Is there an English major who hasn’t thrilled to the story of what is undoubtedly the most famous literary friendship in English letters? The account of two young poets plotting “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in order to raise five pounds for a walking tour, while rambling over the Quantock hills, is the very stuff of Romanticism. Add to this the tale of William with his sister Dorothy (“his eyes,” the poet called her) visiting the valley of the Wye, creating in his head all 159 of the “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” while they walked—not writing them down for a week—and you have literary magic.
While I was teaching in London, a student of mine from Wisconsin, after reading “Tintern Abbey,” impulsively rented a car and spent the weekend alone in its “wild secluded scene.” His strong reaction is hardly unique, and may remind us of Charles Lamb’s moving in a “trance” for a week after hearing Coleridge’s hypnotic “Rime.”
Adam Sisman has taken upon himself to retell in depth the story of this fascinating friendship—without partisanship, as he declares in his introduction. Here he refers to the tendency of biographers to favor one poet over the other, given the bitterness that followed their unfortunate quarrel. I believe he succeeds in this attempt by focusing on the early and best years of their friendship.
These two young men of undoubted genius, when their friendship first began, were about to be the authors of the Lyrical Ballads—a book which, after many years and much abuse by the reigning critics, would change the direction of English poetry and the way we see the world. Sisman has fleshed out their unique friendship in exquisite detail, thoroughly consulting recent scholarship and primary sources and giving us an almost daily or weekly account of their halcyon days.
The two poets are surrounded by other friends, and Sisman finds much in their correspondence to add to the letters and notebooks left by the principals. He digs even to a third level, examining the letters of friends of friends, where these pertain to his subject. (Indeed, my only complaint about the book is that two-fifths pass before the friendship truly begins, so thoroughly does Sisman set the stage for it.) He gives this story the drama and interest of a novel, partly by moving back and forth between the two poets, especially during the seven years before the friendship actually begins. This technique creates an inevitability about the two coming together at just the right time—when their powers had matured—in the annus mirabilis, 1797-98.
In the years leading up to their meeting, Coleridge was active in many ventures, such as his ill-fated journal The Watchman, and had completed two collections of poetry. His brilliance was apparent to all, and his spell-binding conversation attracted the likes of Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincy. On the other hand, Wordsworth from 1790 to 1797 had no occupation but his poetry, and he and his sister seemed to live largely by the assistance of relatives and friends. Both poets were initially enthusiastic about the French Revolution: “Bliss was it that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven.” Wordsworth actually spent time in France, where he met Annette Vallon and had a child with her before war separated them for ten years. While in Paris he observed part of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror.
The poets’ disillusionment with the Revolution, following the Terror and ascent of Napoleon, partly explains their desire to retire from the world, finding in poetry and nature something other than politics to redeem humankind. (Interestingly, both young radicals became conservative in their middle years—especially Wordsworth—much to the distress of a younger generation of Romantic poets, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.)
The two seemed fated to join forces by their similar backgrounds and the circles they moved in. They had exchanged letters earlier, but the friendship really began one June morning when Coleridge leaped over the fence at Racedown Lodge and ran across a field to greet William and Dorothy in the garden. Within a day the two poets were reciting their poems to one another. Coleridge, who’d planned to stay only a couple of days, extended his visit to three weeks.
In a chapter titled “Communion,” Sisman focuses on how extraordinarily close Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Coleridge grew, especially in the first few years before Coleridge left for Malta. They claimed during this time to be “three people, but one soul.” Often they wrote at the same table. They read their work to each other and exchanged criticism and advice. Several of the poems later claimed by one of them contained lines or even whole stanzas written by the other. Regular scrutiny quickened their resolve. Words raced across the paper. They jokingly referred to themselves as “the Concern,” a “commercial or manufacturing establishment” for the production of verse.
A single anecdote exemplifies the kind of cooperation that must surely have happened in other, unrecorded cases. Wordsworth’s “We are Seven” was largely composed while he was walking “in the grove” at Alfoxden, and many years later he gave an account of how it was completed:
When it was all but finished, I came in and recited it to Mr. Coleridge and my Sister, and said, “A prefatory stanza must be added, and I should sit down to our little tea-meal with greater pleasure if my task was finished.” I mentioned in substance what I wished to be expressed, and Coleridge immediately threw off the stanza.
Dorothy was the ideal companion for both poets. “Years later,” Sisman writes,
Thomas De Quincy would describe Dorothy—her gipsy tan, her wild and startling eyes, the glancing quickness of her motion, the powerful feelings that would sometime cause her to stammer … and remark on the “exceeding sympathy, always ready and always profound, by which she made all that one could tell her, all that one could describe, … reverberate to one’s own feelings.”
And the friends complemented each other to an extraordinary degree:
Their conversations turned frequently on the nature of poetry, as they sought new forms with which to express ideas and impressions. In Coleridge, Wordsworth encountered a mind of apparently limitless capabilities, interested in every aspect of human enquiry: a mind moreover nourished by encyclopaedic reading. Wordsworth too possessed a powerful mind, one less analytical than Coleridge’s but nonetheless perpetually probing the sublime, a disciplined mind that fed on a rich hinterland of experience.
For his part, Coleridge admired qualities in Wordsworth that he lacked in himself—control of his feelings, steady habits, and self-discipline. Wordsworth’s firm self-regard, not always appreciated by others, was later memorably characterized by Keats, for whom Wordsworth’s poetry was marked by “the egotistical sublime.” Though Coleridge was far better known and had published much more than Wordsworth when they met, he almost immediately claimed that Wordsworth’s genius was one that overshadowed his own. His admiration was based in part upon Wordsworth’s handful of published poems at that time—”Descriptive Sketches,” “An Evening Walk,” and “The Ruined Cottage,” none of which had been well received by the critics—but also upon the sheer force of his new friend’s personality. Within a day or two of meeting Wordsworth, Coleridge wrote, “I speak with heart-felt sincerity & (I think) unblinded judgement, when I tell you, that I feel myself a little man by his side; & yet do not think myself the less man, than I formerly thought myself.”
Others saw this putting down of himself in Wordsworth’s favor as unjustified and regularly warned him of its dangers. The symbiotic aspect of their work persisted, even though Coleridge, after the first five years, wrote less and less poetry. He encouraged his friend to write the great poem on “Nature, Man, and Society” that Wordsworth contemplated. Both men considered The Prelude (1805) an introduction to the envisioned larger work. Sisman points out that this encyclopedic poem would have much more suited Coleridge’s mind and capacities than Wordsworth’s. (I would add that even if he didn’t complete the projected Recluse, Wordsworth nevertheless wrote the greatest long poem in the language since Paradise Lost. Nor has any written after it rivaled its stature.)
In 1804, Coleridge, weakened by his opium addiction, left for Malta for two years to seek healing in a warm climate. Laudanum was opium in a form taken as an analgesic, as commonly prescribed as aspirin today. Coleridge probably grew addicted to it while ill for several months as an undergraduate. (His addiction was finally brought under control years later, when in his forties he moved to London and lived in the home of a generous physician, Dr. James Gillman.) His early abandoning of poetry may have been due to a number of causes: the ravages of opium, his unhappy marriage to Sara Fricker, and frustrated love for Sara Hutchinson. Perhaps even more destructive of his powers, Sisman stresses, was an overweening regard for Wordsworth’s talent and genius, to the neglect of his own.
Coleridge confided to his notebooks his own fear that this was the case. He returned very ill after the years in Malta, to be cared for by the Wordsworths and living with them until the quarrel in 1810. Unfortunate remarks of Wordsworth about Coleridge’s addiction and behavior, passed on by a third party, caused a serious rift in their friendship that after a year or so was mended. But Coleridge deeply felt betrayed, and the wound did not heal completely.
Sisman describes Wordsworth’s comparatively serene life in the Lakes as perhaps too comfortable in the adoring company of his wife, her sister, and his beloved Dorothy, but he was hardly immune to the vicissitudes of life. Like Coleridge, he always seemed short of cash until given a sinecure in the postal system at the age of forty-two. (As he himself acknowledged, he had no head for business.) He did receive assistance from various friends, relatives, and legacies, and his own habits were decidedly frugal. Early on he suffered the loss of two his children and his beloved brother John. And he was treated with brutal malice and contempt by the critics for many years. (Even as late as 1815, Francis Jeffrey could write in The Edinburgh Review of “The White Doe of Rylstone”: “This, we think, has the merit of being the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume.”) Still, he lived to see his poetry finally accepted and celebrated.
Living away from Wordsworth in London, Coleridge became “the sage of Highgate,” writing some of the best criticism we have of Wordsworth’s poetry in the Biographia Literaria. Although he shows Wordsworth’s limitations, he also reveals his greatness. Coleridge had long supported his friend with his confidence in his work through all the years that it suffered attacks from the established reviews.
A younger generation accepted and celebrated both poets’ work. They sought out Coleridge in London, while tourists streamed to the Lakes to appreciate the scenery Wordsworth described and to visit him at Rydal Mount (in such numbers that he sometimes charged strangers for their tea). And Wordsworth was finally honored with the laureateship.
Sisman skips lightly over these later years. I feel it is helpful to add that once Coleridge’s opium addiction was controlled, under Dr. Gillman’s care, he became remarkably productive, though not of poetry. I also believe Wordsworth might be excused for writing some of his less inspired verse in these years, given that he was revising and perfecting The Prelude, first published in 1850. Though some critics have preferred the early version for its apparent pantheism, the later one, as J. Robert Barth argues in Romanticism and Transcendence and elsewhere, not only reflects the trinitarian Christianity to which Wordsworth and Coleridge both came, but is stylistically much improved and philosophically more coherent.
Interestingly, one subject Coleridge claimed the poets never discussed, at least in the early years, was religion: “We found our data dissimilar and never renewed the subject.” But Coleridge was always devout, even in his Unitarian days, and Wordsworth was from the beginning inclined to mystical experience in nature. In later years Coleridge wrote important theological and philosophical works, including The Statesman Manual and Aids to Reflection, the latter of which Emerson called his “golden book.” Although he never wrote his philosophical magnum opus, except in fragmentary form, his ideas were some of the most seminal in all British philosophy, as Bentham claimed. He was a polymath, interested in all subjects. The 19th-century physicist Michael Faraday credited Coleridge’s Essay on Life, which concludes that all matter is alive, with giving him insights which—decades later, in the 20th century—led to the splitting of the atom.
By focusing on this marvelous friendship, its background and its intense high point, Sisman has created a work at once scholarly and of great general interest. He avoids the trap of trying to psychoanalyze subjects who are no longer living and lets the poets’ letters and other documents speak for themselves, while re-creating the drama of their lives together. Certainly all lovers of poetry should find his book immensely informative and enjoyable, and as thought-provoking as these two “Prophets of Nature” themselves.
Robert Siegel’s most recent books of poetry are A Pentecost of Finches: New & Selected Poems (Paraclete) and The Waters Under the Earth (Canon Press). He is professor emeritus of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
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