Watson - Coleridge the Poet

London

Routledge and Kegan Paul

This book arose naturally out of another, The Literary Critics (1962); but the connection is hardly obvious, and a word of explanation may be in order. In the earlier work, which was a history of descriptive criticism in English since Dryden, I tried to show by examples how little resemblance to the facts of literary history one common view of the interrelationship between literature and criticism bears. I mean the view that literature is about life, and that criticism is about literatureso that criticism does duty at the best as a poor relation, being about life at two removes. This view has such a commonsensical air about it, and is believed by so many who have no reason to believe in anything except because they think it true, that I might decently have hesitated even longer before opposing it openly. In fact I have chosen to work through specific cases: first, by showing that the relationship between the poetic activity and the critical in poets like Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold and Eliot was more intimate and continuous than the common view would suggest; and now, in a more searching view of Coleridge alone, by attempting to show how little substance there has ever been in the myth of his defeat or abdication as a poetto reveal, in fact, how successful a poet he was, and how critical a poet; how partial and inaccurate the assumption, in such a case, that literature can only usefully be about life; and how critical the act of creation itself may be.

In dealing with secondary sources I have adopted a solution which is already familiar in an age of thriving literary studies, and likely to become more so: I have concentrated most of my discussion of other works in a first chapter, which is a summary review of Coleridge studies from the standpoint of one who thinks the defeatist view of his poetic achievement to have been overstated. For the rest of the book, and especially in the later chapters on individual poems, I have not usually referred to the views of others unless for some special purpose, but simply followed my own argument and given references only to direct quotations. I have silently accepted the traditional dating of Christabel, for example, and the attribution of The Mad Monk to Coleridge rather than to Wordsworth, because the contrary arguments have so far failed to convince me. To behave in this way is to risk charges of ignorance, or plagiarism, or both. I should find ignorance an accusation hard enough to rebut, and remain deeply conscious of how much in romantic studies, in spite of my best efforts, I may have missed. Plagiarism would be a graver matter; at all events, I am conscious of many debts. James Dykes Campbells edition of the Poetical Works (1893) contains what is still the best commentary to the poems. The books and articles of Humphry House, Kathleen Coburn, J. B. Beer and George Whalley have taught me much, and their friendship more; and the Bollingen Foundation has earned the gratitude of every scholar in the field by sponsoring the first complete edition of the notebooks. The encouragement of Cambridge colleagues, notably Miss Barbara Everett, Professor Graham Hough, Mr A. G. Lee and Dr David Frost, has been indispensable to me. And my debt to the editors of the following works will be evident on every page.