The symbiosis of Coleridge and Wordsworth is a well attested literary fact. One may debate the detail, and one may question some extrapolations of cause and effect, but no critic of the period can doubt that the verse of Tintern Abbey, for instance, and the feeling of Frost at Midnight, are the fruits of an exchange which was not merely intimate, but at its best generative of extensions of the human imagination. It is equally the case, however, though this is a view less often heard, that the long-term effect of the friendship was a weakening of each poet's confidence in his own identical voice. Wordsworth's ‘descent upon Coleridge’ is fairly well documented: there is evidence for supposing that Wordsworth's insensitivity to Coleridge's imagination was a primary cause of its extinction. Paradoxically, however, it has also been argued that Coleridge's imaginative efflorescence became dependent upon the proximity of his brother poet.

That Wordsworth both fostered and stifled Coleridge's distinctive poetic voice is almost certainly true. But the idea that Coleridge was the weaker personality, which is in some sense assumed by all the current accounts of their relationship, seems to me to be open to radical question. Coleridge, after all, pursued his own course through life, and came to be regarded as the arbiter of Wordsworth's merit. Wordsworth not merely accepted Coleridge's status in that regard, to a degree which borders upon self-immolation, but devoted the major part of his lifetime to a labour ordained for him by Coleridge. He undertook to write, at Coleridge's behest, a long philosophical poem expressive of the younger poet's views to which he strove to subordinate his own.