So many of Coleridge's most fundamental poetic convictions converge on the figure of Wordsworth that, you feel, had he not existed, Coleridge would have had to invent him - which, in a manner of speaking, is what he did. Coleridge's Wordsworth - the great philosophical poet, divinely endowed with 'the vision and the faculty divine' (The Excursion i 79, as quoted by Coleridge, BL ii 60), sublimely solitary inhabitant of '[t]he dread Watch-Tower of man's absolute Self' (To William Wordsworth) - is one of the great creations of the age, one which affected the way Wordsworth's contemporaries perceived him, and continues to influence modern criticism. More importantly for us here, this idea of the poet decisively shaped Wordsworth's conception of himself too: it confirmed in him a colossal awareness of poetic vocation, and established in his mind the shape of that career which would testify to the vocation's successful fulfilment. But Wordsworth, and this Coleridgean figure of Wordsworth, are not a perfect fit; and the visionary ideal to which both men subscribed became increasingly the standard by which they could assess Wordsworth's failure, not his triumph. This sense of a discrepancy between the poet and Coleridge's invention of the poet was personally tragic, instilling in Wordsworth a conviction that, despite some of the language's greatest verse, his poetic life had somehow failed. At the same time, paradoxically, the sense of discrepancy proved thoroughly enabling: Wordsworth absorbed the gap between vocation and achievement and made of it some of his very greatest and most characteristic poetry - a poetry of embarrassed expectations which, if not precisely Coleridgean in its triumphs, still could hardly have achieved the kinds of triumph it did without a Coleridgean calling to frustrate. But then, to complicate the picture a little more, speaking of 'a Coleridgean calling' may imply too single-minded a conception of the poetic good life.