, Research Paper
Coleridge and the Explosion of Voice
Coleridge is so often described in terms which are akin to the word, “explosive,” and by all accounts he was at times an unusually dynamic,charismatic and unpredictable person. His writings themselves could also betermed “explosive” merely from their physical form; a fragmented mass, some pieces finished but most not, much of his writing subject to procrastination or
eventual change of mind. Today I want to address a moment in his life which
produced, as Richard Holmes has characterized it, an explosion of his poetic
talent[1]–Autumn 1799, when he first met Sara Hutchinson, and wrote,
amongst other poems, the ballad, “Love.” In addressing this moment, I want to
suggest that the voice of Coleridge at this time was explosive, vital and new, but
only when set against the “ancient” balladic tradition with which he engaged.
Whilst accepting the dynamism and the unpredictability of Coleridge, I want to
show that his acceptance of a formal mode allowed him to find his own
particular, romantic voice; for, as Stephen Parrish has pointed out, “for
Coleridge, the passion was obscured unless the poet spoke in his own
voice.”[2] The ballad revival of the eighteenth century supplied Romantic
writers with an archive of voices from the past, a past which many seemed to
idealize as a time of true feeling, when Nature not only had its place but was
also imbued with a raw power. Particularly in the late 1790s, Coleridge worked
within such a tradition, and in so doing, found his own voice from the
minstrelsy of the past.
I want to begin by illustrating the literary environment in which Coleridge
found himself at the end of the eighteenth century. Ancient ballad and song
culture was being revived throughout Europe from the early eighteenth century
onwards, possibly beginning with the “Ossian” fragments in Scotland. Although
most British commentators were skeptical of the authenticity of Ossian, as Hugh
Trevor-Roper reports, they were feted in other parts of Europe; and Germany in
particular.[3] The title of this conference is “The National Graduate
Romanticism Conference”; the proximity of “Romantic” and “National” in this
tag is fortuitous, since it is important to realize the close relationship between
the ballad revival and a sense of nationhood. In Johann Herder’s famous essay
on Ossian, the place of the song or ballad as a kind of national cultural archive
is made plain.[4] He refers to the ballads as “the gnomic song of the nation,”
and continues, in letter form, to his “friend”:
What I wanted to do was remind you that Ossian’s poems are songs,
songs of the people, folk-songs, the songs of an unsophisticated people
living close to the senses, songs which have been long handed down
by oral tradition.
Herder locks into the fashionable Rousseauian notion of the “Noble Savage.” He
goes on:
Know then, that the more barbarous a people is – that is, the more
alive, the more freely acting (for that is what the word means) – the
more barbarous, that is, the more alive, the more free, the closer to the
senses, the more lyrically dynamic its songs will be, if songs it has. The
more remote a people is from an artificial, scientific manner of
thinking, speaking and writing, the less its verses are written for the
dead letter.
The attraction of this national voice is its proximity to nature; and thus,
proximity to a kind of raw reality. Herder makes clear that this “ancient” verse is
a superior form for it is from “Nature” and not from “Art.” The present age, he
observes, has made the mistake of foregrounding Art over Nature:
And if that is the way our time thinks, then of course we will admire
Art rather than Nature in these ancients’ poems; we will find too much
or too little Art in them, according to our predisposition, and we will
rarely have ears to hear the voice that sings in them: the voice of
Nature.
Indeed the general thrust of this essay is to cry out for a natural poetic voice, the
kind of voice that he found so evident in the Ossian fragments. He complains at
the recent German translation of Ossian, by Michael Denis, because he used the
polished hexameters of the German neo-classical idiom; a hated, artful masking
of the Natural Voice.
At the end of the essay, Herder calls to his countrymen for a collection of
German folk-songs. They are badly needed, he feels, to remind the nation of
their own collective voice, a voice that has been suppressed. Herder holds up
England’s Bishop Percy as the great example. He says that, “the sturdy
Englishmen were not ashamed of [their ballads], nor did they need to be.”
Whilst invoking the Elizabethan “Hearts of Oak” quality in the phrase “sturdy
Englishmen,” Herder reminds his public that they have theirs–and we should
have ours. It is a national necessity. Eventually Herder fulfilled his own wish,
and himself edited a two volume collection of folk-songs, entitled Volkslieder,
which emerged in 1778-9. This collection was well-known among literary
circles in Europe; when Coleridge visited Hamburg in 1798, he made a point of
buying “a Luther’s Bible, 3 marks & 4 pence — and Herder’s Popular Songs, 7
Marks.”[5]
Herder was writing about Ossian around eight years after the first publication of
Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which came out in 1765. Although
Percy was later to be hailed by many Romantics as a precursor to that
movement, he underplays his contribution to any development in aesthetics,
calling his collection “the barbarous productions of unpolished ages,”[6] and
worrying that these poetic fragments are unworthy of patronage. However
under this veneer of care and worry is a sly advancement of Herder’s division
between natural spontaneity and superfluous decoration. Percy immediately
continues:
But this impropriety, it is presumed, will disappear, when it is declared
that these poems are presented to your ladyship, not as labours of art,
but as effusions of nature, showing the first efforts of ancient genius,
and exhibiting the customs and opinions of remote ages.
Percy, in his famous phrase, “effusions of nature,” anticipates the explosion of
Romantic voices. But in a similar vein to Herder, he points to the collective
importance of the ancient fragments. Voices are not singled out in these
minstrels’ lays; partly because they are anonymous, but partly also, I think,
because Herder and Percy saw the fragments as in fact a kind of corpus, which
in some way represented the collective ancient whole of a nation. Thus Percy
refers to the works as the efforts of “genius,” not “genii.” For the generations
who grew up with Percy’s Reliques, this collection of songs would prove
extremely influential.
By the end of the century, publication of songs had become even more popular
and profitable. One of the most influential of these, as well as one of the most
comprehensive, was Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, of
1802. Here was the historical archive of ancient Scotland; the second chapter of
Ossian, perhaps. Scott emphasized the link between poetry and national history,
thus:
The historian of an individual nation is equally or more deeply
interested in the researches into popular poetry, since he must not
disdain to gather from the tradition conveyed in ancient ditties and
ballads, the information necessary to confirm or correct intelligence
collected from more certain sources. [7]
Hugh Trevor-Roper states that, “Before he had ever written a novel, Scott had
eclipsed the two founding fathers of the romantic revival. He was at once the
new Percy of his country, the new Ossian of his time.”[8] Trevor-Roper’s thesis
in this 1969 Coffin Lecture is that Scott changed the writing of history, by
peopling it. Enlightenment historians–Hume, Gibbon and Robertson, for
example–”saw history as a process, and a process, moreover, of improvement,
of “progress.”[9] “But”, as he goes on to say,
if they thus penetrated to the inner meaning of history, they did so, too
often, by overlooking the human content. The men of the past entered
their story only indirectly, as the agents or victims of ‘progress’: they
seldom appeared directly, in their own right, in their own social
context, as the legitimate owners of their own autonomous centuries.
The romantic writers changed all that.
Appearing “directly,” in one’s “own right,” becomes of crucial importance when
considering the emergence of an individual voice in Coleridge’s early ballads.
Thus Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, according to Dianne Dugaw,
“was being swept, bottom to top, by a spirit of antiquarianism, a sentimental
and revivalist love for old ballads and histories.”[10] Wordsworth and
Coleridge were caught up in this surge of sentimental interest and, whilst
walking on the Quantock Hills in the late nineties, would conceive the idea of
the Lyrical Ballads. In the later Supplementary to the Preface (1815),
Wordsworth makes clear his, or their, debt to Percy:
I have already stated how much Germany is indebted to this . . . work;
and for our own country, its poetry has been absolutely redeemed by it.
I do not think that there is an able writer in verse of the present day
who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligations to the
Reliques; I know that it is so with my friends; and, for myself, I am
happy in this occasion to make a public avowal of my own.[11]
Wordsworth and Coleridge were undoubtedly influenced by Percy. But, as
Mary Jacobus points out, the English romantics were equally stimulated by a
descendent of Herder, the German balladeer, Gottfried B?rger.[12] In the
nineties, ballad imitations–rather than the ancient originals so praised by Herder
and Scott–were becoming increasingly sensational and poorly written. B?rger
was a welcome relief. Jacobus comments: “As no-one in England had done,
B?rger transformed the traditional ballad into something both novel and
contemporaneous.”[13] B?rger’s ballad, “Leonore,” had been in circulation in
England from the early nineties, and it thrilled the English writers. Charles
Lamb wrote to Coleridge in 1796, “Have you read the Ballad called ‘Leonora’, in
the second Number of the ‘Monthly Magazine’? If you have !!!!!!!!!!!!!!”[14]
Coleridge found himself at a time of intense interest and debate over the ballad
form. His closest friends were writing to him about the B?rger ballads; he talked
about the ballad form with Wordsworth, in particular; and he was deeply
interested in German aesthetics. He had taught himself German in the
mid-nineties, because, as Richard Holmes puts it, “he considered [it] to be far
more advanced, both scientifically and philosophically, than French and
English.”[15] During the Lyrical Ballads months, he composed many
experimental ballad poems: between September 1797 and April 1798 he began
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, “The Three Graves,” and “The
Ballad of the Dark Ladie.” Soon after, he traveled to Germany with the
Wordsworths; he spent virtually a year there, reading German philosophy and
aesthetics voraciously, particularly Kant, Schelling, and the Schlegels. It was
during this visit that he bought Herder’s Volkslieder.
He returned to England in July, 1799. And in the autumn of that year, amid his
failing marriage, he traveled to Durham and met Sara Hutchinson whilst with
the Wordsworths. He fell in love with her. Holmes comments: “This love affair
underlay, and to some degree undermined, almost everything he did and wrote
in the next ten years. It broke his marriage, it helped to break his health, and it
very nearly broke his will to go on with his work.”[16] But at this time,
Coleridge was ignited, regenerated in a passion for life and for writing. “His
notebooks, previously used largely for memoranda of his reading, lists,
addresses and accounts, suddenly explode into life with descriptions of the
rivers and mountains, and the subtle effects of light and weather.” From this
regeneration, came immediately the poem “Love”–another experimental Gothic
ballad. It was the only other ballad apart from the Mariner which he actually
completed.
Coleridge’s personal explosion here, although important, is somehow not
unexpected. His life seemed to be a series of violent outbursts and then of
silences, of tremendous energy, and then of procrastination. Dorothy
Wordsworth, impressed by Coleridge in at least the early years of their
friendship, describes the energy of his arrival at Racedown in June 1797: “he
did not keep to the high road, but leapt over a gate and bounded down the
pathless field by which he cut off an angle.”[17] One of the more famous, early,
descriptions of Coleridge is from William Hazlitt.[18] Hazlitt describes the
scene, when Coleridge arrived at his local town to preach in 1798:
He did not come till late on the Saturday afternoon before he was to
preach; and Mr Rowe, who himself went down to the coach in a state
of anxiety and expectation, to look for the arrival of his successor,
could find no one at all answering to the description but a round-faced
man in a short black coat (like a shooting jacket) which hardly seemed
to have been made for him, but who seemed to be talking at a great rate
to his fellow-passengers. Mr Rowe had scarce returned to give an
account of his disappointment, when the round-faced man in black
entered, and dissipated all doubts on the subject, by beginning to talk.
He did not cease while he staid; nor has he since, that I know of. He
held the good town of Shrewsbury in delightful suspense for three
weeks that he remained there.
Coleridge himself, in describing his habit of procrastination, says, castigating,
“it is a deep & wide disease in my moral Nature . . . Love of Liberty, Pleasure of
Spontaneity, &c&c, these all express, not explain, the fact.”[19]
Such “Pleasure of Spontaneity” is, as Thomas McFarland notes, most fully felt
in Coleridge’s notebooks and marginalia. These fragmentary effusions of the
poet’s mind work well with McFarland’s thesis, which to simplify, sees
expressions of ruin and fragmentation as a core or bedrock of Romanticism. He
says, “It is my judgment, and I believe of many and perhaps most scholars
actively engaged in Coleridge studies, that Coleridge’s most pregnant, vital and
idiosyncratic work is to be found in his pure fragments: in the haphazard entries
of his notebooks, and in the immediacies of marginal notations in books he was
reading.”[20] Many of Coleridge’s poems are fragmented, too; Christabel was
written in a series of pieces, over a period of time; and Kubla Khan’s form,
actually described by the poet as “A Fragment,” is a result of interruption and
forgetfulness. Friedrich Schlegel, in one of his own “Fragments,” responds to
this modern habit, and relates it to the ancient tradition: “the works of the
ancients have become fragments; the works of the moderns are fragments at
their inception.”[21]
But the poem “Love” is a completed ballad. If there is fragmentation here, it
seems to be of a more subtle kind. I suggest that the “ruin,” to use McFarland’s
word, is that of the ancient national tradition. In this balladic experiment,
Coleridge works within the by now predictable voices of the tradition, and from
their ruins builds a personal emergent voice. The poem “Love” reminds us that
you cannot have ruins without having a castle in the first place; Coleridge’s own
voice is new, but it is the product of a knowledge and love of the historical
voice which Herder and Scott refer to in their own ways. Stephen Parrish, in his
article, “The Wordsworth – Coleridge Controversy,” [22] simplifies nicely the
difference in approach for Wordsworth and Coleridge in writing songs and
ballads:
the crucial difference lay in Wordsworth’s adoption of the dramatic
method in his ballads. and Coleridge’s rejection of it. To put it in the
simplest way, the passion that Wordsworth expressed in poetry was
likely to be that of his characters, the passion that Coleridge looked for
was mainly that of the poet. For Wordsworth, the passion could appear
only if the poet maintained strict dramatic propriety; for Coleridge, the