Coleridge and Shelley

Textual Engagement

Sally West

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138278301
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317164586
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Sally West's timely study is the first book-length exploration of Coleridge's influence on Shelley's poetic development. Beginning with a discussion of Shelley's views on Coleridge as a man and as a poet, West argues that there is a direct correlation between Shelley's desire for political and social transformation and the way in which he appropriates the language, imagery, and forms of Coleridge, often transforming their original meaning through subtle readjustments of context and emphasis. While she situates her work in relation to recent concepts of literary influence, West is focused less on the psychology of the poets than on the poetry itself. She explores how elements such as the development of imagery and the choice of poetic form, often learnt from earlier poets, are intimately related to poetic purpose. Thus on one level, her book explores how the second-generation Romantic poets reacted to the beliefs and ideals of the first, while on another it addresses the larger question of how poets become poets, by returning the work of one writer to the literary context from which it developed. Her book is essential reading for specialists in the Romantic period and for scholars interested in theories of poetic influence.

Chapter 1 Cultivating the Topos: Early Engagements

DOI: 10.4324/9781315572581-2

The beginning of Shelley’s sustained interest in the work of both Wordsworth and Coleridge can be dated to the winter of 1811. Following his expulsion from Oxford in March and his marriage to the 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook in August, Shelley’s already strained relationship with his father, Sir Timothy, was at crisis-point. When Shelley and Harriet left York for Keswick in early November, it was this state of affairs which initially dictated their destination. Shelley was hoping that the Duke of York, then residing at his castle at Greystoke, near Keswick, would act as an intermediary between himself and his father to enable Shelley to receive some money from his family. ¹ However, Keswick held other attractions of a more literary nature. Confident, on his arrival, that he would meet all three of the ‘Lake poets’, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, it is perhaps, as Richard Holmes has succinctly noted, ‘one of the greatest strokes of ill-luck’ that the only number of the trio that Shelley was to encounter then, or at any future date, was Robert Southey. ²

¹ See Kenneth Neill Cameron, Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical (London, 1951), pp. 109–10. ² Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (rev. edn, London, 1995), pp. 93–4.

Throughout his life, Shelley maintained a respect for the poetry of both Wordsworth and Coleridge. Although in the case of the former, Shelley’s distrust and increasing disgust towards what he perceived as the future laureate’s cynical recantation of his earlier liberal political opinions was to inspire such poems as the 1816 sonnet ‘To Wordsworth’, and the late satire ‘Peter Bell the Third’, it is undeniable that Wordsworth’s earlier poetry, in particular the Lyrical Ballads and the ‘Immortality Ode’, was to influence Shelley’s own poetic development in more positive ways throughout his career. The influence of Coleridge on Shelley’s poetry was no less marked, yet the comments in Shelley’s letters, and the occasional appearances of the figure of the elder poet in the work of the younger are clearly characterized by a greater respect and a greater forbearance of criticism than Shelley accords Wordsworth. Although Shelley and Coleridge never met, Shelley’s later friendships with both Godwin and Byron would have allowed him access to anecdotes about and opinions of Coleridge from those who knew him. ³ Whilst we can only speculate as to how a meeting with either Wordsworth or Coleridge may have influenced Shelley’s poetry or opinions, the record of his acquaintance with the remaining member of the ‘Lake’ trio, Robert Southey, suggests there is a danger of disappointment inherent in encountering one’s poetic idols in the flesh. More significantly for the purposes of this study, an analysis of the contact between Shelley and Southey in the winter of 1811 provides highly suggestive evidence of the origins of Shelley’s first encounters with a number of works by Coleridge. Furthermore, if we view this evidence in the context of Shelley’s poetic output immediately subsequent to his time in Keswick, we can start to observe the ways in which Coleridge’s work first influenced the 19-year-old Shelley.

³ Godwin and Coleridge had been acquaintances since 1800, and whilst not without its arguments, their friendship was strong and mutually influential, including late night inebriated discussions about atheism, which would have appealed to Shelley. (See Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London, 1990), pp. 257–9). Coleridge’s relationship with Byron was largely responsible for the former’s decision finally to publish the Christabel volume in 1816, after Byron expressed his extreme admiration for the poem and agreed to help Coleridge’s negotiations with publishers for the forthcoming Biographia Literaria. Byron was also responsible for introducing Christabel to Shelley in 1816. (See Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (London, 1998), pp. 414–15, 425–6).

Whilst Richard Holmes’s comment implies that Shelley was unfortunate in drawing merely the short straw of Robert Southey during his residence in Keswick, this may be to look back with the hindsight of our current awareness of the degree of literary reputation accorded to each of the ‘Lake poets’. In fact, Shelley’s letters prior to this period reveal a number of references to Southey, but none at all to Wordsworth or Coleridge. By 1811 Shelley was already a conscientious reader of Southey’s works. His letters of late 1810 show an eager anticipation to receive the recently published The Curse of Kehama, and in June of the following year he arranged for a copy to be sent to his correspondent Elizabeth Hitchener, describing it in an accompanying letter as ‘my most favorite poem’. ⁴ Kenneth Neill Cameron suggests that Southey became a significant figure to Shelley as ‘the first important intellectual he had known’, ⁵ yet Shelley’s letters suggest that furthermore, Southey’s works were, at this time, of greater importance to Shelley than those of the other ‘Lake poets’.

⁴ See Letters, vol. 1, pp. 24, 25, 97, 101. ⁵ Cameron, Young Shelley, p. 113.

Shelley’s letters of the winter of 1811–12, written during his residence at Keswick, provide a picture of the younger poet’s shifting view of the elder as Shelley attempted to reconcile the fallible, human Southey with his exulted conception of the great poet. Renting Chestnut Cottage, just outside Keswick, Shelley’s walks in the Lakes took him past Southey’s house, Greta Hall. Originally rented by Coleridge in 1801, Greta Hall became Southey’s home when an extended family visit to the Coleridges in 1802 evolved into permanent occupancy. Shortly after Southey’s arrival, Coleridge left for Malta, and thereafter his residences at Greta Hall were infrequent, and he was never to return after 1812. At the time of Shelley’s visit to Keswick, Coleridge was attempting to reanimate his career with a series of lectures in London, and had been for some years unofficially separated from his wife, Southey’s sister-in-law, who continued to reside at Greta Hall with the Southeys and the various Southey and Coleridge children. Shelley wrote expectantly to Elizabeth Hitchener on 11 November, ‘Southey lives at Keswick. I have been contemplating the outside of his house’, and then again on 23 November, ‘I have not seen Southey, he is not now at Keswick: believe that on his return I will not be slow to pay homage to a really great man’. ⁶ In these comments we can observe something of the aspiring poet’s admiration for the established one, particularly in Shelley’s rather awed contemplation of Greta Hall, the place of composition of The Curse of Kehama, his ‘most favorite poem’.

⁶ Letters, vol. 1, pp. 174, 191.

The tone of these comments is in sharp contrast to that of a letter of 15 December, again to Elizabeth Hitchener:

Southey has changed. I shall see him soon, and I shall reproach him of [for] his tergiversation – He to whom Bigotry Tyranny and Law was hateful has become the votary of these Idols, in a form the most disgusting. – The Church of England it’s Hell and all has become the subject of his panygeric. – the war in Spain that prodigal waste of human blood to aggrandise the fame of Statesmen is his delight, the constitution of England with its Wellesley its Paget & its Prince are inflated with the prostituted exertions of his Pen. I feel a sickening distrust when I see all that I had considered good great & imitable fall around me into the gulph of error. ⁷

⁷ Letters, vol. 1, p. 208.

It is interesting that these comments were made prior to Shelley’s first meeting with Southey. Frederick Jones suggests that Shelley received this information about Southey from William Calvert, a friend of both Southey and Wordsworth, whom Shelley met at the Duke of York’s castle in Greystoke, and who was responsible for introducing the young poet to Southey. It seems likely that Shelley’s specific targets of assault here were the articles which Southey had contributed to the Tory Quarterly Review since 1809. ⁸ Southey certainly wrote for the paper in support of the war, and whilst he was generally in favour of humanitarian social reform, his tendency was to envisage that reform occurring only through existing government frameworks. In addition to this, Southey had been in receipt of a government pension since 1807, a fact that may have contributed to the venom of Shelley’s comment about ‘the prostituted exertions of his Pen’. Shelley was at this time planning a trip to Ireland, where he hoped to disseminate propaganda about social and political reform to the populace, and many of his letters to Elizabeth Hitchener are written in the context of their projected plan to undermine perceived forces of tyranny in the political and social sphere through the establishment of an model community which adhered to ideals of equality and justice. It is unclear whether Shelley knew of the similar project proposed by Southey and Coleridge in the 1790s, that of establishing a ‘pantisocracy’, an ideal community based on the tenets of equal government and shared property; if he did, Southey’s descent from the ‘imitable’ advocate of liberty and justice to the paid producer of government propaganda, would, in Shelley’s eyes, have been swift and shocking. The key word in the letter is, perhaps, ‘imitable’; Shelley’s disillusionment is personal as well as sociopolitical as he confronts an intellectual idol now tarnished and in possession of human frailties.

⁸ Kenneth Curry writes that the Quarterly was established in part ‘to counterbalance the defeatist attitude of the Edinburgh Review towards the Peninsular War and to strengthen the hand of the ministry in its determination to wage war against Napoleon’. See Kenneth Curry, Southey (London and Boston, 1975), p. 47.

Yet there is a competing tone in the letter; Shelley’s confident intention to ‘reproach’ Southey for his change of opinion and the rather self-righteous hand-wringing in his sentiment that all around him falls ‘into the gulph of error’, suggest that the young poet is prepared to do some proselytizing of his own. Such comments may also be an attempt to dilute his continued reverence for Southey to a correspondent to whom Shelley himself wished to remain in a position of intellectual and moral authority. The substance of Shelley’s conversations with Southey when the two poets finally met later that month is reported to Hitchener in a strangely ambivalent mix of justification and censure:

You may conjecture that a man must posess [sic] high and estimable qualities, if with the prejudice of such total difference from my sentiments I can regard him great and worthy – In fact Southey is an advocate of liberty and equality; he looks forward to a state when all shall be perfected, and matter become subjected to the omnipotence of mind; but he is now an advocate for existing establishments; … Southey ’tho far from being a man of great reasoning powers is a great man. He has all that characterises the poet – great eloquence tho’ obstinacy in opinion which arguments are the last things that can shake. He is a man of virtue, he never will belie what he thinks. ⁹

⁹ Letters, vol. 1, pp. 211–12.

It is difficult to unpick from this Shelley’s precise opinion of Southey. There is a sense that, in addressing a correspondent to whom he had consistently advocated an adherence to ‘liberty’, Shelley felt obliged to justify his continued conference with Southey subsequent to finding ‘such total difference’ in their respective sentiments regarding this issue. Thus Shelley augments Southey’s stature by ascribing to him characteristics which must indeed be ‘great and worthy’ to suppress, at least temporarily, Shelley’s ‘sickening distrust’ of the votaries of ‘Bigotry Tyranny and Law’. That this is a suppression rather than an appeasement of Shelley’s disquiet, is revealed in his inability to do more than report Southey’s opinions without comment, and to mention his wish for a future perfected state as evidence that ‘Southey is an advocate of liberty and equality’. When Shelley’s comments on Southey become more personal, the same ambivalence towards the elder poet is still in evidence. It is pertinent to Shelley’s own conception of the role that he should imply that ‘obstinacy of opinion’ is a characteristic of the poet. It is possible that in Southey’s opinions, even – perhaps especially – in those he himself cannot s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editors' Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Cultivating the Topos: Early Engagements
• 2 ‘Beside thee like thy shadow’: The presence of Coleridge in Shelley’s Alastor Volume
• 3 ‘An unremitting interchange’: The Voices of Mont Blanc
• 4 Perpetual Orphic Song: The ‘vitally metaphorical’ in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower’ and ‘To a Sky-Lark’
• 5 ‘To him my tale I teach’: The Legacy of Coleridge’s Mariner in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound Volume
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index