1John Hamilton, 214.↩

2Ibid. 212.↩

3Clark, 71-2.↩

4A recent example of this type of reading is Joshua Wilner’s Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization (Baltimore and London, 2000]: in which he announces that ‘[t]he wager in all these essays is that such formulations [like Wordsworth’s ‘feeds on infinity’] and the reflections they condense involve deeply embedded if obscure registrations of early and ongoing transactions between an imperfectly constituted self and its objects; that these dealings inform the critical and creative power of poetic language generally; and collaterally, that Romanticism’s increasing explicitation of these interactions participates in the long and continuing story of patriarchy’s decline in the West’ (1). The Wordsworth quotation is from 1805 Prelude 13.70.↩

5Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism (Chicago and London, 2003), 1.↩

6Paul Hamilton, Coleridge’s Poetics (Oxford, 1983), 32, 1.↩

7Jerome Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore and London, 2000), 142.↩

8Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division, 2. For a typical example of a sympathetic decision concerning Coleridge’s coherence, see Paul Scott Wilson, ‘Coherence in Biographia Literaria: God, Self, and Coleridge’s “Seminal Principle”’, Philological Quarterly 72.4 (Fall 1993), 451-469. ↩

9Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History, 147.↩

10Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism, 5.↩

11Magnuson, 103.↩

12Weiskel, 16. Lucy Newlyn notes that there is also a certain radical energy residing in the possibility of an ultimately Romantic form of internalisation: ‘[s]ublimity, then, is particularly associated with Satanic passages in Paradise Lost, and with the opening up of subjective or mental space, through the use of a language of obscurity’ (Newlyn, Paradise Lostand the Romantic Reader, 51).↩

13Magnuson, 96-7.↩

14All quotations from Coleridge’s poetry are from the reading texts of CPW except where otherwise identified.↩

15Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem (Chapel Hill and London, 1986), 40.↩

16‘I know no style to which darkness of a certain sort is more suited than to the prophetical’ (George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 2.150).↩

17The phrase ‘eminent Contemporaries’ is drawn from the letter which introduced the first sonnet on December 1, 1794. See CPW 1.1.155.↩

18CPW,** 1.1.264.↩

19George Whalley, ‘The Bristol Library Borrowings of Southey and Coleridge, 1793-8’, The Library, 5th series, 4 (1949), 123.↩

20Magnuson, 65. Magnuson offers in this section a fascinating account of the radical function of this Miltonic image in Coleridge’s poetics, pointing out that ‘[t]he point of tracing the allusion… is not merely to align Coleridge with Milton’s devout prayer for inspiration… but rather to trace Coleridge’s use of “Dark with excessive bright” in its public context, to read it as allusion mediated by public issues’ (64).↩

21Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, 51.↩

22The pre-existence of his son’s spirit has an interesting hermeneutical significance, insofar as a clear understanding of his previous existence must inform a proper understanding of his current form, as the final lines of the poem show in their speculation upon the baby’s life on ‘this nether sphere’ (11]: as a punishment for a crime committed elsewhere. This invokes what John Hamilton refers to as ‘the so-called “dark-filter” notion of obscurity, an idealist mode whereby behind some screen there is said to lie a “pre-existent, luminous meaning”’ (John Hamilton, Soliciting Darkness, 3, quoting from Allon White, 18).↩

23Mehtonen, 135.↩

24Butler, Romantics, 37.↩

25Ibid. 85.↩

26Butler, Burke, 14.↩

27Butler, Romantics, 8.↩

28Clark, 80.↩

29Magnuson, 85.↩

30Ibid. 59. Magnuson nicely invokes the refuge of obscurity invoked in ESTEESI as a ‘location’: ‘[w]hether read as “he hath stood” or “he hath placed,” the word indicates not a personality, but a position, a location which, as he explained to Sotheby, defines him as a friend of freedom authorized by a religion rejected by other English Jacobins and equally distinct from the French, whom Coleridge saw as having forsaken both liberty and religion’ (60).↩

31Norman Fruman, ‘Creative process and concealment in Coleridge’s poetry’, in Romantic Revisions,** eds. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley (Cambridge, 1992), 161.↩

32Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, The fall of Robespierre, 1794 (Oxford and New York, 1991), 3.↩

33Mehtonen, 103.↩

34Paulson, 5.↩

35Thomas Nash, The anatomie of absurdite (1589), quoted in Mehtonen, 122.↩

36Mehtonen, 118.↩

37Marshall Suther, The Dark Night of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York, 1960), 27.****↩

38Paul Hamilton, ‘Shadow of a Magnitude’, 27.↩

39Mary Anne Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy: The Logos as Unifying Principle, (Oxford, 1994), 128.↩

40Coleridge, ‘On the Divine Ideas’, fo. 63, quoted in Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy, 119. Perkins’s book, like Douglas Hedley’s, is a good source for a discussion of the concept of the Logos as it is deployed in Coleridge’s work as a whole. As she states in her article ‘Religious thinker’, ‘Coleridge’s own attempt to develop a “dynamic system” was aimed at a similar integration of ideas, feelings, experience, conscience and actions [as in German philosophies of nature and Idealism]…. Imagination is that power which perceives and realises unity in multiplicity; which recognises symbols as not just representing, but participating in, universal, infinite and eternal realities…. He found a correspondence between these ideas and ancient Greek concepts of Logos as the principle of reason, and of difference, distinction and opposition (all essential to intelligibility), propounded by Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Plato and the neo-Platonists’ (Perkins, ‘Religious Thinker’, in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, 191-2). Interestingly, Coleridge’s deployment of the Logos as a unifying metaphysical or theological figure is here, in high Coleridgean fashion, adopted as a figure for the unification of Coleridge’s work into a coherent system or philosophy, and the metarhetorical function of the figure is elevated by the critic into a guiding concept which guarantees his work’s coherence.↩

41Suther, 143.↩

42McKusick, 26.↩

43CPW, 1.1.190 n.↩

44In his ‘Defence of Poetry’, Shelley invokes a form of Romantic obscurity in his famous declaration: ‘[p]oets are the hierophants of the unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ (Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Peacock’s Four Ages of Poetry, Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, Browning’s Essay on Shelley, ed. H.F.B. Brett-Smith [Oxford, 1923], 59). Insofar as they generally endorse a poetics of clarity rather than a sort of mystical hierophantism, Peacock’s and Browning’s essays offer significant alternatives to Shelley’s invocation of Romantic obscurity.↩

45John Aikin, Review of Poems on Various Subjects 1796, Monthly Review (Jun 1796), quoted in Jackson, 38.↩

46Alexander Hamilton, Review of ‘Ode on the Departing Year’, Monthly Review (Mar 1797), quoted in Jackson, 39.↩

47Anonymous review of Poems 1797, Critical Review (Jul 1797), in Jackson, 41. In his parodic Nehemiah Higginbottom sonnets, published in the Monthly Magazine in 1797, Coleridge attacked the affectations of simplicity, and, punningly, of plainness, in a sonnet ‘To Simplicity’: ‘Now of my false friend plaining plaintively, / Now raving at mankind in general; / But whether sad or fierce, ‘tis simple all, / All very simple, meek SIMPLICITY!’ (11-14)↩

48Robert Southey, Review of Lyrical Ballads 1798, Critical Review (Oct 1798), quoted in Jackson, 53.↩

49Anonymous review of Wallenstein, Critical Review (Oct 1800), quoted in Jackson, 65.↩

50Anonymous review of ‘Remorse’, Theatrical Inquisitor (Feb 1813), quoted in Jackson, 131.↩

51John Taylor Coleridge, Review of Remorse, Quarterly Review (Apr 1814), quoted in Jackson, 138.↩

52Byron, quoted in CPW, 3.2.1049.↩

53The Poems of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, eds. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft, (Athens, Georgia and London, 1994). Lisa Vargo offers a concise account of the publication details in her article ‘The Case of Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “To Mr C[olerid]ge,”’ Charles Lamb Bulletin 102 (April 1998), 61.↩

54Barbauld, quoted in Paulson, 44.↩

55Paulson, 44.↩

56Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism, 155. David Simpson has shown that Barbauld’s commitment to poetic clarity did not involve the reduction of poetry to a mere didactic device for education, and that in poetry there were for her possibilities for information to which clarity was not the only answer: ‘[i]n her prefatory essay to a reprint of Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination’, writes Simpson, ‘Anna Laetitia Barbauld declared that poetry should never “descend to teach the elements of any art or science” or “confine itself” to “regular arrangement and clear brevity.” It is a bad poem that makes us “follow a system step by step”’ (Simpson, 150).↩

57They called her ‘Mrs Bare-bald’. Vargo, 56. ↩

58Vargo, 58, 59.↩

59Ibid. 58.↩

60All references to Barbauld’s poetry are from The Poems of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, eds. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Athens, Georgia, and London, 1994).↩

61Vargo, 60. See The Poems of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, McKarthy and Kraft 297n.↩

62Vargo adds to Simpson’s consideration of this gendered discourse of labour in relation to Barbauld’s defence of William Collins in her edition of his work in 1797: ‘[i]f Simpson is right in arguing that the passage, which seeks to defend Collins against the charge of indolence, created anxiety in male writers because of its feminized character, it nevertheless accounts for why Barbauld entertains such sympathy for Coleridge’s writing’ (Vargo, 60).↩

63CL, 1.11, 133.↩

64CL, 1.277↩

65In a notebook entry in 1796, Coleridge, in a discussion of the judicious labour demanded by the difficulty of Milton, distinguishes between that obscurity that is ‘complaisant to the Reader: not that vicious obscurity, which proceeds from a muddled head’ (CN, 1.276).↩

66McKusick, 15. Pursuing his vision of a coherent Coleridgean philosophy of language, McKusick later claims that for Coleridge ‘[t]he language of poetry, in other words, resists representational transparency to the extent that it succeeds in foregrounding its own verbal texture’ (99).↩

67Hence Coleridge’s resurrected claim twenty years later, in reference to his attempted revisions to ‘Religious Musings’, that ‘I was often obliged to omit disentangling the weed, from the fear of snapping the flower’ (BL, 1.7). The phrase was lifted from the preface to Coleridge’s 1797 Poems, xvii.↩

68CL, 1.278.↩

69Coleridge later became aware of the potentially problematic association of the author with the physician, as he shows in an argument about the inversions involved in teaching a person to think in accordance with principle rather than habit: ‘[t]he man feels, as if he were standing on his head, though he cannot but see, that he is truly standing on his feet. This, as a painful sensation, will of course have a tendency to associate itself with him who occasions it; even as persons, who have been by painful means restored from derangement, are known to feel an involuntary dislike towards their physician’ (BL, 1.73).↩

70CL, 1.278.↩

71Ibid. 1.309.↩

72Ibid. 1.358. See Richard Allen Cave, The Romantic Theatre (Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, 1986), 14.↩

73CL, 2.689. Coleridge sarcastically notices a cheating rhetorical function of obscurity in the same letter, when he says of Locke’s account of time that ‘Mr Locke in order to rescue himself from absurdity must necessarily bewilder his Reader in obscure Notions of Relative Time as contradistinguished from Absolute’ (694). In a notebook entry of the same year, Coleridge considers ‘[w]hether or no the too great definition of Terms in any language may not consume too much of the vital & idea-creating force in distinct, clear, full made images & so prevent originality’ (CN, 1.1016).↩

74CL, 2.830.↩

75Coleridge, Poems 1797, xiv.↩

76Ibid. xvii.↩

77Ibid. xvii-xix. In a rather facile comment which dismisses the importance of Coleridge’s careful establishment of the Romantic charge of obscurity, Norman Fruman remarks that ‘Coleridge’s few early reviews and prefaces to the published editions of his poems are, at best, facile, and, at worst, surprisingly sterile performances. In 1797 he… gave it as his opinion that the charge of obscurity in poetry is a “heavier accusation” than that of turgidity’ (Fruman, The Damaged Archangel, 287).↩

78Paul Hamilton, Coleridge’s Poetics, 11, 32, 80. Hamilton nicely demonstrates the function of obscurity in relation to his argument about Coleridge’s poetics: ‘Coleridge used transcendentalist terminology to obfuscate a critical theory whose radicalism it in fact supported’ (69); thus ‘[t]he idealist vocabulary… obscures its emancipatory impulse entirely’ (180). Thus Hamilton argues that Coleridge ‘presents difficulty in the Biographia Literaria as a means of enhancing his own philosophical authority, not as an incentive for the reader to take over and start producing his own text’ (21]: – in spite of the fact that the latter was the very function of obscurity to which Coleridge was explicitly and paradoxically committed throughout the project of The Friend. ↩

79See ibid. 27.↩

80TF, 2.36.↩

81The importance of the concept of ‘attention’ in Coleridge’s paradoxical project of The Friend is announced early on in the book-Friend: ‘THE FRIEND will not attempt to disguise from his Readers that both Attention and Thought are Efforts, and the latter a most difficult and laborious Effort; nor from himself, that to require it often or for any continuance of time is incompatible with the nature of the present Publication, even were it less incongruous than it unfortunately is with the present habits and pursuits of Englishmen’ (TF 1.16-17). The claim is repeated in a slightly altered form in the Biographia where Coleridge claims ‘I am aware, that I shall be obliged to draw more largely on the reader’s attention, than so immethodical a miscellany can authorize’ (BL, 1.88).↩

82Ibid. 1.45.↩

83Paul Hamilton notes the attempts by ‘sympathizers’ to try to reveal a connecting method running through the Biographia which shows its argument to be complete (Paul Hamilton, Coleridge’s Poetics, 12-13).↩

84BL, 1.ix, xi.↩

85Ibid. 1.46.↩

86Ibid. 1.88.↩

87Ibid. 1.175.↩

88Ibid. 1.88.↩

89Ibid. 1.88.↩

90Ibid. 1.88 and Jerome Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History, 74.↩

91BL, 1.153.↩

92Ibid. 1.154-5.↩

93Paul Hamilton, Coleridge’s Poetics, 81.↩

94BL, 1.x, 219.↩

95Ibid. 1.120.↩

96Writing of the influence of Coleridge’s staged evasion on the intuitive theoretical reading practice of the new criticism, Hamilton observes that ‘[t]he consequences of his evasion are still with us’ (Paul Hamilton, Coleridge’s Poetics, 11).↩

97BL, 1.77.↩

98Ibid. 1.79.↩

99Ibid. 2.103 n.↩

100Ibid. 2.147. The quotation is from PL, 7.31.↩

101BL, 2.146-7.↩

102Ibid. 1.301.↩

103Ibid. 1.301 and PL, 1.669-70.↩

104BL, 1.301. The lines of poetry are from ‘To William Wordsworth’ 45-7 (var).↩

105Levinson, 17. The quotation is from Hans Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory”, NLH 1 (Autumn 1970), 13-14. Such positive endorsements and appropriations of the Romantic fragment poem’s metarhetorical announcements of its own incompleteness have led nonetheless to various heroic attempts to complete them, as one can see in Lowes’ attempt to uncover the veil of hidden reference in The Road to Xanadu, or Elinor Shaffer’s attempt to discover a cohering syncretism in ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School In Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770-1880 (Cambridge, 1975). ↩

106Harding, Coleridge and the Inspired Word, 15. He is discussing Kathleen Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry (London, 1981).↩

107Edwin Webb notes another obscure origin in the poem in his discussion of Coleridge’s language of consciousness: ‘[t]he origins of consciousness are obscure as the river arises from the depths of the earth, runs its course’ (Edwin Webb, ‘“Reality’s Dark Dream”: Coleridge’s language of consciousness’, Critical Quarterly 25.1 [Spring 1983], 27).↩

108Harding notes in Inspired Word that Coleridge associated the Hebrew resistance to divine visibility as the reason the Old Testament ‘excelled all other literatures in “Imagination, or the modifying, andco-adunating Faculty” (Harding, 69, citing CL, 2:866).↩

109CPW, 1.1.510.↩

110John Hamilton, 99.↩

111Read, 154-55.↩

112Raimonda Modiano, ‘Historicist Readings of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford, 2001), 287; and Patrick J. Keane, Coleridge’s Submerged Politics: The Ancient Mariner and Robinson Crusoe (Columbia, London, 1994).↩

113Suther, 150.↩

114Modiano, ‘Historicist Readings’, 294.↩

115Perkins, ‘Religious thinker’, 188.↩

116Smith, 209.↩

117Except where otherwise noted, all references are to the 1798 version of the ‘Rime’.↩

118Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division, 284.↩

119Seamus Perry, ‘Coleridge and the End of Autonomy’, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (Oxford, 2001), 263.↩

120Ibid. 263.↩

121Vivien Jones, ‘Women Writing Revolution: Narratives of History and Sexuality in Wollstonecraft and Williams’, in Beyond Romanticism, eds. Stephen Copley and John Whale (London and New York, 1992), 180. For an informed account of such figures in the wider literature of the period see Jane Kromm, ‘Representations of Revolutionary Women in Political Caricature’, in The French Revolution Debate in English Literature and Culture, ed. Lisa Plummer Crafton (London, 1997), 123-135. Harriet Guest suggests a positive element lurking in the acknowledgment of revolutionary power this otherwise negative figuration of the feminine: ‘[f]or the construction of femininity in terms of its extrapolitical formlessness, rather than containment within and from masculine realities, may indirectly constitute a feminine utopian fantasy capable of political articulation’ (Harriet Guest, ‘The Wanton Muse: Politics and Gender in Gothic Theory after 1760’, in Beyond Romanticism, eds. Stephen Copley and John Whale [London and New York, 1992], 138).↩

122Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York, 1973), 78.↩

123Harding, Coleridge and the Inspired Word, 17.↩

124‘So long as they labour under the illusion that it is possible once and for all to write down, to describe, to give any finality to the process which they are trying to catch, which they are trying to nail down, unreality and fantasy will result - an attempt, always, to cage the uncageable, to pursue truth where there is no truth, to stop the unceasing flow, to catch movement by means of rest, to catch time by means of space, to catch light by means of darkness. That is the romantic sermon’ (Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (London, 1999), 121.↩

125Mays translates the lines thus: ‘[h]apless and suffering the worst kind of haplessness is he who, half a man, has taken to his bed a woman half as much again, and with the tearful dew from his small rigid tube scarcely strikes the silent thirsty orifice and the gulf of that great aperture’ (CPW, 1.2.894)↩