When a
great ego collides with a crippling addiction, the results are sure to be
catastrophic. So it was for the “friendship” that existed during the
late 1790s and 1800s between William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1832.)
Wordsworth’s
single-minded ambition fed his ego, while Coleridge’s addiction resulted
from his heavy consumption of opium, which he believed he needed to
inspire his creativity.In her
review of Adam Sisman’s book, “The Friendship, Wordsworth and
Coleridge,” in The Telegraph, Frances Wilson takes issue
with Sisman’s somewhat unsympathetic view of the troubled and dreamy
Coleridge. Indeed, when looking at the material available, it does seem as
though Wordsworth was far from sympathetic towards his needy poet friend, and
on occasion, rather cruel.
The Beginning of England’s Romantic Poetry Revolution
Coleridge,
son of a Devonshire vicar, moved to Nether Stowey on the edge of the Quantock
Hills, not far from the home of Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy. The two
poets got together and became friends, and then they decided to compile
their experimental, major work in English poetry, the Lyrical
Ballads, which were to spawn the revolution of England’s
Romantic Poetry. Coleridge’s
important contribution was The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. However,
he was known for starting poems and not finishing them. His lack of faith
in his own creative genius was sadly lacking, and he lost heart easily.
In his
article, “Cruel Wordsworth drove Coleridge to brink of death” in
the Sunday Times, Nicholas Helien says, “William Wordsworth,
poet and romantic, is to be portrayed in a controversial BBC feature film as a
bully, who betrayed his closest friend and collaborator, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, driving him into a drug addiction that nearly killed him.”
Manipulative Behaviour
Richard
Holmes, the Coleridge biographer who researched the film, put forward a number
of issues between the pair, some of them related to their work and others of a
more personal nature. He claims that Wordsworth was a bully, uninterested
in helping or saving his friend. Instead, Wordsworth decided to profit
from his friend’s addiction by spurring him into an even more excessive
consumption of opium. It was nothing more than an experiment by Wordsworth, in
order to “…reap the poetic rewards of the vision.”
According to
Helien, the makers of the film, “Pandaemonium” believed the
decline in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s health and his lack of faith in himself
and his own creativity, could be directly attributed to William Wordsworth and
his sister, Dorothy. Holmes quotes Frank Cottrell Boyce, who wrote the
screenplay:
“Coleridge
was looking for a father figure and he found one in Wordsworth. But Wordsworth
betrayed him. He was feeding on two other geniuses – his sister Dorothy and
Coleridge.”
It seems a
strange claim to suggest that Coleridge might discover a father-figure in
Wordsworth, since there were only two years’ difference in age between the two
poets. While it seems fair to say that Coleridge needed to latch onto a
stronger personality he believed he could trust, a more fitting comparison
might be that of a concerned older brother.
The problem
was William Wordsworth’s inability to understand Coleridge’s originality and
vision. Biographers describe Coleridge as a weaker personality, but maybe this
is to judge him too harshly. He was a man of great imagination and sensitivity.
Coleridge was unable to withstand such harsh criticism and rejection and so he
did not publish the work spurned by Wordsworth. Instead, he turned to opium for
both consolation and inspiration.
Crisis of Creativity
In the year
1800, William Wordsworth was preparing the second edition of the Lyrical
Ballads. To Coleridge’s distress, Wordsworth rejected his
poem “Christabel,” generally considered to be one of his
greatest works. As a result, Coleridge had, what Jenny Fabian, in
her essay title, describes as “Coleridge’s Crisis of Creativity.”
By this time,
Coleridge was suffering from a constant fear of failure, as well as a lack
of confidence and self-esteem, qualities that propelled him into an even deeper
addiction to opium.
Helien’s
article quotes Michael Kustow, the film’s producer: “Coleridge, who had
already been exploring the effect of opium on his writing upped his intake for
solace. His consumption was staggering. He began to gulp laudanum – liquid
opium – as if it were wine.”
The article
explains that Coleridge would take one hundred drops of laudanum at one time,
and was spending around £5 a week on opium, an enormous amount of money at that
time, reckoned to be the equivalent of two weeks’ average earnings. Wordsworth
only used the drug if he had something wrong with him; a toothache or some
other bodily pain.
Support for William Wordsworth
The film’s
claims have been hotly disputed by Jonathan Wordsworth, a descendant of William
Wordsworth. He told Nicholas Helien that, on the contrary, Wordsworth had been “massively
supportive” of Coleridge. According to Jonathan Wordsworth, the only
mistake made was by Montagu, for telling Coleridge what Wordsworth had written.
This seems
illogical. After all, whether or not Coleridge knew about Wordsworth’s
betrayal, it would have made no difference to its intended result – that of a
further rejection by refusing to allow the unfortunate Coleridge to
move into Wordsworth’s London lodgings. It was a betrayal, regardless of
whether the victim had knowledge of it.
Further,
Jonathan Wordsworth refused to blame Coleridge’s decline on Wordsworth’s
reluctance to publish his work. Instead, he blamed Coleridge’s depression and
addiction on the poet’s unconsummated love affair with his sister-in-law, Sara
Hutchinson. (Coleridge had been married, but the marriage, unsurprisingly, had
broken down.)
The other
contributing factor, according to Jonathan Wordsworth in his interview with
Helien, was this: “It is also not Wordsworth’s fault that Coleridge
began to talk a great deal of metaphysics and took the view that he was no
longer worthy of being a poet.”
Again, can
this be a fair evaluation? Visionary poetry was what Coleridge did best.
Wordsworth knew this when the two men collaborated on their great
project.
Did Wordsworth Abandon Coleridge?
On 14 October,
1803, Coleridge wrote to Thomas Poole (letter reprinted in Romanticism
An Anthology,edited by Duncan Wu):
“I now see
very little of Wordsworth. My own health makes it inconvenient and unfit for me
to go thither one third as often as I used to do – and Wordsworth’s indolence,
etc. keeps him at home. Indeed, were I an irritable man (and an unthinking
one,) I should probably have considered myself as having been very unkindly
used by him in this respect, for I was at one time confined for two months, and
he never came to see me – me, who had ever paid such unremitting attention to
him!”
By, 1810, the
situation was dire. Coleridge was depressed and unproductive. He left the
Wordsworths’ house in the Lake District and went to lodgings in the London
residence of Basil Montagu. Even here, the poet would find no haven. Wordsworth
had pre-empted him, by writing to Montagu, telling him that Coleridge was no
more than “a drunken nuisance,” explains Helien in
the Sunday Times article.
(Christabel
and Other Poems. (Christabel was the
unfinished poem claimed to have been turned down by Wordsworth although this
has been disputed) It was not published until many years later, in 1817 on
the initiative of Byron.)
A Literary-Cormorant
In fact,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s predilection for metaphysics in his poetry is well
documented.
The “Lyrical
Ballads” entry in The Oxford Companion to English Literature,
edited by Margaret Drabble, quotes Coleridge from his Biogaphica
Literatia, chapter xiv, describing their collaboration:
“…it was
agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters
supernatural or at least romantic… Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to
propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of
everyday.”
A further
example is a letter he wrote dated 19 November, 1796, to John Thelwall (letter
reprinted in Romanticism, An Anthology, edited by Duncan Wu)
where he expressed his innermost feelings. Here is the relevant passage:
“I am and
ever have been, a great reader and have read almost everything, a
literary-cormorant. I am deep in all out of the way books, whether of the
monkish times of of the puritanical era. I have read and digested most of the
historical writers, but I do not like history. Metaphysics and poetry
and “facts of mind” (ie. accounts of all the strange phantasms
that ever possessed your philosophy-dreamers from Thoth the Egyptian to Taylor
the English pagan) are my darling studies.”
Breakdown, Recovery and a New Path
Coleridge
suffered a mental and physical breakdown at the end of 1813 and had treatment
in Bristol, before spending time to recuperate with friends. Then, in 1816, he
went to Highgate and settled in the home of Dr. James Gilman, where he remained
until the end of his life.
Although the
publication of Christabel was imminent, as well as the
publication of his collected poems Sybilline Leaves (1817,)
his career as a poet was, in essence, finished. He filled the gap by becoming a
philosopher and lecturer and he gained a group of enthusastic intellectuals
around him, including key literary figures of that time, radical
philosopher, William Godwin (who married Mary Wollstonecraft, and the essayist, Charles Lamb.
A Philosophical Evaluation
Although he
may not have achieved the poetic commendations he yearned for from Wordsworth
and his peers, Coleridge is now remembered, deservedly, for his visionary
originality. The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, under
the entry Samuel Taylor Coleridge, says:
“Coleridge’s
reputation as a poet is secured by a small, though radiant, corpus of major
works… His theory of the poetic imagination as a unifying and mediating power
within divided modern cultures, provided one of the central ideas of Romantic
aesthetics, and his dialectical juxtapositions of reason and understanding,
culture and civilization, and mechanical and organic form, shaped the
vocabulary of its recoil from Utilitarianism. Yet much of Coleridge’s work is
shot through with self-doubt and fears for his Christian belief, a metaphysical
anxiety that seems to anticipate modern existentialism.”
Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, for all his mental illness, eccentricities and opium addiction, was
truly a remarkable visionary and philosophical poet whose influence will
continue to enrich English literature.
Resources
for this article
Helien, Nicholas. Cruel
Wordsworth drove Coleridge to brink of death. (1997). Sunday
Times.
Hannah, John,
et al. Pandaemonium. (2000). BBC.
Accessed on November 21, 2014
Wu, Duncan,
Ed. Romanticism An Anthology. (1994). Blackwell
Publishers Ltd..
Ousby, Ian,
Ed . The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English. (1993). Cambridge
University Press.
Drabble, Margaret,
Ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. (1985). Oxford
University Press.
