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Coleridge's Use of Wordsworth's Juvenilia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Jane Worthington Smyser
Jane Worthington Smyser*
Affiliation:
Connecticut College New London
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Extract

In his edition of The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth Ernest DeSelincourt published for the first time over thirty poems of Wordsworth's juvenilia.1 Among these he discovered three poems previously thought to be the work of Coleridge and long published under his name. In The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,2 these poems are entitled “Lewti, or the Circassian Love-Chaunt” (I, 253), “Inscription for a Seat by the Road Side” (I, 349), and “Alcaeus to Sappho” (I, 353). Since the publication of Wordsworth's juvenilia, I have found three more poems in the works of Coleridge which DeSelincourt failed to note as also originally belonging to Wordsworth: “To Lesbia” (I, 60), “The Death of the Starling” (I, 61), and “Morienti Superstes” (I, 62); besides these, a conjecture may be made as to the authorship of a fourth, “Moriens Superstiti” (I, 61), for it is paired with a poem clearly belonging to Wordsworth.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , June 1950 , pp. 419 - 426
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1950

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References

1 (Oxford, 1940-44), i, 259-316; II, 463-465. All references to the poetry of Wordsworth will be to this edition.

2 E. H. Coleridge, ed., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1912). All references to the poetry of Coleridge will be to this edition, unless otherwise noted.

3 Daniel Stuart, “Anecdotes of the Poet Coleridge and his Newspaper Writings”, The Gentleman's Magazine, N.S., Ix (May, 1838), 485; Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1933), I, 86-87; The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. James Dykes Campbell (London, 1905), p. xl; E. K. Chambers, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford, 1938), pp. 86-87; Lawrence Hanson, The Life of S. T. Coleridge (London, 1938), p. 221. Campbell and Hanson both speak of contributions in prose, but no contributions in prose appear to have been made until December, 1799 (see Thomas J. Wise, A Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of Samuel Taylor Coleridge [London, 1913], p. 257), and Stuart wrote that before Coleridge went to Germany no prose writing was expected from him (see S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Epistolaris, ed. A. Turnbull, 2 vols. [London, 1911], II, 77).

4 See Wise, A Bibliography, pp. 207 ff., and Coleridge, Poetical Works, II, 1179.

5 Unpublished Letters from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to the Rev. John Prior Estlin (London, 1884), p. 52.

6 Dec. 7, 1797, “To an Unfortunate Woman”; Dec. 12, 1797, “Melancholy”; Jan. 8, 1798, “Fire, Famine, and Slaughter.” There were also published three pieces of light verse, now printed by E. H. Coleridge with “Epigrams” and “Jeux d'Esprit” in Coleridge, Poetical Works. See Wise, A Bibliography, pp. 207-209; Coleridge, Poetical Works, II, 1179.

7 December, 1797, and January, 1798, Coleridge considered accepting an invitation to Shrewsbury to serve there as Unitarian minister; at about the same time he was offered first a gift and later an annuity from the Wedgwoods. After much debate, he accepted the annuity and rejected the Shrewsbury invitation. See Unpublished Letters, ed. Griggs, I, 83-100; Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols. (London, 1895), I, 234-235; Chambers, Coleridge, pp. 86-90.

8 Stuart, The Gentleman's Magazine, N.S., Ix (May, 1838), 486.

9 Mrs. Henry Sandford, Thomas Poole and his Friends, 2 vols. (London, 1888), I, 261.

10 Unpublished Letters, ed. Griggs, i, 97. For an amusing example of Coleridge's turning a new leaf, see his letter to Stuart, Sept. 19, 1801, wherein he promises to “give THE POETICS a complete jog … to get together a FAIR STOCK IN HAND of poems … and to send these off as things always to be had” (Letters from the Lake Poets to Daniel Stuart [London, 1889], p. 20).

11 Unpublished Letters, ed. Griggs, i, 87.

12 The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. DeSelincourt, 2 vols. (London 1941), i, 6-16.421

13 Unpublished Letters, ed. Griggs, I, 216.

14 Coleridge, Poetical Works, I, 60.

15 Wise, A Bibliography, p. 160.

16 Wordsworth, Poetical Works, I, 306 (text), 374 (note).

17 Coleridge's Poems. A Facsimile Reproduction of the Proofs and MSS. of Some of the Poems, ed. J. D. Campbell, preface and notes by W. H. White (Westminster, 1899), p. x.

18 See below p. 423.

19 Coleridge, Poetical Works, I, 253.

20 (Boston and New York, 1927), pp. 513-516, n. 76. Lowes' note needs to be drastically corrected: in lines and phrases of Wordsworth's which Coleridge left unchanged, Lowes finds evidence of imagery drawn, not from Winander as in fact it was, but from Bartram's Travels; a more crucial error is his supposing the original Mary of the poem to be Coler- ridge's Mary Evans, and on this ground alone dating Coleridge's knowledge of Bartram as far back as the end of 1794 or the beginning of 1795.

21 Wordsworth, Poetical Works, i, 263. That “Lewti” was originally Wordsworth's was first pointed out by E. H. W. Meyerstein in TLS, Nov. 29 and Dec. 6,1941; Meyerstein's argument was supported by J. R. Sutherland (TLS, Dec. 6, 1941); and DeSelincourt, upon reëxamination of the MSS, quickly admitted the justice of their observations (TLS, Dec. 20, 1941). In his second volume, DeSelincourt corrected the omission he had made in his annotation of the poem (Wordsworth, Poetical Works, II, 531).

22 Wordsworth, Poetical Works, I, 367.

23 See Coleridge, Poetical Works, II, 1049-50.

24 John Christian Fischer, Vila Ioannis Victorii Roscii (Cologne, 1739), p. cxvii.

25 Coleridge, Poetical Works, i, 248.

26 Ibid., i, 61-62. It is unlikely that Coleridge was browsing through ephemeral French literature in 1798, or earlier. Although Wordsworth might actually have had a contempo- rary French source, I suspect that the prefatory note is merely another of Coleridge's many hoaxes, intended to attract attention and provide private amusement.

27 Wordsworth, Poetical Works, I, 263 (text), 367 (note).

28 Ibid., i, 367.

29 Wise, A Bibliography, p. 160.

30 Coleridge's Poems. A Facsimile Reproduction, p. x. The MS is now in the B. M. (Add. MSS. 27,902). When it was sold to the Museum, it came with the famous Gutch Memo- randum Book of 1795-98.424

31 The Early Wordsworth, English Assn. Presidential Address (1936), pp. 6-7.

31a Since this article went to press I have obtained from the British Museum a photostat of the Coleridge MS. W. H. White in his description of the MS, quoted above, failed to note that the MS also contains “Moriens Superstiti.” The Starling poem from Catullus425

32 Wise, A Bibliography, pp. 213-219; Coleridge, Poetical Works, II, 1179.

33 Coleridge, Poetical Works, I, 349, 353.

34 Wordsworth, Poetical Works, i, 372. For Wordsworth's different versions of “Inscrip‐tion for a Seat”, see ibid., I, 300-302. It is interesting to observe that in August and Sep- tember, 1800, Wordsworth was busy with his poems on the naming of places; that in August Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth walked several times to Windy Brow and made a seat there; and that on September 1 Coleridge discovered a rock-seat in the orchard at Grasmere (Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, I, 57-67). With inscriptions and rock-seats so much on their minds, it is easy for us to imagine Wordsworth's fetching from his desk one of his earliest inscriptions. DeSelincourt dates Wordsworth's first draft 1794, his revision 1797.

35 The Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. DeSelincourt (Oxford, 1935), p. 222.426

36 Wordsworth, Poetical Works, II, 465 (text), 531 (note).

37 Letters from the Lake Poets to Daniel Stuart, pp. 15-17. From Coleridge's letter, Stuart would presume the poem to be Coleridge's, although Coleridge does not say actually that it is: “I shall fill up these blanks with a few poems”—that is all; “Alcaeus to Sappho” follows.

38 See, e.g., Tail's Edinburgh Magazine, N.S., I (Sept. 1834), 509-520; Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, XLVII (March, 184Q), 287-299; The Athenaeum, No. 3558 (Jan. 4, 1896), p. 18, and (Jan. 11, 1896), pp. 53-54; The Poetical Works of Coleridge, ed. J. D. Campbell, pp. 629-630; J. D. Campbell, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1896), p. 140.

39 The Correspondence of H. C. Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle, ed. Edith J. Morley, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1927), I, 402-403. Wordsworth here defends Coleridge against the charges made in Blackwood's (see above), but at the same time he deplores Coleridge's carelessness and cites as an example Coleridge's use of his own epitaph from Chiabrera “True is it that Ambrosio Salinero” (Poetical Works, Iv, 250) in “A Tombless Epitaph” (Coleridge, Poetical Works, i, 413).