in 1789. He went on, of course, to become Prime Minister. Here Coleridge pays back the ridicule Canning had subjected him to in his reactionary newspaper The Anti-Jacobin, by accusing the eminent statement of plagiary (‘ferrumination’ seals the joke: the Latin ferrumino means ‘to cement, solder, join’, and ‘soldering’ is, of course, the principle strategy involved in canning, a process patented in 1810). 

What does all this have to do with the Ancient Mariner? Well, here's one of Poliziano's more famous short poems, ‘In Amicam’ [Epigrammata, 64]:

Allicis, expellis, sequeris, fugis, es pia, et es trux;
   me vis, me non vis, me crucias, et amas.
promittis, promissa negas, spem mi eripis, et das.
   iam iam ego vel sortem Tantale malo tuam.
durum ferre sitim circum salientibus undis,
   durius in medio nectare ferre sitim.

P.'s ‘amica’ is the woman he loves, and her treatment of him is not consistent. Tricky to capture the compression of the Latin in English, mind. Here's a fairly slack version:

You lure me, you banish me; you follow, you flee; you're kind and are cruel;
   you want me, you don't want me; you torment me, you're in love.
You promise then deny your promise, you snatch away my hope and offer it.
   Right now I feel like Tantalus in wanting you:
how hard my thirst, surrounded by salty waves,
   how hard my thirst in the midst of such nectar!

Here's another version:

You tease, reject; follow, flee; are kind, cruel;
   want me, don't want; torment me, are loving.
You vow, break your vow, crush hope and give it.
   Right now I'm Tantalus in wanting you:
hard thirst surrounded by salty waves,
   hard in the midst of such nectar to thirst

That's probably a bit elliptical. At any rate, it strikes me that Coleridge's potent image of desperate thirst in the midst of salt water has an antecedent in Poliziano's little love poem. Then again, I'm not accusing him of Canning-like plagiary. These things register, sinking into the mulch of the creative imagination, and are reworked. By excerpting the image from Poliziano's mannered itinerary of erotic contrasts Coleridge frees it from its rather starchy wit and re-somatizes it as something universal, something indeed existential. Immature poets, as Eliot said, imitate, mature poets steal and good poets make what they take into something better.

Kubla Khan Continued 2

Kubla Khan Continued 1 is here.

[This is part 2 of an occasional, and I'm perfectly aware pointless, series, in which I body-forth a possible completion of Coleridge's famous ‘Kubla Khan’. You know the story: out walking in the Somerset countryside, STC stopped off at a local farm (Adam Nicolson thinks it was Withycombe Farm in the village of Culbone, near Porlock) troubled with an attack of ‘dysentery’. He took a slug of opium to deal with his diarrhoea, blissed out for a while, and returned to consciousness with, so he claimed, ‘Kubla Khan’ fully formed in his head. Straightaway he began writing the poem out, only to be interrupted ‘by a person on business from Porlock’ who ‘detained by him above an hour’, such that ‘on his return to his room [he] found to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purpose of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast’. There is some reason to doubt the absolute verisimilitude of this account. And indeed, if we're honest, there are two ways, and not a third, of apprehending ‘Kubla Khan’ as a poem. One is to say, with Harold Bloom, that it's not only not a fragment, it's actually one of the most perfectly finished and perfect poems in English. The other is to take a more, let's say, Thomas McFarland approach and say: yes, it is a fragment, but its fragmentariness is integral to its effectiveness, and the urge to ‘complete’ it does a kind of violence to the text's evocative distinctiveness. Both possibilities exclude the notional third, that it's a fragment worth continuing. Still, here we are. Unable to offer any kind of defence of my actions at this point, in this place (although I do have a nascent Notes Towards a Theory of Aesthetic Defragmentation brewing) I shall step discretely back into the shadows, pausing only to note that I take my cue as to the possible direction Coleridge would have taken this poem, had he completed it, from this old post.]

PART II

The Khan’s Armada jostled in the bay
Barge, Warship, Doww,
Each keel, each prow
And chiming hollow hull
Clanging flank to flank
Innumerable in rank:
Whilst the tide strains full
Red marks the grisly sky at break of day
And gongs make signal to speed the boats away
Cutting sea as earth is cut by plough.

Depart! Depart!
For the far Nipponian shore
            And war!
Anchors upstart!
In long procession, more and more.
The last boat lingers on the breaking tide.
Three soul-expanding shouts the skies divide;
Three wild, responsive cheers re-echo wide.
All sweet vibration 
Tremble in the ear
As if in holy fear
Approaching the human mind

In humblest prostration.
The last delightful sounds they'll ever hear!

Still the white signal, fading, strains the eyes,
Still the lorn lover with his hand replies:
Till melting into air—the object lost
And duty sternly calling to his post,
Twixt him and joy th'eternal curtain's drawn,
No more of bliss to know returning dawn. 

Sailing a stilly sea, the fleet as one

Turns backward stern upon the setting sun.

How beautiful this ocean night!
Dewy stars supply the light,
No mist obscures, no little cloud
Breaks the whole serene of sky.
In full-swarmed glory starlights now
Flit firefly-like about the prow
As Kubla’s fleet skim silvery by:
Close hugging every warlike ark
The ocean’s bosom girdled with the dark.
How beautiful is night!

But, eye, descend, O descend!
To where the depths of water end
Bitumen-black bed of ocean's ground
Unlit, unseen, opaque to sound:
                         Descend!
Leave far above the never ceasing roar
Of titan-waves whose grip will break the shore
From rock to boulder and so to sand.
Descend to where air, sky and land
And merely phantasmic dreams:
To where all drowning bodies tend
To where hot seabed chasms rend
In utter silence and dark
                          Descend!
Blackening in ultimate deep
To where a timeless oozeing swells
To where ebon Atar, spirit, dwells
Compressed of ancient malice, half-asleep
Half-dreaming of all ruin’s creep
That spreads a boneless tentic arm
And wills man’s harm.

Ancestral spirits, they that drave
And urged proud Kublai on to war
Appearing flitting-wise in dreams
That sank, as all sinks, through ocean’s streams
Down to the monster in its cave
Within his dreaming dire and huge
With magick power of subterfuge
And mingling with the roar
Of the portentous tides
That under upper waters pour
Water slides and aye backslides.
Atar half-woke to half-declaim
In abysmal growl a spell infame:
He pronounced the deep unholy name.
Pronounced it thrice, pronounced it dire
To stir a whirlpool in that mire
That rose to where the waves aspire.

Whence enmity arose between
Th’ancestral powers of Xanadu
And this far-sunken power marine
None can tell the story true.
We only know Atar stands gainst
The Chinee empire pressing east:
And makes their coast impermious fence
Barring imperial ambition hence
Vowing they never be released.

Summoned by deep art, storms appear
Swift from the breezy north's assertive gales:
A raging hurl of tidal atmosphere
T’impel the course and swell the yielding sails
A rush the trembling craft past power to steer.

Before the sightless breeze the vessels fly
Clambers the mountain sea, t’approach the sky
And plunge again into the wave-trough nigh.
That now the refluent fleet evades the sight,
High-briny peaks and plunging water vales

Or thund'ring down the depths that foam below,
Ploughs up the surging brine with dashing prow.
The rattling cordage whirls, the sail-yards strain,
The winding pipe re-echoes o'er the main:

Firm in their stations ply the obedient crew,
To trim the lines, and strain the rudder
Haul on the beating sheets with sinew'd force,
Wrestling the vast machine’s unsteady course
Whist wind and magic make the beams shudder
               And darkness palls
               As wind heaps walls
Of water side on side to block all view.

A mast is rent
A keel is cracked
And down is sent
Ruined and racked
Warship and barge, small and large.
As gales crash in and fierce rebound
Ship after ship staggers and is drowned


*******

Far round the globe
Th’Abyssin mantissa rolls to white her eyes
And moans a magnifying chant.
She seats herself upon the earth,
Bows her head, tucks tight her robe
While hairgirt dwarfs their queen attend
Keeping holy distance til the trance doth end.* 

Phantoms of sublimity flit
Death and rebirth
A vision of a mighty fo'csle split
And crashed into the ocean
Reverberating through the depths
She sees how the winds bursting through
From ev'ry point are whirl'd, and still renew
Their circuit: rapid torrents gushing spray
In rivers that their tribute to the Ocean pay,
Whose vast will never overswell its shores.
For strait, in vapours, by the Sun exhaled
Or through Earth's secret caverns, it restores
All back again in misty cloudhead veiled.
So does the maiden’s hymn
Encircle back into its source
Web'd mystic beauties brim
Paths intricately retrouse.
The circled dome, the whirlpool’s grip!
Lamenting each engulféd ship.

He who crossed the waters
For rich Nippon’s land
With his many Sons and Daughters
And Armies to command.
Found them all the Children
Of one great Lord of Love
Whose Mercy from a thunderhead
Strikes scorpion-lightning in a spread

White antlers from above.
What the meed of her Song?
That the ceaseless on-flow
And myriad Echo
Which from the welcoming Hearts of the Pure
Repeats and works ever to prolong
Each difference Tone all meanings Just
Until in still-harmonious notes all crumbles into dust.

----------

* ‘In the middle of Abyssinia there are men called Pyganmies, who speak the same language as the other inhabitants of the country. They are very short, the tallest being only two cubits in height, most of them only one and a half. Their hair is very long, going down to the knees and even lower, and their beards are larger than those of any other men. When their beards are full grown they leave off wearing clothes and let the hair of their head fall down behind far below the knees, while their beard trails down to the feet in front. When their body is thus entirely covered with hair they fasten it round them with a girdle, so that it serves them for clothes. Their sheep are no bigger than lambs, their oxen, asses, horses, mules, and other beasts of burden about the size of rams. 3000 of them attend on the monarch of Abyssinia.’ Ctesius INDIKA

Kubla Khan Continued 1

:1:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
           Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.


:2:

Tis Taindu's golden square and street
And Xandu's spacious vales and trees
Where many pilgrim travellers meet
All chanting for an end to peace.
           “To war!” they cry
           “All glory ay!
Where shields ring and arrows fly!”

Proud Kublai on a throne of jet
Beneath a canopy of gold
            Nods one
            Nod all
And ever and far off still grinds the sound
Of that unseen and mighty river
Whose deep sublime full fall
Passing far beneath the ground
Where rock and darkness aye dissever
To drive with force along its course
And gush unseen into unknown abysses
Home to forgetfulnesses of human wishes
Kubla himself approaches
Astride a Mongol steed
And eighty wooden coaches
Follow his imperial lead.

Who taught thee thus to venture down th' abyss
And ope the regions of primeval bliss?
            A song, a song
            Is borne along!
With melody as fine as its through-pulse is strong!
Whether thy Chinee orgies I behold,
Or Arimaspian rich with conquer'd gold;
Hymalian heights whereon delusive sprites
Of bitter frost and vagrant tempest play
Spout smoaks of snow through the day
And lead the wandering to their doom by night
             Where'er
             This air
             Will travel there
And thrill my mind's true ear and lift me past despair!

The woodsman stands beneath the arch
Of drooping birch or feathery larch,
Or mountain-ash, that o'er it bends,
And sees some streamlet as it wends;
Some brook whose tune its course betrays,
As it is drawn to feed the hidden ways
Of mighty Alph the hidden.
The woodsman has his new command
To fell the trees that dot the land
To hew the timbers into mighty strips
That best can fit a navy's ships.
To planks of oak and planks of pine;
And water gives itself to brine.
All as the Khan has bidden.

To trace the rivers where they flow,
Serenely brawling, fiercely slow
Down to the sea where all streams go.
Streams that over summits leap,
Or in rock-scooped basins sleep;
Pools that deeper are than deep.
Bursting foam in bright cascade,
Thronged with lotus in the shade
Freighted with vessels timber-made.

Till earth and sky themselves grow mute,
The maiden's floating songs salute
The Khan's great armys route:
Such the flow and such the dance
Where soldiers strut and horses prance
Astrologer and Necromance
Provisioner and Royal Scribe
Forsworn and tied to Kublai's tribe
Advance! Advance!

A million men! A million men!
Dance stately out and through the glen
And pass beyond the homeland's ken.

Ten thousand ships! Ten thousand craft!
From galleon-yacht to simple raft,
With Kublai's horde as cargo draught!

***

Wouldst thou know the true most truly,
More than middling mortals find?
Drink close fragrance from the lily
Than faint odour on the wind?
Wouldst thou know why sunlight pauses
To cast its shadows on the mind?
Know of what the moon discourses
Looking down on humankind?
Then strike the cithar and the timbrel!
Pound at drums and shake the cymbal
Cast thy voice o'er the restless sea
Of aye-surging infinity!
Grief shall ope the founts of truth,
And heaven sing the truth to thee.
We knew this at our earliest birth
And will again when we quit this earth
And if, between, our memory
Cannot quite grasp such mystery
We need but patience, patience now
Await aye still th' immortan How.
Patience child of grief
The weary unrelief
Patience who is strong
From grief that is lifelong.
Grief in darkling manner freeing.
Wouldst thou yet unriddle of Being
Further than others can?
Sorrow shall give thine eyes new lustre
Sorrow's trumpet is thy muster
That Providence and Mars thus toy with man
To end what it began.

To Love and Sorrow all Nature draws;
If the riddle be read,
The code behind eternal laws
And each divergent thread
Of its mazy texture, and discover:
Whence the ravel spread.

Beside the summer sea I stand,
Where slow billows swelling shine.
How beautiful this pearly sand!
That waves, and winds, and years refine!
Be this delicious quiet mine—
The joy of youth, so sweet before,
When I could thus my frame recline,
And watch th’ entangled weeds ashore!

[Part 2 of this continuation is here.]

Adam Nicolson, "The Making of Poetry" (2019)

Subtitle: ‘Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels.’ Capitalisations, sic.

I don't often review books on this blog (here's one exception to that rule), but Nicolson is a writer I like, and I've been reading his latest: an account of 1797-98 in the life of STC, Dorothy and William Wordsworth. Turns out this book is three things: 1, a detailed, elegantly-written account of Wordsworth and Coleridge's friendship over this year and the epochal poetry it produced (with sidebars on Dorothy); 2, interspersed autobiographical ruminations by Nicolson walking around the west country seeking out remnants of Wordsworth-Coleridge Country in the modern world, and 3, twenty-eight woodcuts by artist Tom Hammick. De gustibus famously not admitting of disputation, you may love these. I can't say I did. Some are pretty enough:

Others, though, seemed to me, in their clonking primitivism, wholly to miss the more nuanced resonances and often oblique sublimity of the poems they notionally illustrate. As, for example, this visualisation of ‘Kubla Khan’s woman wailing for her demon lover:

Teen whining at being served brocoli. I don't mean to descend to merely cheap shots, but, come on: that's a flatly lassitudinous and crayon-doodled image to stand for one of Coleridge's most extraordinary images of the erotic sublime, surely. Other images hang on the gallery wall of the same wheelhouse:

An image, there, illustrating Wordsworth's ‘The Bald Man On The Five-Legged Horse’.

... and this from Coleridge's ‘The Selfie-Stick’. I'm snarking. I'll stop. The images are always bright and bold, and if I found them too nursery-colour-scheme and scrawly, you may find more merit in them. And either way they aren't particularly integral to what Nicolson is doing in the meat, that is the prose, of his book.

And what he is doing is good. I have some issues with some of The Making of Poetry, but the bottom-line is: I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, very often thought-provoking and vivid work. Much of it treads pretty familiar ground, and I was already aware of most of what Nicolson quotes, but the book has an energy of commitment to its topic and an, as it were, writerly charm that carried me easily all the way through it.

In a sense saying so touches on a larger issue with respect to my bailiwick, academic literary criticism. I have read and continue to read a lot of this, as you'd expect (I write quite a lot of it too) and I have to say, by bulk, the vast majority of it is balefully badly written. The badness comes in two main flavours: the energy-vampire boring kind and the rebarbatively difficult kind. Where the first of these flavours is concerned, there is simply no excuse. The deplorable truth is that many professional academics, including actual colleagues and friends of mine, just aren't interested in writing as a craft. The second flavour is trickier to account for, I think—you know what I'm talking about: that brand of lit-crit in which the prose is turgidly baroque and thorny with neologisms. Two rationales for this style are sometimes floated. One is: ‘it's just a professional jargon; you wouldn't expect to pick up a work of advanced mathematics or science or whanot and expect to be able to read it easily, now, would you?’ The other is slightly more seductive, along the lines of: ‘the critical-theoretical concepts with which I am wrestling are inherently tangled and complex and it would misrepresent them to talk about them with simplicity and clarity of style.’ The first of these justifications has never convinced me, I'll be honest. Literary critics are in the business of elucidating and contextualising great literature, and some of this literature is baffling (in which case it behooves us to de-baffle it somewhat) where most of it is eloquent and penetrating (in which case it certainly behooves us not to insert bafflement of our own). Besides, the ‘this is how they write science!’ defence won't wash. Origin of Species is beautifully written, every sentence clear as the song of a rimrubbed wineglass, and it's one of the most influential works of science ever published.

It's taken me longer to come to terms with my dislike of the second justification, the Derridean or Jamesonian one. The truth is that, though I've flirted with it in the past, nowadays it strikes me as simply a mode of intellectual narcissism. There are tens of thousands of salaried literary critics in the world whose job entails teaching students, doing admin and communicating with readers about literature. Cultural historians looking back on the history of lit-crit over the last forty years or so will surely scratch their heads as to why so many of us manifested such a precipitous retreat from this last charge, scampering away into thickets of obscurity and onano-referentiality. Still here we are.

I mention this only to note that it is possible to write literary history and literary criticsm well—elegantly, clearly, resonantly; and this book, vividly and clearly written throughout, is a case in point. Whatever issues I have with Nicolson's critical-theoretical approach, I can't argue with his elegance of expression.

The Making of Poetry is at its best as an account of the social and topographical contexts out of which the Lyrical Ballads volume was produced.  Nicolson is particularly excellent on the poverty of that war-drained and starving decade. He knows how to select telling details to bring it home to his readers (that, say, people would creep into farmers' fields in the dead of night and surreptitiously milk the cows there, so starving they were). He's also good on how the landscapes of this corner of Somerset are variegated according to a verticalising logic: how quickly a path will plunge into a humidly overgrown valley, or rise to a barer eminence from which the sea is gloriously visible. And he knows his onions when it comes to the exigences of day-to-day life of his subjects:

You could buy opium in all kinds of preparations: mixed with honey, as an electuary, meaning “something to be licked up”; powdered with chalk; sugared as an opiate confection; mixed with soap; in a liquorice lozenge or troche; in vinegar or wine; as a suppository or enema; as a plaster or embrocation; or, most popularly of all, dissolved in alcohol as laudanum, a name given it in the sixteenth century and meaning “the thing to be praised” because it was so effective at relieving pain and distress. Infants were often given Godfrey's Coridal (also called The Mother's Friend), a mixture of opium, water and treacle, to keep them quiet. In some places opium was added to the beer. [144]

A nation of heroin users! This, you can probably guess, is Nicolson setting the scene for Coleridge writing ‘Kubla Khan’, a section of his book that I especially enjoyed. At some point in the autumn, ‘perhaps early in October’, Coleridge left wife and kids at home and went walking: ‘it was for a few days, heading west, out past Williton and down into Watchet, into the thick drooping, wooded, coastal hills on the borders with Devon’ [139]. But Coleridge's perambulations were interrupted by a dose of ‘dysentery’, and he holed up somewhere in the tiny village of Culbone, where he took a slug of opium to deal with his diarrhoea, blissed out for a while, and returned to consciousness with (as he so famously claimed) ‘Kubla Khan’ fully formed in his head.

Nicolson retraces these steps. ‘Upstream from [Culbone] church,’ he tells us, ‘three or four farms claim to be the place’ where ‘Kubla Khan was written’:

Most think it might have been Ash Farm, perhaps only because it seems to look as such a place might look. Some think Parsonage Farm—but would the parson have taken him in? Few claim Silcombe Farm. Mr R J Richards, who is the fourth generation of Richardses to farm there, and all of whose ancestors are buried in Culbone's tiny streamside churchyard, thinks Coleridge wouldn't have come so far. ‘If he was ill he would have gone to the nearest and the most likely spot, to my mind,’ he told me over the farm wall. ‘That's a place that is no longer there. Withycombe. There is a pond there. Every house has a pond.’

Half a mile along the lane from Silcombe, the little valley of Withycombe itself is a steep cut into the shore-facing hill. Just down from the gate off the lane is a flattened spot which is, I guess, where the house once stood. Ground ivy now covers the grass there. ... The water of the Withycombe stream still bubbles through that abandoned place. The stone dam across the stream, built to make the pond, is still there, but broken, so that the stream now runs over the flat and nettly bed of what was once the pond. On its edge, an enormous oak, undoubtedly growing when Coleridge was here, is now encrusted and burdened with ivy. Limbs of fallen ashes now block the paths so that Withycombe now is buried in space as much as time, occupied on this late autumn afternoon only by two old ewes. Bumblebees drift down on the wind. [143]

‘This is where Coleridge in his illness had written the great fragment,’ Nicolson says. I've quoted, here, at some length to give a flavour of the book's style. Much of it is like this: rich and evocative if a little fruitily-written.

Still, if Nicolson is expert at staging his scenes, his literary critical skills are thinner. It is perhaps inevitable, give his larger approach, that Nicolson's accounts of the poems themselves will revert to a kind of biographical criticism. It's a rather reductive way of reading texts, I feel, but there you go. The take-away from The Making of Poetry is its subjects' ‘intuitive genius’ and ‘supreme awareness’: Coleridge's ‘subtilising mind, inescapable complexity and genius’ [170] and Wordsworth's ‘grandeur’, ‘great and lonely soul’ [230] and ‘poetic gift’ [262]. Wimsatt and Beardsley eat your hearts out. These kinds of judgment get iterated and reiterated throughout (with his ‘subtilising mind’ Coleridge ‘was not a simple man’ [270]; Wordsworth ‘is above the world of flux ... the whole of being, the giant self-fertilising’ [312-6]) and whilst this certainly indexes Nicolson's enthusiasm and love for his topic, it also blunts specificity, drags attention from text back to (Barthesian) dead authors. To an extent it even creates a flattening, even cartoony sense of the two men: Wordsworth deep, Coleride complex; Wordsworth profound, Coleridge restless, and so on. At one point, 21st-century Nicolson, shadowing the routes taken by his subjects two centuries earlier, starts literally to somaticise their physical symptoms like some kind of spirit medium. Reading the drafts in Wordsworth's notebooks and ‘the fugutive thoughts, moments of vision and impossible schemes in Coleridge's’

... my body, to my surprise, also started to fill with those pains, in my back and legs, tightening across my chest, numbing one arm or another, and sometimes so severe that after an hour or so I could not stand up from the chair and desk at which I had been sitting. [181]

‘It was,’ he helpfully adds, ‘psychosomatic’ (‘once I had stood up and left the house in Adscombe, it could be cured by walking’). But it figures in the book, really, as something spookier than that, a kind of daemonic possession whereby Wordsworthian poetry about

                          the obstinate pains
an uneasy spirit, [that] with a force
Inexorable would from hour to hour
For ever summon my exhausted mind

glides down the centuries and sheathes its claws in Nicolson's own muscles. I don't doubt the simple veracity of his account, of course. But as a reading of Wordsworth and Coleridge it muddies aesthetic analysis with a kind of psycho-superstition that seems to me, in the end, more belittling than anything. Perhaps that's inevitable in this mode of celebrity historicising. I don't know.

At any rate, as a literary critic, a couple of Nicolson's readings perhaps knock their heads against the ceiling of credulity a little: as when he suggests, as a key to unlocking ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, that ‘the friendship and brotherhood between Coleridge and Wordsworth find its reflection in the friendship and brotherhood of mariner and albatross’ [165]. Other judgments inhabit a mode of sometimes vatic tautological-ness. Of Coleridge's ‘Eolian Harp’ we're told ‘the wavering wind-songs of the Aeolian Harp could soothe and seduce the mind’ [85], a line whose nice alliteration compensates a little for its analytic emptiness. ‘Tintern Abbey’, Nicolson tells us, is a ‘triumph’ and ‘represent[s] one of the great moments of human consciousness’ [316] which is fine and lovely and not even necessarily wrong, but doesn't do much to actually unpack the poem.

But The Making of Poetry, despite its title, isn't really a work of literary criticism. If we read the title as implying a question (‘how is it that poetry gets made?’) Nicolson's answer is, nutshell-wise: ‘a couple of great poetic masters really inhabit a particular landscape’. A magnificent nature-writing blankness repels any more analytic interrogation of the wellsprings of creativity. Indeed, there are moments in this book when I found my brow wrinkling at Nicolson's implied model of poetic creativity. One example: ‘for poetry to surface [for Wordsworth] it had first to pass through the great digestive organ of his mind’ [183]. I find the notion of Wordsworthian mental lower-bowel a little ... uhm.

For all that, I liked this book a lot. Quite apart from anything, there's a commendable chutzpah in the enthusiasm with which Nicolson's jogs alongside his subjects, both physically and writerishly. The Making of Poetry quotes generously from the poetry and prose of Coleridge and Wordsworth, plus chunks of Dorothy. To read Nicolson's anthology is to be struck again and again just how extraordinarily good these geezers were at the writing lark, and so to align oneself with Nicolson's ubiquitous praise. And here, Nicolson offers his own:

Walking westward is a walk towards wildness. As you move into the woods and up on to the rough brown open-weave spaces of Exmoor, the Quantocks start to seem smaller and more ordinary by comparison, a gentler younger brother of this big moory expanse on the fringes of Devon, On this path now, high on the broken cliffs, the scale changes. Islands of shadow breeze across the brown and turgid sea. The Bristol Channel looks as earthy as a ploughed field. The path plunges on, up over the rounded thighs of each valley, slipping into the declivities, down into the ferny damp of the streams running off Exmoor, up again to the sound of the sea that rises from the surf breaking miles away in a constant single outbreath from below. [141]

This isn't bad writing, by any means. Indeed it's very nice, evocative and a pleasure to read. And rather like Nicolson finding himself mystically channelling Wordsworth's sore back and Coleridge's various neuralgic twinges, he is here, wittingly or otherwise, blocking out rough-edged blank verse:

On this path now, high on the broken cliffs,
The scale changes. Islands of shadow breeze
Across the brown and turgid sea of life.
The Bristol Channel looks as earthy as
A well-ploughed field. The path plunges on, up.
Over the rounded thighs of each valley
Down into the ferny damp of the streams
Running off Exmoor, and up again to (the)
Sound of the sea that rises from the surf
Breaking miles away ...

... and so on. Credit to Nicolson for the courage in going for it at all. It makes his book stand splendidly out, brightly coloured in an ocean of prose-grey.

And to finish on a note of praise, Nicolson's account of the actual product of this ‘great year’ (‘product’ is too instrumentalising a term, but you know what I mean): the Lyrical Ballads volume itself, is very good, and particularly good on Wordsworth's contributions. It is still a boggling set of poems, really: not so much the fantastical or metaphysical Gothicism of ‘Ancient Mariner’, or the more elevated philosophic versifying of ‘Tintern Abbey’, but those characteristically crudified ballads of the poor and dispossessed, the elderly and broken-down, the mothers with their idiot children and murdered babies. Nicolson thinks of them as some of the greatest achievements in poetry not despite but because of their crudity, or say rather because of their bold, expressive, affectively complex simplifications (if that doesn't look too contradictory).

This aspect of Wordsworth has been very often dismissed, of course; and has even been actively mocked and parodied. Bravely Nicolson spends a long time on, and makes the case for the greatness of, ‘The Thorn’. The occasion for this long ballad is an actual thorn tree, old and twisted, that Wordsworth and Dorothy often passed. The story goes that a young woman, Martha Ray, was once seduced and abandoned by her lover Stephen Hill; that she gave birth to a child, murdered it and buried its corpse by this tree, which place she afterwards returned to over and over in guilt and despair. Indeed, says the story, the ghost of this child can be seen by those capable of seeing it. As Nicolson notes, it is ‘the archetypal lyrical ballad, fringing at its edges into the beautiful and the troubling, but also into the ridiculous, repetitive and loquacious.’ This is the poem in which are to be found Wordsworth's most notorious lines, a couplet of such bathetic badness it is given pride of place in The Stuffed Owl.

Not five yards from the mountain-path,
This thorn you on your left espy;
And to the left, three yards beyond,
You see a little muddy pond
Of water, never dry;
I’ve measured it from side to side:
’Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.

‘His most infamous lines,’ laments Nicolson of that last couplet. Not just bad but hilariously so. Can they be defended? ‘I have spent so long with Wordsworth,’ Nicolson says, ‘that I have come to think of him as a friend who makes mistakes, and for whom things have a way of coming out wrong, but whom I trust and admire for his other qualities.’ He adds: ‘I want to maintain that this childlike simplification of his language, for all its ridiculousness, opens a door into the heart of the poem.’

“But what’s the thorn? and what’s the pond?
“And what’s the hill of moss to her?
“And what’s the creeping breeze that comes
“The little pond to stir?”
I cannot tell; but some will say
She hanged her baby on the tree,
Some say she drowned it in the pond,
Which is a little step beyond,
But all and each agree,
The little babe was buried there,
Beneath that hill of moss so fair.

This simplicity is by turns, and sometimes at once, beautifully penetrating and ridiculously clumsy, and that, Nicolson powerfully argues, is the point.

Ludicrous or tragic, beautiful or absurd, perceptive or superstitious, ‘The Thorn’ is a transcription of the kind of suffering that was everywhere in the England of the late 1790s, and of the frame of mind that attempts or fails to understand that suffering. The poem is an act of empathy. The people of the village are muttering about Martha, as they did of Wordsworth and his family. Their gossip is a means of exclusion. Wordsworth has renounced his membership of that gossiping world, dropped all pretence at decorum and left behind the assumptions of privilege. He now inhabits the voice of the woman for whom he is demanding understanding from his readers. That is the act of courage represented by ‘The Thorn’: the daring to be absurd because the absurd is close to the bereft. And, in that, the poem makes one giant claim: the point of poetry is not beauty but truth, and if truth is awkward and uncertain then poetry should be like that too. [Nicolson, Making of Poetry, 263-4]

This is superbly well-put, I think; and whatever reservations I may have about some of the other bits of Nicolson's critical engagement, he is simply brilliant in his account of the sheer strangeness of these seemingly simple poems: the magazines of the time were, he says, ‘full of poems about the poor, the abused and the deranged, suffering the battery of life itself, but none had been as linguistically radical as what Wordsworth would now write.’ As he notes, poem after poem provides the reader with ‘no destination, but a kind of retraction from reliability’:

Extraordinarily, these poems remain as strange now as when they were written: intractable, uncomfortable, indefinable, unsettling and uncertain, repeatedly motivated by the double negative that lay somewhere near the centre of Wordsworth's own mind. Are the stories they tell true or untrue? Or not untrue? They often seem impossible, but are they not also not unimpossible? Do they matter? Are they about anything at all? Are the tellers of the tales trustworthy, or maybe simply not untrustworthy? Where are the truths they seem to orbit around?

Nicolson is quite right, I think, about how even today these poems retain their power of sheer unsettling oddness of eloquence. Powerful stuff.