1802: A Bromance
Today I am gonna take a brief hiatus from my study of postmodernism to bring you something a little more old school. How about a little Romantic poetry, eh, eh?
I am currently developing a thesis for my midterm in Romantic literature. For the last several weeks we have been focused on a study of Samuel T. Coleridge (1772-1834) and William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Now, while there is much to say about their work individually, it was during their time together that they managed to cook up an idea that would change the face of poetry from that moment right up to the present.
The story of Wordsworth and Coleridge is one of the great bromances of the Romantic era. Both started as bright eyed lovers of nature and the “common sight(s)” (Wordsworth, Ode, ln. 2, 1815) . During their walking tours about the British country side during the 1790’s they would talk and dream and, ultimately cobble together what would become their joint masterpiece the Lyrical Ballads volume.
Within this work we see such notable pieces as “Rhyme of the Ancyent Marinere” (maybe better known today by Iron Maiden’s Tribute to the Coleridge’s Classic) and “A Few Lines Written above Tinturn Abbey”. What makes this work and the poems contained within it truly remarkable is the concept woven into their creation. Wordsworth and Coleridge had it in their heads that there was something poetic about the common delights of life. They spent a lot of time in conversation, and so, naturally, they found an idea in the concept of conversation: Conversational poetry. Poetry that doesn’t preach or speak at the audience, but rather reaches out to include the reader in an inter-subjective space. This space is made specifically for their readers, it is groomed and made hospitable for the other so that they might participate in the conversation on the page.
Wordsworth and Coleridge did this by adopting the native language of their audience, common English. They tried to reach out by taking the very personal deep subject matter of their own private conversations and making them public. Much in the way Jean-Jaques Rousseau’s posthumously published Confessions (1781) laid bare his mind and invited the reader to find themselves in its darkest corners, the private and personal dialogues between Coleridge and Wordsworth can be seen behind the veil of verse. The entire concept was an experiment, something that had not been considered or, at least, acted upon until Lyrical Ballads. The two poets played with the representation of the voices of others within poems and experimented with the potential of dialogical underpinnings between poems.
During their time together, Wordsworth and Coleridge became great friends, and for much of their lives lived fairly close to one another. It was a Bromance for the ages, kindred minds and spirits deeply conversing about about nature, people, poetics and life. However, like every great Bromance, their comes a falling out.
Coleridge often suffered from bouts of what his generation might term “Melancholia”. Today he would most likely be diagnosed with clinical depression, and their is some speculation as to bi-polar disorder. While Wordsworth began to feel the effects of age in the early 1800’s—nostalgia, a sense of loss, or, in his words, “The things which I have seen I now can see no more” (Ode, ln. 9)—he did not allow himself to succumb to greif, “Oh, evil day! If I were sullen/ While the earth herself is adorning” (Ode, ln 43). He was keenly aware of the “despondency and madness” (Resolution and Independence, ln49) many poets saw in their later years, however, Wordsworth was of sound enough mind to battle these fears and come out on the other side. Coleridge, on the other hand, was not so lucky.
His depression, being most likely chemical rather than existential, took complete control of him. When in his “ill-mood” he was beyond salvation. In the early years, both Wordsworth and Coleridge found solace and joy in the pleasures of nature and the voices of others. These themes pervade most of their early work and it can be understood as a foundational belief in both of their lives. It was this external beauty of “common sight(s)” that kept them going. However, there came a moment in around 1802 where, for Coleridge, it just wasn’t enough anymore. He lost his faith in the external, and looking inward, found only despair,
“A greif without a pang - void, dark, and drear;
A stifling, drowsy, unimpassioned grief
That finds no natural outlet, no relief
In word, or sigh, or tear - “
- Letter to Sara Hutchinson/Dejection: An Ode
Though try as he might, Coleridge simply could not recapture the feeling of joy he saw in nature. He acknowledges its objective beauty, even that it can have affect on others of his creative disposition (specifically Wordsworth). However, for himself, he could not feel anything.
“Those stars that glide behind them and between
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen;
Yon crescent moon, as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue -
A boat beclaimed! Dear William’s sky Canoe!
I see them all, so excellently fair;
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!
- A Letter to Sara Hutchinson
This depression was crippling, and at the time of 1802 when the two wrote a series of poems which addressed this melancholy, Coleridge was bed ridden with despair in Wordsworth Cottage. These few poems: Wordsworth’s Ode and Resolution and Independence, as well as Coleridge’s Letter to Sara Hutchinson a personal letter that would be the foundation for his other work Dejection: An Ode; contain a dialogue between the two poets that mirrored the collapse of Coleridge’s faith in Wordsworth’s natural beauty and plunge into despair and, finally, Wordsworth’s resolution to dump Coleridge.
I like to view the sequence like this: the first 56 lines of Ode, written in 1802, are like Wordsworth’s wy of sending Coleridge a sympathetic “get well soon” card. the Letter to Sara Hutchinson is akin to that awkward email you send to that girl you like but you can’t have so you settle for good friends, telling her in turns how great she is and how miserable you are and how the guy she likes better (William) is full of shit. Dejection: An Ode is the snarky, passive aggressive facebook statuses that accompany the letter. And finally, Resolution and Independence can be seen almost as Wordsworth’s “Dear John” letter to Coleridge, when he finally kicks Coleridge out of his Cottage.
In the end, Wordsworth rises out of his funk and goes on to become England’s Poet Laurette, While Coleridge circles the drain and fades to obscurity during his life time. The nasty literary break up however is forever immortalized in their published works, a familiar tale most people can say they’ve seen if not experienced. While it was a private conversion, its entrance into the public sphere gives the reader an opportunity to weigh in on the crumbling bromance, and find themselves in the details left out.
