Coleridge: The Anxiety of Influence

Author(s): Harold Bloom

Source: Diacritics , Spring, 1972, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring, 1972), pp. 36-41
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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36

Colernidge: The Anxielty of nflluence

"Psychologically," Coleridge observed, "Con- treatment of Coleridge, and this after a century of
sciousness is the problem," and he added somberly: commentary. Pater, who knew his debt to Coleridge,
"almost all is yet to be achieved." How much he knew also the anxiety Coleridge caused him, and
achieved, Miss Coburn and others are showing us. Pater therefore came to a further and subtler know-
My concern here is the sadder one, of speculating ing. In the Organic analogue, against which the en-
yet again why he did not achieve more as a poet. tire soul of the great Epicurean critic rebelled, Pater
Mr. Bate has meditated, persuasively and recently, recognized the product of Coleridge's profound
upon Coleridge's human and literary anxieties, par- anxieties as a creator. I begin therefore with Pater
ticularly in regard to the burden of the past and its on Coleridge, and then will move immediately deep
inhibiting poetic splendors. I swerve away from Mr. into the Coleridgean interior, to look upon Cole-
Bate to center the critical meditation upon what ridge's fierce refusal to take on the ferocity of the
might be called the poetics of anxiety, the process strong poet.
of misprision by which any latecomer strong poet This ferocity, as both Coleridge and Pater well
attempts to clear an imaginative space for himself. knew, expresses itself as a near-solipsism, an Egotis-
Coleridge could have been a strong poet, as strong tical Sublime, or Miltonic godlike stance. From 1795
as Blake or Wordsworth. He could have been an- on, Coleridge knew, loved, envied, was both cheered
other mighty antagonist for the Great Spectre Miltonand darkened by the largest instance of that Sub-
to engage and, yes, to overcome, but not without lime since Milton himself. He studied constantly, al-
contests as titanic as The Four Zoas and The Ex- most involuntarily, the glories of the truly modern
cursion, and parental victories as equivocal as Jeru-
strong poet, Wordsworth. Whether he gave Words-
salem and The Prelude. But we have no such poems worth rather more than he received, we cannot be
by Coleridge. When my path winds home at the certain;end we know only that he wanted more from
of this discourse, I will speculate as to what theseWordsworth than he received, but then it was his
poems should have been. As critical fathers for my endearing though exasperating weakness that he al-
quest I invoke first, Oscar Wilde, with his gloriousways needed more love than he could get, no matter
principle that the highest criticism sees the objecthowas much he got: "To be beloved is all I need,
/ And whom I love, I love indeed."
in itself it really is not, and second, Wilde's critical
father, Walter Pater, whose essay of 1866 on "Cole- Pater understood what he called Coleridge's
ridge's Writings" seems to me still the best short "peculiar charm," but he resisted it in the sacred
name of what he called the "relative" spirit against
Coleridge's archaizing "absolute" spirit. In gracious
Harold Bloom is Professor of English at Yale. Among but equivocal tribute to Coleridge he observed that:
his numerous books are Yeats A Study in Romanticism
(reviewed in Diacritics I, 2) and The Ringers in the The literary life of Coleridge was a disinterested strug-
Tower (see Diacritics I, 1). gle against the application of the relative spirit to moral

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 and religious questions. Everywhere he is restlessly 31
scheming to apprehend the absolute; to affirm it effec- absolute being." As Pater says, "that exaggerated
inwardness is barren" because it "withdraws us too
tively; to get it acknowledged. Coleridge failed in that
attempt, happily even for him, for it was a struggle far from what we can see, hear, and feel," because
against the increasing life of the mind itself. [...] How it cheats the senses and the emotions of their tri-
did his choice of a controversial interest, his determination umph. I urge Pater's wisdom here not only against
to affirm the absolute, weaken or modify his poetic gift? Coleridge, though I share Pater's love for Coleridge,
but against the formalist criticism that continued in
Coleridge's absolute spirit.
To affirm the absolute, Pater says, or as we What is the imaginative source of Coleridge's
might say, to reject all dualisms except those sanc- disabling hunger for the Absolute? On August 9,
tioned by orthodox Christian thought; this is not 1831, about three years before he died, he wrote in
materia poetica for the start of the nineteenth cen- his Notebook: "From my earliest recollection I have
tury, and if we think of a poem like the "Hymn Be- had a consciousness of Power without Strength-a
fore Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni," then we are
perception, an experience, of more than ordinary
likely to agree with Pater. We will agree also when power with an inward sense of Weakness [...]. More
he contrasts Wordsworth favorably with Coleridge, than ever do I feel this now, when all my fancies still
and even with Goethe, commending Wordsworth for in their integrity are, as it were, drawn inward and
"that flawless temperament [...] which keeps his con- by their suppression and compression rendered a
viction of a latent intelligence in nature within the mock substitute for Strength-" Here again is Pater's
limits of sentiment or instinct, and confines it to barren and exaggerated inwardness, but in a darker
those delicate and subdued shades of expression context than the Organic principle provided.
which perfect art allows." Pater goes on to say that This context is Milton's "universe of death,"
Coleridge's version of Wordsworth's instinct is a
where Coleridge apprehended death-in-life as being
philosophical idea, which means that Coleridge's po- "the wretchedness of division." If we stand in that
etry had to be "more dramatic, more self-conscious"
universe, then "we think of ourselves as separated
than Wordsworth's. But this in turn, Pater insists,
beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind,
means that for aesthetic success ideas must be held
as object to subject, thing to thought, death to life."
loosely, in the relative spirit. One idea that Coleridge To be so separated is to become, Coleridge says, "a
did not hold loosely was the organic analogue, and it soul-less fixed star, receiving no rays nor influences
becomes clearer as we proceed in Pater's essay that into my Being, a Solitude which I so tremble at, that
the aesthetic critic is building towards a passionate I cannot attribute it even to the Divine Nature."
assault upon the Organic principle. He quotes Cole- This, we can say, is Coleridge's Counter-Sublime, his
ridge's description of Shakespeare as "a nature hu- answer to the anxiety of influence, in strong poets.
manized, a genial understanding, directing self-con- The fear of solipsism is greater in him than the fear
sciously a power and an imolicit wisdom deeper even of not individuating his own imagination.
than our consciousness." "There," Pater comments,
As with every other major Romantic, the prime
witn binter eloquence, " 'the absolute' has been af- precursor poet for Coleridge was Milton. There is a
firmed in the sphere of art; and thought begins to proviso to be entered here; for all these poets-Blake,
congeal." With great dignity Pater adds that Cole- Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge (only Keats is an
ridge has "obscured the true interest of art." By exception)--there is a greater Sublime poetry be-
likening the work of art to a living organism, Cole- hind Milton, but as its author is a people and not a
ridge does justice to the impression the work may single poet, and as it is far removed in time, its
give us, but he "does not express the process by greatness does not inhibit a new imagination, not
which that work was produced." unless it is taken as the work of the Prime Precursor
M. H. Abrams, in his The Mirror and the
Himself, to whom all creation belongs. Only Cole-
Lamp, defends Coleridge against Pater by insisting ridge acquired a doubly Sublime anxiety of influence,
that Coleridge knew his central problem "was to among these poets. Beyond the beauty that has terror
use analogy wiih organic growth to account for Lhe in it of Milton, was beauty more terrible. In a letter
spontaneous, the inspired, and the self-evolving in to Thelwall, December 17, 1796, Coleridge wrote:
the psychology of invention, yet not to commit him- "Is not Milton a sublimer poet than Homer or Vir-
self as far to the elected figure as to minimize the gil? Are not his Personages more sublimely cloathed?
supervention of the antithetic qualities of foresight And do you not know, that there is not perhaps one
and choice." Though Abrams called Pater "short- page in Milton's Paradise Lost, in which he has not
sighted," I am afraid the critical palms remain with borrowed his imagery from the Scriptures?-I allow,
the relative spirit, for Pater's point was not that and rejoice that Christ appealed only to the under-
Coleridge had no awareness of the dangers of using standing & the affections; but I affirm that, after
the Organic analogue, but rather that awareness, here
reading Isaiah, or St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews,
as elsewhere, was no salvation for Coleridge. The Homer & Virgil are disgustingly tame to me, & Mil-
issue is whether Coleridge, not Shakespeare, was able ton himself barely tolerable." Yet these statements
to direct "selfconsciously a power and an implicit are rare in Coleridge. Frequently, Milton seems to
wisdom deeper than consciousness." Pater's com- blend with the ultimate Influence, which I think is a
plaint is valid because Coleridge, in describing normal enough procedure. In 1796, Coleridge also
Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, keeps repeating his ab- says, in his review of Burke's Letter to a Noble Lord:
solute formula that poems grow from within them- "It is lucky for poetry, that Milton did not live in
selves, that their "wholeness is not in vision or con- our days." Here Coleridge moves towards the center
ception, but in an inner feeling of totality and of his concern, and we should remember his for-

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38
mula: "Shakespeare was all men, potentially, except poem skipped about and wavered, his imagination
Milton." This leads to a more ambiguous formula, meant "vaulting," for "Religious Musings" is a wildly
reported to us of a lecture that Coleridge gave on ambitious poem. "This is the time," it begins, in
November 28, 1811: "Shakespeare became all things direct recall of Milton's "Nativity" Hymn, yet it fol-
well into which he infused himself, while all forms, lows not the Hymn but the most sublime moments
all things became Milton-the poet ever present to of Paradise Lost, particularly the invocation to Book
our minds and more than gratifying us for the loss III. As with the 1802 "Hymn before Sunrise," its
of the distinct individuality of what he represents." great fault as a poem is that it never stops whooping;
Though Coleridge truly professes himself more than in its final version I count well over one hundred
gratified, he admits loss. Milton's greatness is pur- exclamation-points in just over four hundred lines.
chased at the cost of something dear to Coleridge, a Whether one finds this habit in Coleridge distressing
principle of difference he knows may be flooded out or endearing hardly matters; he just never could stop
by his monistic yearnings. For Milton, to Coleridge, doing it. He whoops because he vaults; he is a high-
is a mythic monad in himself. Commenting upon the jumper of the Sublime, and psychologically he could
apostrophe to light at the commencement of the not avoid this. I quote the poem's final passage, with
third book of Paradise Lost, Coleridge notes that: relish and with puzzlement, for I am uncertain as to
"In all modern poetry in Christendom there is an how good after all it may not be, though it does
under consciousness of a sinful nature, a fleeting seem palpably awful. Yet its awfulness is at least
away of external things, the mind or subject greater Sublime; it is not the drab, flat awfulness of Words-
than the object, the reflective character predominant. worth at his common worst in The Excursion or even
In the Paradise Lost the sublimest parts are the (heresy to admit this!) in so many passages of The
revelations of Milton's own mind, producing itself Prelude that we hastily skip by, with our zeal and
and evolving its own greatness; and this is truly so, relief in getting at the great moments. Having just
that when that which is merely entertaining for its shouted out his odd version of Berkeley, that: "Life
objective beauty is introduced, it at first seems a is a vision shadowy of truth," Coleridge sees "the
discord." This might be summarized as: where Mil- veiling clouds retire" and God appears in a blaze
ton is not, nature is barren, and its significance is upon His Throne. Raised to a pitch of delirium by
that Milton is permitted just such a solitude as Cole- this vision, Coleridge soars aloft to join it:
ridge trembles to imagine for the Divine Being.
Humphry House observed that "Coleridge was Contemplant Spirits! ye that hover o'er
quite unbelievably modest about his own poems; and With untired gaze the immeasurable fount
the modesty was of a curious kind, sometimes rather Ebullient with creative Deity!
humble and over-elaborate." As House adds, Cole- And ye of plastic power, that interfused
ridge "dreaded publication" of his poetry, and until Roll through the grosser and material mass
1828, when he was fifty-six, there was nothing like In organizing surge! Holies of God!
(And what if Monads of the infinite mind?)
an adequate gathering of his verse. Wordsworth's
I haply journeying my immortal course
attitude was no help of course, and the Hutchinson
Shall sometime join your mystic choir! Till then
girls and Dorothy no doubt followed Wordsworth in I discipline my young and novice thought
his judgments. There was Wordsworth, and before In ministeries of heart-stirring song,
him there had been Milton. Coleridge presumably And aye on Meditation's heaven-ward wing
knew what "Tintern Abbey" owed to "Frost at Mid- Soaring aloft I breathe the empyreal air
night," but this knowledge nowhere found expres- Of Love, omnific, omnipresent Love,
sion. Must we resort to psychological speculation in Whose day-spring rises glorious in my soul
order to see what inhibited Coleridge, or are there As the great Sun, when he his influence
more reliable aids available? Sheds on the frost-bound waters-The glad stream
Flows to the ray and warbles as it flows.
In the Biographia Literaria Coleridge is not
very kind to his pre-Wordsworthian poetry, and par-
ticularly to the "Religious Musings." Yet this is where Scholars agree that this not terribly pellucid
we must seek what went wrong with Coleridge's passage somehow combines an early Unitarianism
ambitions, here, and if there were time, in "The with a later orthodox overlay, as well as quantities of
Destiny of Nations" fragments (not its arbitrarily Berkeley, Hartley, Newton, Neo-Platonism and pos-
yoked-together form of 1817), and in the "Ode to sibly more esoteric matter. A mere reader will be re-
the Departing Year" and "Monody on the Death of minded primarily of Milton, and will be in the right,
Chatterton" in its earlier version. After Wordsworth for Milton counts here and the rest do not. The
had descended upon Coleridge, supposedly as a Spirits Coleridge invokes are Miltonic Angels,
"know-thyself" admonition from heaven, but really though their functions seem to be more complicated.
rather more like a new form of the Miltonic blight, Coleridge confidently assures himself and us that his
then Coleridge's poetic ambitions sustained another course is immortal, that he may end up as a Miltonic
kind of inhibition. The Miltonic shadow needs to be angel, and so perhaps also a Monad of the infinite
studied first in early Coleridge, before a view can bemind. In the meantime, he will study Milton's "heart-
obtained of his maturer struggles with influence. stirring song." Otherwise, all he needs is Love, which
With characteristic self-destructiveness, Cole- is literally the air he breathes, the sun-rise radiating
ridge gave "Religious Musings" the definitive sub-title: out of his soul in a stream of song, and the natural
"A Desultory Poem, Written on the Christmas Eve of Sun towards which he flows, a Sun that is not dis-
1794." The root-meaning of "desultory" is "vault- tinct from God. If we reflect on how palpably sincere
ing, and though Coleridge consciously meant that his this is, how whole-hearted, and consider what was

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to be Coleridge's actual poetic course, then we will from the precursor, by so reading the parent-poem
be moved. Moved to what? Well, perhaps to remem- as to execute a clinamen in relation to it. This ap-
ber a remark of Coleridge's: "There are many men, pears as the corrective movement of his own poem,
especially at the outset of life, who, in their too eager which implies that the precursor poem went ac-
desire for the end, overlook the difficulties in the curately up to a certain point, but then should have
way; there is another class, who see nothing else. The swerved, precisely in the direction that the new poem
first class may sometimes fail; the latter rarely suc- moves.

ceed." Whatever the truth of this for other men, no 2. Tessera, which is completion and antith
man becomes a strong poet unless he starts out with I take the word not from mosaic-making, whe
a certain obliviousness of the difficulties in the way. still used, but from the ancient Mystery-cults
But soon enough he will meet those difficulties, and it meant a token of recognition, the fragmen
one of them will be that his precursor and inspirer of a small pot which with the other fragment
threatens to subsume him, as Coleridge is subsumed re-constitute the vessel. The later poet antith
by Milton in "Religious Musings" and his other pre- "completes" the precursor, by so reading the p
Wordsworthian poems. And here, I shall digress poem as to retain its terms but to mean them
massively, before returning to Coleridge's poetry, for opposite sense, as though the precursor had f
my discourse enters now upon the enchanted and go far enough.
baleful ground of poetic influence, through which I 3. Kenosis, which is a breaking-device simi
am learning to find my way by a singular light, which the defence mechanisms our psyches employ
will bear a little explanation. repetition-compulsions; kenosis then is a mov
I do not believe that poetic influence is simply towards discontinuity with the precursor. I t
something that happens, that it is just the process by word from St. Paul, where it means the humb
which ideas and images are transmitted from earlier emptying-out of Jesus by himself, when he
to later poets. On that view, whether or not influence reduction from Divine to human status. The later
causes anxiety in the later poet is a matter of tem- poet, apparently emptying himself of his own af-
perament and circumstance. Poetic influence thus re- flatus, his imaginative godhood, seems to humble
duces to source-study, of the kind performed upon himself as though he ceased to be a poet, but this
Coleridge by Lowes and later scholars. Coleridge ebbing is so performed in relation to a precursor's
was properly scornful of such study, and I think poem-of-ebbing, that the precursor is emptied out
most critics learn how barren an enterprise it turns also, and so the later poem of deflation is not as
out to be. I myself have no use for it as such, and absolute as it seems.
what I mean by the study of poetic influence turns 4. Daemonization, or a movement towards a
source-study inside out. The first principle of the personalized Counter-Sublime, in reaction to the pre-
proper study of poetic influence, as I conceive it, is cursor's Sublime; I take the term from general Neo-
that no strong poem has sources and no strong poem Platonic usage, where an intermediary being, neither
merely alludes to another poem. The meaning of a Divine nor human, enters into the adept to aid him.
strong poem is another strong poem, a precursor's The later poet opens himself to what he believes to
poem which is being misinterpreted, revised, cor- be a power in the parent-poem that does not belong
rected, evaded, twisted askew, made to suffer an in- to the parent proper, but to a range of being just be-
clination or bias which is the property of the later yond that precursor. He does this, in his poem, by
and not the earlier poet. Poetic influence, in this so stationing its relation to the parent-poem as to
sense, is actually poetic misprision, a poet's taking or generalize away the uniqueness of the earlier work.
doing amiss of a parent-poem that keeps finding him, 5. Askesis, or a movement of self-purgation
to use a Coleridgean turn-of-phrase. Yet even this which intends the attainment of a state of solitude; I
misprision is only the first step that a new poet takes take the term, general as it is, particularly from the
when he advances from the early phase where his practice of pre-Socratic shamans like Empedocles.
precursor floods him, to a more Promethean phase The later poet does not, as in kenosis, undergo a re-
where he quests for his own fire, which nevertheless visionary movement of emptying, but of curtailing;
must be stolen from his precursor. he yields up part of his own human and imaginative
I count some half-dozen steps in the life-cycle endowment, so as to separate himself from others,
of the strong poet, as he attempts to convert his in- including the precursor, and he does this in his poem
heritance into what will aid him without inhibiting by so stationing it in regard to the parent-poem as to
him by the anxiety of a failure in priority, a failure make that poem undergo an askesis also; the pre-
to have begotten himself. These steps are revisionary cursor's endowment is also truncated.
ratios, and for the convenience of short-hand, I find 6. Apophrades, or the return of the dead; I
myself giving them arbitrary names, which are prov- take the word from the Athenian dismal or unlucky
ing useful to me, and perhaps can be of use to days upon which the dead returned to reinhabit the
others. I list them herewith, with descriptions but not houses in which they had lived. The later poet, in his
examples, as this can only be a brief sketch, and I own final phase, already burdened by an imaginative
must get back to Coleridge's poetry, but hopefully, solitude that is almost a solipsism, holds his own
with this list helpfully in hand, to find my examples poem so open again to the precursor's work that at
in Coleridge. first we might believe the wheel has come full circle,
1. Clinamen, which is poetic misprision proper; and that we are back in the later poet's flooded ap-
I take the word from Lucretius, where it means a prenticeship, before his strength began to assert itself
"swerve" of the atoms so as to make change pos- in the revisionary ratios of clinamen and the others.
sible in the universe. The later poet swerves away But the poem is now held open to the precursor,

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40
where once it was open, and the uncanny effect is uously presented as to be finally beyond analysis. I
that the new poem's achievement makes it seem to would ask the question: what was Coleridge trying
us, not as though the precursor were writing it, but (not necessarily consciously) to do for himself by
as though the later poet himself had written the writing the poem, and by this question I do not mean
precursor's characteristic work. Kenneth Burke's notion of trying to do something
These then are six revisionary ratios, and I think for oneself as a person. Rather, what was Coleridge
they can be observed, usually in cyclic appearance, the poet trying to do for himself as poet? To which
in the life's work of every Post-Enlightenment strong I would answer: trying to free himself from the
poet, which in English means, for practical purposes, inhibitions of Miltonic influence, by humbling his
every Post-Miltonic strong poet. Coleridge, to return poetic self, and so humbling the Miltonic in the
now where I began, had the potential of the strong process. The Mariner does not empty himself out;
poet, but declined the full process of developing into he starts empty and acquires a Primary Imagination
one, unlike Blake, Wordsworth and the major poets through his suffering. But, for Coleridge, the poem
after them down to Yeats and Stevens in our time. is a kenosis, and what is being humbled is the Mil-
Yet his work, even in its fragmentary state, demon- tonic Sublime's account of the Origin of Evil. There
strates this revisionary cycle in spite of himself. My is a reduction from disobedience to ignorance, from
ulterior purpose in this discussion is to use Coleridge the self-aggrandizing consciousness of Eve to the
as an instance because he is apparently so poor an painful awakening of a minimal consciousness in the
example of the cycle I have sketched. But that makes Mariner.
him a sterner test for my theory of influence than The next revisionary step in clearing an imag-
any other poet I could have chosen. inative space for a maturing strong poet, is the Coun-
I return to Coleridge's first mature poetry, and ter-Sublime, the attaining of which I have termed
to its clinamen away from Milton, the Cowperizing daemonization, and this I take to be the relation of
turn that gave Coleridge the Conversation Poems, "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel" to Paradise Lost.
particularly "Frost at Midnight." Hazlitt quotes Far more than "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
Coleridge as having said to him in the spring of 1798 these poems demonstrate a trafficking by Coleridge
that Cowper was the best modern poet, meaning the with powers that are daemonic, even though the
best since Milton, which was also Blake's judgment. Rime explicitly invokes neo-Platonic daemons in its
Humphry House demonstrated the relation between marginal glosses. Opium was the avenging daemon
"Frost at Midnight" and The Task, which is the or alastor of Coleridge's life, his Dark or Fallen
happy one, causing no anxieties, where a stronger Angel, his experiential acquaintance with Milton's
poet appropriates from a weaker one. Coleridge used Satan. Opium was for him what wandering and
Cowper as he used Bowles, Akenside and Collins, moral tale-telling became for the Mariner-the per-
finding in all of them hints that could help him sonal shape of repetition-compulsion. The lust for
escape the Miltonic influx that had drowned out paradise in "Kubla Khan," Geraldine's lust for
"Religious Musings." "Frost at Midnight" like The Christabel; these are manifestations of Coleridge's
Task swerves away from Milton by softening him, revisionary daemonization of Milton, these are Cole-
by domesticating his style in a context that excludes ridge's Counter-Sublime. Poetic Genius, the genial
all Sublime terrors. Like Cowper he is not so much spirit itself, Coleridge must see as daemonic when it
humanizing Milton-that will take the strenuous, is his own, rather than when it is Milton's.
head-on struggles of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, It is at this point in the revisionary cycle that
Keats-as he is making Milton more childlike, or Coleridge begins to back away decisively from the
perhaps better, reading Milton as though Milton ferocity necessary for the strong poet. He does not
loved in a more childlike way. sustain his daemonization, closes his eyes in holy
The revisionary step beyond this, an antithetical dread, stands outside the circumference of the
completion or tessera, is ventured by Coleridge only daemonic agent, and is startled by his own sexual
in a few pantheistic passages that sneaked past his daring out of finishing Christabel. He moved on to
orthodox censor, like the later additions to "The the revisionary ratio I have called askesis, or the
Eolian Harp," or the veiled vision at the end of the purgation into solitude, the curtailing of some imag-
second verse paragraph of "This Lime-Tree Bower inative powers in the name of others. In doing so, he
My Prison." With his horror of division, his endless prophesied the pattern for Keats in The Fall of
quest for unity, Coleridge could not sustain any re- Hyperion, since in his askesis he struggles against
visionary impulse which involved his reversing Mil- the influence of a composite poetic father, Milton-
ton, or daring to complete that sacred father. Wordsworth. The great poems of this askesis are
But the next revisionary ratio, the kenosis or "Dejection: an Ode" and "To William Wordsworth,"
self-emptying, seems to me almost obsessive in Cole- where criticism has demonstrated to us how acute
ridge's poetry, for what is the total situation of the the revision of Wordsworth's stance is, and how
Ancient Mariner but a repetition-compulsion, which much of himself Coleridge purges away to make this
his poet breaks for himself only by the writing of revision justified. I would add only that both poems
the poem, and then breaks only momentarily. Cole- misread Milton as sensitively and desperately as they
ridge had contemplated an Epic on the Origin of do Wordsworth; the meaning of "Dejection" is in its
Evil, but we may ask: where would Coleridge, if relation to "Lycidas" as much as in its relation to the
pressed, have located the origin of evil in himself? "Intimations" Ode, even as the poem "To William
His Mariner is neither depraved in will nor even dis- Wordsworth" assimilates The Prelude to Paradise
obedient, but is merely ignorant, and the spiritual Lost. Trapped in his own involuntary dualisms, long-
machinery his crime sets into motion is so ambig- ing for a monistic wholeness such as he believes he is

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found by in Milton and Wordsworth, Coleridge in mans. Still more compelling is a March, 1802 entry
his askesis declines to see how much his composite in the Notebooks: "Milton, a Monody in the metres
parent-poet has purged away also. of Samson's Choruses-only with more rhymes /
After that, sadly enough, we have only a very -poetical influences-political-moral-Dr.Johnson/."
few occasional poems of any quality by Coleridge, Consider the date of this entry, only a month before
and they are mostly not the poems of a strong poet, the first draft of "Dejection," and some sense of
that is, of a man vaulting into the Sublime. Having what Milton, a Monody might have been begins to
refused the full exercise of a strong poet's mispri- be generated. In March 1802, William Blake, in the
sions, Coleridge ceased to have poetic ambitions. But midst of his sojourn at Hayley's Felpham, was deep
there is a significant exception, the late manuscript in the composition of Milton: a Poem in 2 Books,
fragment "Limbo" and the evidently still-later frag- To Justify the Ways of God to Men. In the brief,
ment "Ne Plus Ultra." Here, and I think here only, enigmatic notes for Milton, a Monody Coleridge sets
Coleridge experiences the particular reward of the down "-poetical influences-political-moral-Dr.
strong poet in his last phase, what I have called the Johnson," the last being we can assume, a refutation
apophrades or return of the dead, not a Counter- of Johnson's vision of Milton in The Lives of the
Sublime but a negative Sublime, like the Last Poems Poets, a refutation that Cowper and Blake would
of Yeats or The Rock of Stevens. Indeed negative have endorsed. "Poetical influences" Coleridge says,
sublimity is the mode of these Coleridgean frag- and we may recall that this is one of the themes of
ments, and indicates to us what Coleridge might have Blake's Milton, where the Shadow of the Poet Milton
become had he permitted himself enough of the per- is one with the Covering Cherub, the great blocking-
verse zeal that the great poet must exhibit in mal- agent who inhibits fresh human creativity by em-
forming his great precursor. "Limbo" and "Ne Plus bodying in himself all the sinister beauty of tradi-
Ultra" show that Coleridge could have become, at tion. Blake's Milton is a kind of Monody in places,
last, the poet of the Miltonic abyss, the bard of not as a mourning for Milton, but as Milton's own,
Demogorgon. Even as they stand, these fragments solitary utterance, as he goes down from a premature
make us read Book II of Paradise Lost a little dif- Eternity (where he is unhappy) to struggle again in
ferently; they enable Coleridge to claim a corner of fallen time and space. I take it though that Milton,
Milton's Chaos as his own. a Monody would be modelled upon Coleridge's early
Pater thought that Coleridge had succumbed to "Monody On the Death of Chatterton," and so
the Organic analogue, because he hungered too in- would have been Coleridge's lamentation for his
tensely for eternity, as Lamb had said of his old Great Original. Whether, as Blake was doing at pre-
school-friend.Pater also quoted De Quincey's sum- cisely the same time, Coleridge would have dared to
mary of Coleridge: "he wanted better bread than can identify Milton as the Covering Cherub, as the angel
be made with wheat." I would add that Coleridge or daemon blocking Coleridge himself out from the
hungered also for an eternity of generosity between poet's paradise, I cannot surmise. I wish deeply that
poets, as between people, a generosity that is not al- Coleridge had written the poem.
lowed in a world where each poet must struggle to It is ungrateful, I suppose, as the best of Cole-
individuate his own breath, and this at the expense ridge's recent scholars keep telling us, to feel that
of his forebears as much as his contemporaries. Per- Coleridge did not give us the poems he had it in him
haps also, to modify De Quincey, Coleridge wanted to write. Yet we have, all apology aside, only a
better poems than can be made without misprision. double handful of marvelous poems by him. I close
I suggest then that the Organic Analogue, with therefore by attempting a description of the kind of
all its pragmatic neglect of the processes by which poem I believe Coleridge's genius owed us, and
poems have to be produced, appealed so over- which we badly need, and always will need. I would
whelmingly to Coleridge because it seemed to pre- maintain that the finest achievement of the High
clude the anxiety of influence, and to obviate the Romantic poets of England was their humanization
poet's necessity not just to unfold like a natural of the Miltonic Sublime. But when we attend deeply
growth but to develop at the expense of others. to the works where this humanization is most stren-
Whatever the values of the Organic Analogue for uously accomplished-Blake's Milton and Jerusalem,
literary criticism-and I believe, with Pater, that it the Prelude, Prometheus Unbound, the two Hype-
does more harm than good-it provided Coleridge rions, even in a way Don Juan-we sense at last a
with a rationale for a dangerous evasion of inner quality lacking, in which Milton abounds, for all his
steps he had to take for his own poetic development. severity. This quality, though not in itself a tender-
As Blake might have said, Coleridge's imagination ness, made Milton's Eve possible, and we miss such
insisted upon slaying itself on the stems of genera- a figure in all her Romantic descendants. More than
tion, or to invoke another Blakean image, Coleridge the other five great Romantic poets, Coleridge was
lay down to sleep upon the Organic Analogue as able, by temperament and by subtly shaded intellect,
though it were a Beulah-couch of soft, moony repose. to have given us a High Romantic Eve, a total hu-
What was our loss in this? What poems might a manization of the tenderest and most appealing ele-
stronger Coleridge have composed? The Note Books ment in the Miltonic Sublime. Many anxieties
list The Origin of Evil, an Epic Poem; Hymns to the blocked Coleridge from that rare accomplishment,
Sun, the Moon, and the Elements-six hymns, and and of these the anxiety of influence was not the
more fascinating even than these, a scheme for an least.
epic on "the destruction of Jerusalem" by the Ro-

diacritics /Spring 1972

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