Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Negative Cap-abilities: Keats’s Apollonian Afterlives
- The Sublime of Man: Neoplatonic Interactions in Coleridge’s “Religious Musings”
- Liberty and Revolution: Mary Robinson’s Epic Vision in The Progress of Liberty
- Byron’s Don Juan as a Horatian Poem: Citations, Themes and Poetic Ethics
- “Let Me Converse with Spirits”: Haunting Interactions in P. B. Shelley’s Disembodied Dialogues
- Coleridge’s Interaction with Wordsworth: The “Dejection” Dialogue
- The Art of Ellipsis: The Early Keats and B. R. Haydon
- “Negative Capability”: Keats Informing the “Existince” of Shakespeare
- Keats, the Grotesque, and the Victorian Visual Imagination: “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”
- Keats’s Negative Capability: The Afterlife of the Concept from Romanticism to Roberto Unger and José Saramago
- Romantic Interactions across the Atlantic: F. W. J. Schelling’s Concept of the “Indivisible Remainder” and Herman Melville’s Idea of the “Ungraspable Phantom of Life”
- Interactions between Science and Literature: Ludwik Zejszner’s Anxiety of Literary Influence
- Shelley’s “Subtler Language” and Its Modern Echoes
- Challenging Rousseau, Challenging Conquest: Wales in Maria Edgeworth’s “Angelina; or L’Amie Inconnue” and Helen
- Feminine Law and Ableness Endangered in the Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Brontë, and Rachel Whiteread
- Textual Intercourses of Women Playwrights with Their Audiences at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- “We love Jane Austen more and more”: William Dean Howells and the Rise of American Janeitism
- Cultural Interaction: The Construct of the “Noble Savage” in the Poetry of Goethe, Seume, and Chamisso
- Margaret Fuller between America and Europe: Dispatches from Britain, France, and Italy as Exercises in Cultural Criticism
- Bettina von Arnim and Her Writings on Poland
Coleridge’s Interaction with Wordsworth: The “Dejection” Dialogue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Negative Cap-abilities: Keats’s Apollonian Afterlives
- The Sublime of Man: Neoplatonic Interactions in Coleridge’s “Religious Musings”
- Liberty and Revolution: Mary Robinson’s Epic Vision in The Progress of Liberty
- Byron’s Don Juan as a Horatian Poem: Citations, Themes and Poetic Ethics
- “Let Me Converse with Spirits”: Haunting Interactions in P. B. Shelley’s Disembodied Dialogues
- Coleridge’s Interaction with Wordsworth: The “Dejection” Dialogue
- The Art of Ellipsis: The Early Keats and B. R. Haydon
- “Negative Capability”: Keats Informing the “Existince” of Shakespeare
- Keats, the Grotesque, and the Victorian Visual Imagination: “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”
- Keats’s Negative Capability: The Afterlife of the Concept from Romanticism to Roberto Unger and José Saramago
- Romantic Interactions across the Atlantic: F. W. J. Schelling’s Concept of the “Indivisible Remainder” and Herman Melville’s Idea of the “Ungraspable Phantom of Life”
- Interactions between Science and Literature: Ludwik Zejszner’s Anxiety of Literary Influence
- Shelley’s “Subtler Language” and Its Modern Echoes
- Challenging Rousseau, Challenging Conquest: Wales in Maria Edgeworth’s “Angelina; or L’Amie Inconnue” and Helen
- Feminine Law and Ableness Endangered in the Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Brontë, and Rachel Whiteread
- Textual Intercourses of Women Playwrights with Their Audiences at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- “We love Jane Austen more and more”: William Dean Howells and the Rise of American Janeitism
- Cultural Interaction: The Construct of the “Noble Savage” in the Poetry of Goethe, Seume, and Chamisso
- Margaret Fuller between America and Europe: Dispatches from Britain, France, and Italy as Exercises in Cultural Criticism
- Bettina von Arnim and Her Writings on Poland
Summary
“Collaboration” is an especially relevant term in discussing the exchange between William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the composition of such poems as “The Three Graves,” “The Wanderings of Cain,” and even images and lines in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The Lyrical Ballads, both poets insist, was a shared labor, in spite of disparities in each poet's account of how that labor was shared. “Dialogue” may be a more flexible term, intended here to describe, at a more spontaneous level, the shared excitement and frustration that attended their convictions about poetic imagination and the creative process. Even in a more casual sense, dialogue, in contrast to conversation, may designate a content specific discourse. To the extent that this dialogue is conducted in letters and poems, it is scripted dialogue and the interlocutors adhere to established roles.
Their dialogue commenced at their meeting in Nether Stowey at the end of March 1797. Both poets confessed a diminished creativity when the other was not present to stimulate the poetic impulse. The contents of the dialogue grew painful and poignant. Five years after it had first commenced the dialogue became burdened with emotional distress. On January 28, 1802 Dorothy Wordsworth wrote in her journal that Wordsworth was sleepless and dispirited. On the following day she wrote that Wordsworth continued unwell after another sleepless night, and both were alarmed at the arrival of “A heart-rending letter from Coleridge.” They were so alarmed by the report that Wordsworth was ready to travel to London. Coleridge's letter of that date is missing, but the contents were probably similar to the report that he had posted to William Godwin the week before (January 22, 1802): “I was struggling with sore calamities, with bodily pain, & languor—with pecuniary Difficulties —& worse than all, with domestic Discord.”
Perhaps both a cause and effect of his desperate attraction to Sara Hutchinson, Coleridge's arguments with Sara Fricker Coleridge had rendered the marriage intolerable. Wordsworth, too, was caught in a marital crisis. He had been separated from Annette Vallon since December 1792, having left Orléans shortly before the birth of his daughter.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Romantic Dialogues and Afterlives , pp. 117 - 128Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2021