Hope and disappointment

It is difficult to think of another poet whose principal masterpieces seem so different. Auden might be one; but where Auden’s endless versatility feels an integral part of his identity, the miscellaneousness of Coleridge’s poetic career has struck most observers as merely unfortunate, testament to a crucial desultoriness. Coleridge’s poems are actually very numerous, and his life in verse was in one way long and dedicated; but, nevertheless, for no other English poet of comparable rank is a characterization of failure so central a part of the critical tradition. The list of Coleridge’s unwritten poems betrays a poetic life unled: ‘The Brook’, ‘Comforts and Consolations’, an epic on the siege of Jerusalem, ‘The Soother of Absence’, ‘The Flight and Return of Mohammed’ – besides the ideas for innumerable smaller works that flit through the notebook: an ode to pleasure, a poem on suicide, a song entitled ‘Transpositions’, a poem on ‘strange things’. Hazlitt was sharp: ‘Alas! “Frailty, thy name is Genius!” – What is become of all this mighty heap of hope, of thought, of learning and humanity?’ That allows a kind of greatness (by association with Hamlet) while still damning Coleridge with a crippling absence of purpose: ‘While he should be occupied with a given pursuit, he is thinking of a thousand other things; a thousand tastes, a thousand objects tempt him, and distract his mind, which keeps open house, and entertains all comers.’