The Reactionary Poetics of Obscurity

Who but a deceiver himself would have sunk low enough not merely to hate what he could not understand, but incriminate it, if he could?

Boccaccio, Genealogiae, quoted in Mehtonen, 121.

That other reader, the enthusiast of metaphysical poetry (including, occasionally, Coleridge himself) enjoys the obscurity of imperfect understanding.

1. C. Goodson, ‘Coleridge on Language: A Poetic Paradigm’, Philological Quarterly 62.1 (Winter 1983), 64.

Coleridge’s prose treatment of obscurity in his poetry emerges as a pattern of reactions to the charge of poetic obscurity. Just as he develops his paradoxical Romantic obscurity in relation to prose in response to the charges of obscurity in letters and reviews throughout the project of The Friend, so does his formulation of positive forms of poetic obscurity develop in acts of attack and defence in private letters and in other public works. The earliest reviews of Coleridge’s poetry display a preoccupation with his obscurity which was certainly inspired in part by the figures of obscurity in his indeterminate poetic landscapes and political reflections. A review of Coleridge’s 1796 Poems on Various Subjects by John Aikin, the Warrington Academy-educated dissenting writer and physician, in the June 1796 Monthly Review offers a qualified criticism and endorsement of obscurity and its poetic effects, associating both with the dangers of politicised enthusiasm: ‘[o]ften obscure, uncouth, and verging to extravagance, but generally striking and impressive to a supreme degree, it exhibits the ungoverned career of fancy and feeling which equally belongs to the poet and the enthusiast’.⁴⁵ In the following year, the Whig orientalist Alexander Hamilton invoked a classical criticism of the rhetorical excesses of poetic figures in a review of the ‘Ode to the Departing Year’, accusing Coleridge of attempting to trick or cheat his readers: ‘all the mechanical tricks of abrupt transition, audacious metaphor, unusual phraseology, &c. produce nothing better than turgid obscurity and formal irregularity’.⁴⁶ An unsigned review in the Critical Review of the same year associates Coleridge’s obscurity with ‘pomposity’ as opposed to the more acceptable ‘simplicity’ and claims that he ‘too frequently mistakes bombast and obscurity, for sublimity’.⁴⁷

The criticism stuck. Southey’s famous attack on the ‘Rime’ as ‘a Dutch attempt at German sublimity’⁴⁸ is a good example of how close the charge of obscurity was to the charge of not being English, and points to the manner in which obscurity came to encompass not only Coleridge’s prose and poetry, but also the questionable origins of his ideas in a suspicious terra incognita. In a review of Wallenstein in the Critical Review in October 1800, Coleridge is similarly admonished for abdicating the responsibilities of a published author, and implicitly for an attempt to manipulate his readers:

it were well if Mr. Coleridge would teach his pupils, both by precept and example, the art of blotting - would instruct them that hasty effusions require the file, that carelessness is not ease, and that obscurity in no instance constitutes the true sublime.⁴⁹

Here, obscurity is simply a lazy incompleteness. ‘Remorse’, too, was generally charged with an obscurity, echoes of which we can see in an 1813 review in the Theatrical Inquisitor which I cited in my last chapter and which calls Coleridge’s ‘diction uncouth, pedantic, and obscure’, rails against ‘the general confusion or obscurity of composition’, and even claims that Ordonio’s passion is ‘obscurely and imperfectly developed’.⁵⁰ John Taylor Coleridge, the poet’s unColeridgean nephew, pointed out the mortifying assumption of superiority which poetic obscurity invokes in the sensitive recipient, arguing that ‘the poetry [of ‘Remorse’], beautiful as it is, and strongly as it appeals in many parts to the heart, is yet too frequently of a lofty and imaginative character, far removed from the ready apprehension of common minds’.⁵¹ There is something like a pattern of reciprocal figuration at work here, as the reviewers rhetorically adopt the figures and concepts of Coleridge’s poetic obscurity in a pattern of inversion and transvaluation. Thus an account of the charge of obscurity in reviews of Coleridge itself reads like ‘A dark tale darkly finish’d’ (‘Remorse’ 4.1.145). ‘Remorse’ may have been staged around a ‘“a kind of rage”’ for Coleridge’,⁵² as Byron put it, but the intensity of attacks on his obscurity also registers a rage contra Coleridge.

One unique response to Coleridge’s poetics of obscurity was Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s ‘To Mr C[olerid]ge’, published by Barbauld’s brother John Aikin in the Monthly Magazine in April 1799 but written by September 1797, around the time when Coleridge’s 1797 Poems was published.⁵³ Educated in the circle of the Warrington Academy, Barbauld was a prolific writer and educator with strong dissenting roots in the rhetoric of clarity. She participated in the campaign to abolish the slave trade and wrote An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts in 1790 as a response to Burke’s reactionary parliamentary harangues, appealing to ‘certain, sure operations of increasing light and knowledge’.⁵⁴ As Ronald Paulson claims of her optimistic rhetoric, ‘Barbauld combines the light of knowledge with the irresistible forces of nature, using light to express the irreversible moment of change’.⁵⁵ Like the other rhetoricians of clarity I have discussed in my second chapter, Barbauld’s commitment to clarity, and indeed a poetics of clarity, was political. As Lucy Newlyn claims, ‘Barbauld’s preference for a poetic of clarity and distinctness - her deep suspicion towards mystification - declare the strongly Warringtonian complexion of her allegiances’.⁵⁶

In her article on Barbauld’s poem, Lisa Vargo has detailed the story of Barbauld’s relationship with Coleridge and Coleridge’s later infamous criticisms of her, including his and Southey’s ‘childish punning on her name’.⁵⁷ For my purposes it is sufficient to indicate that Coleridge and Barbauld had personally met (to Coleridge’s delight) in August 1797, and that both this meeting (and perhaps Coleridge’s talking) and the publication of ‘Religious Musings’ were the occasion for her poem and its criticism of Coleridge’s obscurity. Barbauld’s response to Coleridge’s obscurity reinforces my claims about the troubled, early Romantic conflation of the rhetorics of clarity and obscurity in ‘Religious Musings’, insofar as the poem at once ‘served Coleridge as an entrée into Unitarian circles’ and occasioned a poem charging him with obscurity.⁵⁸ This also reinforces my point about the misleading elements of a Coleridgean coherentism which would reconstruct some sort of syncretic system out of Coleridge’s unsystematic pattern of references that primarily served to figuratively associate him with the principles and politics of the rhetoric of clarity, not with a coherent philosophy. Coleridge’s early participation in this problematic poetics of clarity invokes the rhetoric of clarity as a sign of his basic allegiances, in spite of his lack of a coherent philosophy and his various disagreements with particular thinkers.

Barbauld’s poem reads as an admonishment of Coleridge not for a political, but for an intellectual apostasy. It is therefore something more than (a nonetheless significant) ‘act of questioning of [Romantic] aesthetic definitions by Barbauld herself’.⁵⁹ Its punishing appropriation of the figures of obscurity prevalent in Coleridge’s poetry resembles an act of reciprocal figuration and inverts Coleridge’s ambivalently positive representation of the possibilities inherent in aesthetic or philosophical indeterminacy. The poem begins with a relatively sympathetic representation of Coleridge’s seduction by abstruse research: in the grove which represents Coleridge’s precarious intellectual position, ‘in tangled mazes wrought’, ‘dubious shapes / Flit thro’ dim glades, and lure the eager foot / Of youthful ardour to eternal chase’ (3, 4-6).⁶⁰ The misty bower into which the eager Coleridge is tempted becomes a space of misleading indeterminacy which separates him from the proper light of reality:

Athwart the mists,
Far into vacant space, huge shadows stretch
And seem realities; while things of life,
Obvious to sight and touch, all glowing round
Fade to the hue of shadows (9-13).

Invoking a kind of mid-way space which relates analogously to Coleridge’s obscure environment of mists and the indeterminate temporality of his interchangeable dusk-dawns, Barbauld represents Coleridge as situated ‘Midway the hill of Science’ (1). But as Vargo notes in relation to the prescient figure of the ‘maze of metaphysic lore’ (34), to build a ‘place of resting’ (35) mid-way on a hill – or indeed on a staircase, one might add – Barbauld is here echoing representations of obscurity as the product of laziness, and the relation of obscurity to labour and mortification:

[t]he “maze of metaphysic lore” seems to represent [Barbuald’s] comment on Religious Musings and its more audacious flights of fancy. The locale resembles the spot halfway up a hill where Coleridge repeatedly situates his poems, including ‘The Eolian Harp’, and ‘France: An Ode’. And, as McCarthy and Kraft note, the Hill of Science refers to the hill difficulty in Pilgrim’s Progress, where Christian finds an arbour and falls asleep and loses his scroll.⁶¹

In addition, to be mid-way implies that Coleridge is occupying a suspicious place between alternative ideological positions that could figure as an apostatical rejection of either one or the other, or both, and the association of intellectual weakness with sitting on the fence, as it were. Thus Barbauld highlights the impoverishing temptations of the grove:

Nor seldom Indolence these lawns among
Fixes her turf-built seat, and wears the garb
Of deep philosophy, and museful sits,
In dreamy twilight of the vacant mind (19-22).

As in other admonitions for his lack of sustained application, Coleridge’s indolence is represented as a feminine force which lacks manly dedication, and carries connotations of fineness and delicacy (26).⁶² This indolence is contrasted with the more masculine ‘Active scenes’ which ‘Shall soon with healthful spirit brace thy mind’ (38, 39), should Coleridge find the strength to chase away ‘each spleen-fed fog / That blots the wide creation’ (41-42). In her inversive, poetic appropriation of the figures of poetic obscurity, Barbauld provides a challenge to Coleridge’s emerging poetics of obscurity which offers a more sympathetic contrast to the prose attacks of the reviews, and which gives something in addition to a critique of the Romantic aesthetics of obscurity. Barbauld was, in effect, not merely claiming that there should be such a thing as a poetic rhetoric of clarity: she was herself providing a metarhetorical one.

As he did in the project of the The Friend, Coleridge responded to these public charges of obscurity by developing a concept of a positive, poetic Romantic obscurity in his private correspondence. Though he had earlier castigated his brother George for his obscure handwriting and made minor a complaint about the obscurity of a phrase in Southey’s ode ‘To Lycon’,⁶³ Coleridge’s first serious epistolary treatment of poetic obscurity occurs in a letter to Thelwall written in December 1796, in which Coleridge defends the obscurity of his ‘Sonnet, Composed on a journey homeward’ against Thelwall’s charge. ‘And now, my dear fellow! for a little sparring about Poetry’, he writes in friendly defence:

[m]y first Sonnet is obscure; but you ought to distinguish between obscurity residing in the uncommonness of the thought, and that which proceeds from thoughts unconnected & language not adapted to the expression of them. When you do find out the meaning of my poetry, can you (in general, I mean) alter the language so as to make it more perspicuous – the thought remaining the same? …Now this thought is obscure; because few people have experienced the same feeling’.⁶⁴

The obscurity of a poetic text is here complicated in a four significant ways. First, it may be the result of the reader’s obstinacy, or his indolent resistance to the labour of intellectual mortification. Second, a sense of obscurity in the reader may result from the fact that the thought is unfamiliar or, to use a word with a more significant class connotation, ‘uncommon’. The consequent implication, that the fault may be in the use made of language by the author, is one which I have already shown to be essential to the negative valuation of obscurity by the rhetoric of clarity.⁶⁵ The suggestion that the fault may be in the choice of a particular language also invokes new rhetorical doubts concerning communication across barriers of inter- and intra-cultural difference: creating a readership involved the simultaneous creation of a new language. As James McKusick notes in relation to the argument of this letter, ‘Coleridge is proclaiming the need for a philosophical terminology distinct from ordinary language…. Although the poet has no need for a specialized vocabulary, he does need a philosopher’s ear for precision of usage…. While condemning willful obscurity of expression, Coleridge allows some deviation from standard usage’.⁶⁶ The claim for coherence, as Coleridge suggests, also involved the acceptance of a poetics of coherence, according to which each part played an essential role in the identity of the whole. It should be noted here that this strong claim carries with it the consequence that the revision of a poem entailed the loss of its original identity.⁶⁷ Finally, the reader’s confusion may be a reflection of the fact that the obscurity expresses feelings which are foreign or unfamiliar, and hence either a sign of the reader’s limitation or the author’s originality. Coleridge’s further implication is that it may take some effort to read his texts properly, and that the charge of obscurity is itself a sign or an admission of weakness.

‘Bless me!’ wrote Coleridge later in the letter, ‘a commentary of 35 lines in defence of a Sonnet!’⁶⁸ It is a sign of his optimism at this early stage in his career, in which he would spill so much ink in his reactionary development of Romantic obscurity, that a mere 35 lines in defence could seem noteworthy. Couched as it is in a moment of self-defence, Coleridge’s letter sets the pattern for his future placement of the responsibility for obscurity squarely on the reader, and renders the charge of poetic obscurity as suspect – and as potentially positive – as the obscure poem. As the charge is stripped of its immediate, negative force, obscurity can be figured a means of opening new perspectives, paradoxically prescribing the mortifying exercise necessary for the development and the sustenance of a healthy reason, or for the recognition of humility in the face of one’s own limited capacities.⁶⁹ At this point, however, Coleridge was still ready to admit his own fault and to clarify himself in the future, just as he did when corresponding complaints of the periodical-Friend began to trouble him: ‘[i]n some (indeed in many of my poems,) there is a garishness & swell of diction, which I hope, that my poems in future, if I write any, will be clear of’.⁷⁰

After this letter, Coleridge’s mentions and defences of his obscurity begin to multiply. In a letter to his publisher Joseph Cottle in February 1797 (presumably in reply to Alexander Hamilton’s remark on the ‘Ode to the Departing Year’) he wrote: ‘[s]o much for an “Ode,” [Departing Year] which some people think superior to the “Bard” of Gray, and which others think a rant of turgid obscurity; and the latter are the more numerous class. It is not obscure. My “Religious Musings” I know are, but not this “Ode”’.⁷¹ As Richard Allen Cave notes in The Romantic Theatre, in December 1797 Coleridge related (to Poole) the reason ‘Sheridan rejects the Tragedy [Osorio] – his sole objection is – the obscurity of the three last acts’.⁷² The economic aspect of obscurity hit home: it had now in a very real way begun to affect Coleridge’s prospects, and his pocketbook. But an awareness of the need for the serious treatment of obscurity had still not occurred to Coleridge four years later in February 1801, when he wrote to Josiah Wedgwood that

Mr Locke has given 25 folio pages to the explanation of Clear, Distinct, obscure, confused, real, fantastical, adequate, inadequate, true & false Ideas; and if I mistake not has exhibited throughout the whole a curious specimen of dim writing. Good heavens! twenty five folio pages to define half a dozen plain words; and yet I hazard the assertion, that the greater number of these words are explained falsely.⁷³

Locke was not the only figure Coleridge would charge with a negative obscurity in these pre-Friend years. Coleridge’s next mention of obscurity in relation to poetry comes in a letter to Southey that was written in reaction to Wordsworth’s statement of his own poetic creed in the preface to the 1802 Lyrical Ballads:

[i]n the new Edition of the L. Ballads there is a valuable appendix, which I am sure you must like / & in the Preface itself considerable additions… but it is, in parts, (and this is the fault, me judice, of all the latter half of that Preface) obscure beyond any necessity – & the extreme elaboration & almost constrainedness of the Diction contrasted (to my feelings) somewhat harshly with the general style of the Poems, to which the Preface is an Introduction.⁷⁴

Ironically, this dark passage reads much like a criticism of the Biographia Literaria that one can imagine having been written by Wordsworth.

Coleridge’s first public response in prose to the charge of obscurity came in what David Jasper has called ‘his first formal response to public criticism’, the preface to his 1797 Poems. In accordance with his anxieties relating to the emergent, indeterminate ‘people’ in the later eighteenth century, Coleridge begins the preface by claiming that there is indeed no coherent public to address: ‘[w]e are forever attributing personal Unities to imaginary Aggregates.- What is the PUBLIC, but a term for a number of scattered Individuals?’⁷⁵ But if the identity of public readers failed to materialise, the public identity of the reviewers was coherent enough, and Coleridge admits to ‘a general turgidness’, acknowledging their criticisms with a backhanded revisionary response:

I RETURN my acknowledgments to the different Reviewers for the assistance, which they have afforded me, in detecting my poetic deficiencies. I have endeavoured to avail myself of their remarks: one third of the former Volume I have omitted, and the imperfections of the republished part must be considered as errors of taste, not faults of carelessness.⁷⁶

But while Coleridge is willing to revise himself for the sake of diminishing double epithets (though unwilling to snap the flower of ‘Religious Musings’ in response to Hamilton’s charge of turgidity), he is so far from willing to admit that the reader’s charge of obscurity is negative that he invokes the armoury of arguments he had lately been developing in his letters and notebooks. The relevant passage, with its echoes of these early and his later arguments, is the first extended public announcement of the advent of a positive Romantic obscurity, and bears quoting in full:

[a] third and heavier accusation has been brought against me, that of obscurity; but not, I think, with equal justice. An Author is obscure, when his conceptions are dim and imperfect, and his language incorrect, or unappropriate, or involved. A poem that abounds in allusions, like the Bard of Gray, or one that impersonates high and abstract truths, like Collins’s Ode on the poetical character; claims not to be popular – but should be acquitted of obscurity. The deficiency is in the Reader. But this is a charge which every poet, whose imagination is warm and rapid, must expect from his contemporaries. Milton did not escape it; and it was adduced with virulence against Gray and Collins. We now hear no more of it; not that their poems are better understood at present, than they were at their first publication; but their fame is established; and a critic would accuse himself of frigidity or inattention, who should profess not to understand them. But a living writer is yet sub judice; and if we cannot follow his conceptions or enter into his feelings, it is more consoling to our pride to consider him as lost beneath, than soaring above, us. If any man expect from my poems the same easiness of style which he admires in a drinking-song, for him I have not written.⁷⁷

Interestingly, there were few attacks on Coleridge’s obscurity in reviews of his 1797 Poems.

As I have already noted, Coleridge resurrected part of this statement in a defence against the same charge of obscurity in the beginning of the Biographia twenty years later. Throughout that infamous text, Coleridge figures his poetics of obscurity as reactionary, as a thematised and metarhetorically philosophised defence that comes after the writing of the poems. Paul Hamilton has discussed a version of this latecoming in his book on Coleridge’s Poetics, arguing that Coleridge’s ‘philosophy’ involves a method of ‘providing an intuitive response with a discursive explanation’ which drove ‘the Romantic theorists’ to write ‘about philosophy by writing about poetry’, and led Coleridge to deduce the imagination from the critical practice of a radical desynonymy, rather than the other way around.⁷⁸ That fact that poetry thus leads to philosophy in Coleridge’s ‘theory’ in spite of his assertions to the contrary⁷⁹ demonstrates my claim about the proximity of metarhetoric and metaromanticism: the reflexivity of Romantic poetics is grounded in the reflexivity of rhetorical self-figuration.

The Biographia was from the beginning figured as a response to ‘falsehoods and calumnies attached to [Coleridge’s] name’, especially in relation to the charge of indolence and, of course, obscurity.⁸⁰ His obscurity, and the obscurity of the Biographia, was to be represented in a manner of attack and defence which inverted the claim that obscurity was a consequence of the writer’s weakness, and which simultaneously transferred the charge of negative obscurity to the reader’s inattention.⁸¹ In his provocatively contradictory way, Coleridge claims in his second chapter that ‘[i]indignation at literary wrongs, I leave to men born under happier stars. I cannot afford it’, and then proceeds (punningly) to ‘authorise acts of self-defence’ ⁸² related to his literary work. Aside from the philosophical chapters which have garnered so much sympathetic exegesis and unsympathetic calumny, the Biographia is in fact a patchwork quilt which, if it coheres at all, does so by virtue of a pattern of responses to criticisms and complaints of obscurity.⁸³

Thus the first chapter is announced in the table of contents as involving first ‘The motives of the present work’ and second the ‘Reception of the Author’s first publication’, while the third chapter ironically addresses ‘The author’s obligations to critics’, and the twenty-first chapter involves a series of ‘Remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals’.⁸⁴ His claim that his works have been used ‘to plume the shafts in the quiver of [his] enemies’⁸⁵ is typical of these obsessive reactions. He constantly invokes the mortification of obscurity, and his mortifying endurance of his critics’ calumnies, as yet another manner of demonstrating the expense of his investment in the works of The Friend. For example, he argues at the end of a protracted defence of his obscurity and its paradoxical demands on the reader:

[t]hose at least, let me be permitted to add, who have taken so much pains to render me ridiculous for a perversion of taste, and have supported the charge by attributing strange notions to me on no other authority than their own conjectures, owe it to themselves as well as to me not to refuse their attention to my own statement of the theory which I do acknowledge; or shrink from the trouble of examining the grounds on which I rest it, or the arguments which I offer in its justification.⁸⁶

One further example of this inversive metarhetorical reaction stands out in particular, in part because it explains Coleridge’s earlier reference to not being able to ‘afford’ indignation. Referring to the periodical- and bound-Friends as works which have been forgotten (and which he therefore repeatedly mentions), he states that

I have even at this time bitter cause for remembering that, which a number of my subscribers have but a trifling motive for forgetting. This effusion might have been spared; but I would fain flatter myself, that the reader will be less austere than an oriental professor of the bastinado, who during an attempt to extort per argumentum baculinum a full confession from a culprit, interrupted his outcry of pain by reminding him, that it was “a mere digression!” “All this noise, Sir! is nothing to the point, and no sort of answer to my QUESTIONS!” “Ah! but (replied the sufferer) it is the most pertinent reply in nature to your blows”.⁸⁷

In this prime example of the reactionary rhetoric of Romantic obscurity, the figured digression is exposed as the real end of the author’s work, and the reader’s consent to torment in reading the works of The Friend has always already been paid in kind not merely by the author’s sweat, but also by his blood and tears.

Three particular defences of his own poetic obscurity stand out. In the first, Coleridge appeals to a supplementary authority in order to justify obscurity. In the statement following his articulation of the paradoxical project of the immethodical miscellany, he writes of Hooker’s need in the Ecclesiastical Polity to guard against ‘complaints of obscurity’, and notes Hooker’s claim that original thoughts appear dark to minds unaccustomed to them.⁸⁸ Hooker’s defence becomes Coleridge’s defence, and Hooker’s apology for the toil he would demand in his work becomes Coleridge’s: ‘I would gladly therefore spare both myself and others this labour, if I knew how without it to present an intelligible statement of my poetic creed’.⁸⁹ Finally, through the figure of ‘the judicious author’ Hooker, Coleridge invokes a similar principle to that which Jerome Christensen must refer when he announces the ethical option to stop reading: ‘[i]f I may dare once more adopt the words of Hooker’, writes Coleridge, ‘“they, unto whom we shall seem tedious, are in no wise injured by us, because it is in their own hands to spare that labour, which they are not willing to endure”’.⁹⁰ Ironically, given his programmatic need to figuratively demonstrate his own investment of labour in his work in order to justify his demands on his readers, in this passage Coleridge lets someone else do the work for him, and he thereby gains extra credit by demonstrating his participation in a venerable and judicious tradition.

Coleridge’s description of how Kant’s obscurity is a construction of ‘Reviewers and Frenchmen’ functions reflexively as an account of how Coleridge himself became a figure of and for obscurity. This time, however, he is invoking not merely a questionable philosopher but a foreign, German philosopher, and the fruits of this supplementary figure’s obscurity must be picked rather differently. His claim that understanding Kant involves the investment of ‘due efforts of thought’ also serves as a model for the clarification of his own obscure work, and, incidentally, the ‘originality, the depth, and the compression’ of his thoughts.⁹¹ But Kant’s (and thereby Coleridge’s) obscurity is also figured as a radical refuge from oppression:

[h]e had been in imminent danger of persecution during the reign of the late king of Prussia, that strange compound of lawless debauchery, and priest-ridden superstition: and it is probable that he had little inclination, in his old age, to act over again the fortunes, and hair-breadth escapes of [Christian] Wolf. The expulsion of the first among Kant’s disciples, who attempted to complete his system, from the University of Jena, with the confiscation and prohibition of the obnoxious work by the joint efforts of the courts of Saxony and Hanover, supplied experimental proof, that the venerable old man’s caution was not groundless.⁹²

At least for Coleridge, there was more at work in his appropriation of German obscurity than a ‘purloined, sham authority’.⁹³ In the figure of Kant, Coleridge found ample opportunities for a sympathetic reciprocal figuration of (radical) obscurity.

Unlike the first two examples I have discussed, the third significant passage which justifies his obscurity is all Coleridge. In the tenth chapter, ostensibly ‘[a] chapter of digression’, he in fact gets right to the point when he invokes the fact that his ‘character’ has ‘been repeatedly attacked’, and he sets out to defend himself by defending the paradoxical mortification of his obscurity.⁹⁴ He argues that he has been charged with indolence because of the public obscurity of his writings, in the double sense relating to format in addition to form. His critics point to his lack of labour, that is, by pointing to his lack of books, those permanent repositories of lasting reflections. When he refers to the obscurity of his ‘prose writings’, he therefore refers for the most part to his Friends, in addition to the two Lay Sermons:

[m]y prose writings have been charged with a disproportionate demand on the attention… in short with obscurity and the love of paradox. But my severest critics have not pretended to have found in my compositions triviality, or traces of a mind that shrunk from the toil of thinking…. Seldom have I written that in a day, the acquisition or investigation of which had not cost me the previous labor of a month.⁹⁵

Just as the past reviews of critics provide the consistent motivation for his development of a positive obscurity throughout the Biographia, so does the figuration of his authorial activity as being always in the past serve as insurance against his readers’ charges of obscurity.

Finally, the development of reactionary poetic obscurity in the Biographia also comes in the form of responses to the work of Wordsworth, and in the infamous theoretical ‘evasion’ of a full statement concerning the imagination in the thirteenth chapter.⁹⁶ In the fourth chapter, in the passage where he describes his first acquaintance with Wordsworth, Coleridge proceeds immediately to a qualified defence of his obscurity in Coleridgean terms. Describing Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches as a work announcing ‘the emergence of an original poetic genius’, he claims that

the language was not only peculiar and strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength; while the novelty and struggling crowd of images acting in conjunction with the difficulties of the style, demanded always a greater closeness of attention, than poetry (at all events, than descriptive poetry) has a right to claim. It not seldom therefore justified the complaint of obscurity.⁹⁷

As we have seen, this apparent concession to popular taste, that Wordsworth’s demand on the attention justifies the complaint of obscurity, is a backhanded concession to the reader: elsewhere the demand on attention is an essential element of a text’s informing, improving value. The conceit that poetry, or, in a significant qualification, descriptive poetry is not suited to such subjects, and the transfer of that burden to prose, is here merely a theoretical cover for Coleridge’s historico-cultural observations about the weakness of his fellow countrymen. And yet, in the next passage on Wordsworth, where Coleridge describes how they became personally acquainted, Coleridge turns once again to the discussion of Wordsworth’s ‘occasional obscurities’ and claims that they had ‘almost wholly disappeared’, presumably because of Wordsworth’s ‘manly reflection’.⁹⁸ Such claims, in the context of Coleridge’s deliberate and lengthy justifications of obscurity in poetry and in prose, can only be reconciled to a consistent argument – though that is hardly necessary – if they are considered as calculated positivities intended to balance Coleridge’s complex critique of his friend’s poetry throughout the Biographia. Indeed, in a footnote to a later paragraph of Wordsworth, Coleridge explicitly prefaces a criticism of a banal Wordsworthian obscurity (concerning the use of the word ‘scene’) with a description of Wordsworth’s ‘judicious’ use of words. He would not ‘hazard’ the ‘remark’, he writes, ‘in the works of a poet less austerely accurate in the use of words’.⁹⁹

Such compliments are positioned in Coleridge’s reactionary poetics of obscurity in order to balance what he knew could be a rather insulting association of Wordsworth with obscurity, however much he tried to transform it into a positive concept. As he knew, associating oneself with the figures of obscurity gave critics a good opportunity to engage in parodic forms of reciprocal figuration. Coleridge’s figurations of the poet as a positive figure of obscurity – and here Wordsworth plays the supplemental role projected onto Hooker as a figure of obscure theological reflection, and Kant of philosophical speculation – demonstrate this anxious desire for a balance of light and darkness. In the twenty-second chapter, devoted to a discussion of Wordsworth’s ‘defects’, Coleridge places Wordsworth in high biblical company, and invokes the hierarchy of hermeneutical obscurity with which we are by now familiar:

[i]f Mr. Wordsworth is not equally with [Samuel] Daniel alike intelligible to all readers of average understanding in all passages of his works, the comparative difficulty does not arise from the greater impurity of the ore, but from the nature and uses of the metal. A poem is not necessarily obscure, because it does not aim to be popular. It is enough, if a work be perspicuous to those for whom it is written, and “Fit audience find, though few”.¹⁰⁰

But even this typical Friendly endorsement of obscurity is qualified by the articulation of a paradoxical perspicuity. Samuel Daniel, who Wordsworth ‘strikingly resembles’, himself invokes an obscurity of paradoxical perspicuity: ‘[f]or though [his sentiments] are brought into the full day-light of every reader’s comprehension; yet are they drawn up from depths which few in any age are privileged to visit, into which few in any age have courage or inclination to descend’.¹⁰¹ In other words, Wordsworth’s obscurity, which here functions as always as a projection of Coleridge’s own, resembles something like witchery by daylight.

The infamous evasion and indefinite delay of Coleridge’s absent statement of his poetic creed is circumscribed by his Romantic obscurity. The fictional correspondence introduced in the thirteenth chapter, which in fine Porlockian fashion figures a staged interruption which justifies Coleridge’s incompletion, invokes the figures and inversions of obscurity which Coleridge had been developing in response to criticisms of obscurity since his first appearance on the public scene. In a remarkable moment, Coleridge adopts the figures he introduced earlier in the very same text, and the fictional correspondent claims that his perusal of the chapter on imagination has left him feeling like Coleridge’s hater of physicians who is mired in a state of illusory inversion. The correspondent then adopts – and inverts – the figures of obscurity associated with negative religion in the superstition allegory, and claims that entering Coleridge’s work is like entering, alone, into the ‘palpable darkness’ of ‘one of our largest Gothic cathedrals in a gusty moonlight night of autumn’.¹⁰² Fantastic shapes and shadows surround him, and he discovers that figures of respect have been inverted into ‘grotesque dwarfs; while the grotesques, in my hitherto belief, stood guarding the high altar with all the characters of apotheosis’. And finally, in the climactic moment of this penultimate climax of Coleridge’s development of a thematised, Romantic obscurity, he invokes the central passage for Romantic obscurity in Milton:

[i]n short, what I had supposed substances were thinned away into shadows, while every where shadows were deepened into substances:

If substance might be call’d what shadow seem’d,
For each seem’d either!¹⁰³

And then comes the ultimate figuration of Coleridge’s projected friend and his own projection of obscurity:

[y]et after all, I could not but repeat the lines which you had quoted from a MS. Poem of your own in the FRIEND, and applied to a work of Mr. Wordsworth’s though with a few of the words altered:

An orphic tale indeed,
A tale obscure of high and passionate thoughts
To a strange music chanted!

Be assured, however, that I look forward anxiously to your great book on the CONSTRUCTIVE PHILOSOPHY, which you have promised and announced: and that I will do my best to understand it. Only I will not promise to descend into the dark cave of Trophonius with you, there to rub my own eyes, in order to make the sparks and figured flashes, which I am required to see.¹⁰⁴

As I have shown, the concept of poetic obscurity is not merely at the heart of the protracted and indefinite delay of the full articulation of the imagination: it is also the thematised figure for that delay, for its promise of a mortifying penetration of mysterious and unknown lands, and for the promise of an apotheosis otherwise represented as apostasy.