Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
edited by
[Yale University Press, $10.00]
INESTIMABLE is the importance to students of Coleridge of this amazing collection of four hundred letters hitherto unpublished (barring excerpts from a handful, scattered through various publications). How, without them, any just measure of Coleridge can have been taken is now hard to know. For the first time we have much-needed light shed upon many controversial episodes in his life. With burning sincerity and brilliant energy, the poet in these pages discloses the labyrinthine paths of his inner life, which manifestly interested him not less than any one of his rapidly changed bosom friends to whom he confided his intimate thoughts.
His intense words revivify for us his varied career; the youthful escapade when he, who held ‘violent antipathy to soldiers and horses,’ enlisted in the Dragoons; his repentant mind sore with self-inflicted miseries; his ‘emancipation’; his meeting with Southey, and their ‘impregnable’ System; his occupation with Pantisocratic economics; his naming his ‘cat sister in the Fraternity of universal Nutare ’ the day he poetically addressed the Young Ass as ‘brother’; his sad obituary on the scheme that ‘did credit to our hearts rather than our heads’; his engagement and marriage (though he loved Mary) to Sara from a sense of duty (and now Southey is plainly exonerated of old blame for that fatal error); marriage teaching him ‘the wonderlul uses of that vulgar article yclept Bread’; his unqualified admiration and long love for Wordsworth, with significant silence on Dorothy; their tour to Scotland, when he parted from them because of the wet, only to tramp 263 miles in eight days; his escape to Malta in search of health and peace, where from a safe distance all whom he loved in England he could love ‘tenfold’; his reluctance to return to Sara; his many separations from her; his quarrel with Wordsworth, and the festering wound it left in his heart; his obsequiously bending his back to the young Byron’s lordly lash; his long years of aimless unsettlement; his finding solace in philosophical speculation; his last thoughts, just before death, for a faithful attendant.
But one need not be a student of Coleridge to value these letters. The white heat of inspiration glows from many a page of this emancipator of the imagination, in a phrase, a reflection, an incomparable choice of word. People, philosophy, literature, politics, and not least of all his own illness, his restless head occupied itself with, in ever-fresh and enthusiastic comment. Here we find his happy faculty for giving himself completely to his interests, and his distinguishing poetic gift: an uncanny power over words. Charles Lamb, he says, ‘every now and then irradiates, and the beam, though single and fine as a hair, is yet rich with colours, and I both see and feel it.’ Nothing could more accurately describe his own correspondence and our reaction to it.
BERNARD D. N. GREBANIER