Coleridge the Poet by Watson George;

Author:Watson, George;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4560494
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

On the whole, it is surely clear, the reduction of the ode to its familiar form is a continuous triumph of critical acumen.

The Dejection Ode, too, represents the height of Coleridge’s poetic intimacy with Wordsworth since the Lyrical Ballads of four years before. That intimacy, in many ways and avowedly, was from the start a meeting of opposite temperaments, and it was to prove so various in its poetic effects that it is difficult even at this distance to sum it up. Wordsworth’s mature poetic language—the language, say, of ‘Tintern Abbey’ or of the 1805 Prelude—was not one of Coleridge’s ‘assumptions’, something he could travesty or put on like an old garment. It was in some measure his own invention; it was something that belonged to him as much as it belonged to Wordsworth. When, in 1797, the two young poets divided the world of poetry between the supernatural and the everyday (BL xiv), there is no reason to suppose that they thought the division directly represented the nature of their individual talents, though it may in some sense have represented their current inclinations. Coleridge, after all, had been writing conversation poems about the everyday for two years, and Wordsworth was to collaborate actively in the composition of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and may have written an early draft of ‘Lewti’. Once, at least, they indulged themselves in a composition-race to write different parts of the same work, a race that ended in Coleridge’s prose fragment ‘The Wanderings of Cain’. And yet there are ranges and depths in each poet which, one ultimately feels, were forever inaccessible to the other. The tragic bitterness which Coleridge reveals in his talent for the nightmarish, as in the central stanzas of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, make Wordsworth seem almost an emotional prig; and, at the same time, Coleridge seems never to have been patient enough to achieve in verse those long, emotional explorations of feeling, those minute diagrams of human perception at which Wordsworth excelled. The proximity of Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode and Coleridge’s Dejection emphasize both the sympathy and the contrast: the vast areas in which the two men were at one, the recesses of mind where each remained private and alone. Coleridge had already written ‘The Mad Monk’, a dramatic monologue put in the mouth of a crazed Sicilian which had appeared in the Morning Post (13 October 1800). It contained the lines:

There was a time when earth, and sea, and skies,

The bright green vale, and forest’s dark recess,

With all things, lay before mine eyes

In steady loveliness:

But now… (CPW 348).

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