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. From the landforms and settlements of the landscape, he traces what he calls “the deep psychic structure of the year”, which he defines as a series of departures and arrivals, a restless journeying, a to-ing and fro-ing, as a host of itinerants wander up and down roads, telling stories and going nowhere in particular. The image of Nicolson as Dorothy, picking up the lines dropped on the road by Wordsworth as he went “bumming and booing” about, is wonderfully apt not least because Nicolson’s own sensibility – his ear, his eye, his sense of place and the intensity of his concentration on words, plants, foliage and light – recalls that of Dorothy Wordsworth. This website uses cookies to help us give you the best experience when you visit our website. Their paths have forked and their footsteps, from now on, will diverge. It examines a set of scientific patterns drawn from natural, geometric, celestial, and astronomical sources which Wordsworth and Coleridge used to express their ideas about poetry, religion, literary criticism, and philosophy. No one has described better the strange and obsessive nature of biographical pursuit, and the business of “footstepping” has since become associated with the Holmesian style of method-biography, in which the biographical subject returns from the dead with a palpable physical presence. The power of Wordsworth's autobiographical poetry lay partly in his ability to capture an experience that was generational, true; but it stemmed, too, from an audacious originality of purpose that was Wordsworth's and no-one else's: "high theme by Thee first sung aright," as Coleridge had put it in the lines to Wordsworth (1.4 Poems 436). or login to access all content. This article appears in the 02 August 2019 issue of the New Statesman, Summer special, All change: the fortunes of Coleridge (left) and Wordsworth were reversed during 1797, The end of the affair: how Tory MPs are falling out of love with Boris Johnson, Donald Trump has shown how he plans to use far-right violence to try to retain power, Palantir IPO: why the secretive data giant is cosying up to Donald Trump, NS Recommends: new books from John Mullan, Marilynne Robinson, Sebastian Strangio, and Clive James. Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau theorized that we, as…, Famous philosopher Plato didn’t look too fondly on art …, Adam Smith advocated an individualistic, self-interest …, Born in 1853, Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure chan…, It’s difficult to say when music began. Adam Nicolson has shown us, in this subtle and masterly book, the cost of the making of poetry. Coleridge, meanwhile, effectively abandoned his own wife and child in order to devote himself full time to Wordsworth-worship. His laugh, when it came, apparently sounded lecherous. It examines a set of scientific patterns drawn from natural, geometric, celestial, and astronomical sources which Wordsworth and Coleridge used to express their ideas about poetry, religion, literary criticism, and philosophy. Keywords: “Its method is his: to follow in the footsteps of the great, looking to gather the fragments they left on the path, much as Dorothy Wordsworth was seen by an old man as she was accompanying her brother on a walk in the Lake District, keeping ‘close behind him, and she picked up the bits as he let ’em fall, and tak ’em down, and put ’em on paper for him’.”. He is remembered as a poet of spiritual and epistemological speculation, a poet concerned with the human relationship to nature and a fierce advocate of using the vocabulary and speech patterns of common people in poetry. Using the language of everyday speech, Coleridge would describe the supernatural world and Wordsworth the natural world but both poets, Nicolson shows, relied on narrators who were in equal measure loquacious and uncertain; the poems “retract from reliability in the way a snail’s horns pull back when touched”. poetry, Thomas Owens, author It has been generally supposed that Wordsworth’s theory of poetic language is merely a reaction against, and a criticism of, ‘the Pseudo Classical’ theory of poetic diction.Such a view is partially true. The “driving and revolutionary force of this year”, Nicolson says, was the idea that “poetry was not an aspect of civilisation but a challenge to it; not decorative but subversive, a pleasure beyond politeness”. Frances Wilson is an author, biographer and critic, whose works include The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth. It establishes the central important of analogy in their creative thinking. subscribe Exploring the structures behind Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poems and metaphysics stakes out a return to the evidence of the Romantic imagination, not for its own sake, but in order to reveal that their analogical configuration of the world provided them with a scaffold for thinking, an intellectual orrery which ordered artistic consciousness and which they never abandoned. ...Discuss Wordsworth’s Theory of Poetry as advocated in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Having walked from Nether Stowey to Racedown, the West Dorset home of the Wordsworths, Coleridge leaps over the gate and bounds through the field to where William and Dorothy are working in their garden. science, Your email address will not be published. Heaven knows where they all slept in the miniscule Coleridge cottage but each member of the circle was, as Nicolson points out, already on the edge of madness. PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). What Nicolson shows us is the setting into stone of the Wordsworthian ego. Sleeping, as Stevenson did, beneath the stars, bathing in rivers, and feeling half mad on the excess of liberty, Holmes learned that his vocation was to live like a ghost crab in another man’s shell. astronomy, Nicolson’s aim is to get as close as possible to the sources of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poetic power in 1797-98, when they collaborated on Lyrical Ballads: he therefore moves to the Quantocks. When they met, Wordsworth was weak and Coleridge was strong; by the end of the year this was to be reversed. Coleridge’s project was to bring together “a small company of chosen individuals” whose task was to rejuvenate the poetry and politics of the age: these included Charles Lamb, whose sister had recently lost her reason and murdered their mother; John Thelwall, hero of the 1794 Treason Trials; and the young William Hazlitt, described by Coleridge as “singularly repulsive; brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange”. He would later move his family to the Lakes in order to be on Wordsworth’s native soil, but the Wordsworths now moved to Alfoxden, two miles from Nether Stowey, to be nearer to Coleridge. She reviews for the TLS, the Telegraph and the New Statesman. Most significantly, the book illustrates that these sources are not simply another context or historical lens through which to engage with Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s work but are instead a controlling device of the symbolic imagination. The Wordsworth whom Coleridge discovered in Racedown was recovering from a breakdown: having returned from Revolutionary France where he had sired a daughter, he was now living, in a mock-up of the French family he had abandoned, with his sister and the five-year-old son of a friend.