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Contemporary Critics of Coleridge, the Poet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Walter Graham
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Extract

To live in a day when conceptions of poetry were undergoing rapid change was for Samuel Taylor Coleridge both an advantage and a misfortune. Perhaps his own work, which greatly advanced the change, gained a significance it could not have had in any other period. Yet by the same token, it was generally unappreciated by his contemporaries, inclined as they were to the old, narrow views of what constituted poetic merit. Lack of adequate criticism throughout almost the whole of Coleridge's lifetime is thus not difficult to explain. Nor is it a matter of mystery that two of his young disciples, John Sterling and Henry Nelson Coleridge, appear to have been, before his death in 1834, the only critics who approached his poetry with the same sympathetic effort at understanding that Coleridge himself employed when he criticised the work of others.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , June 1923 , pp. 278 - 289
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1923

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References

1 Poems on Various Subjects, Bristol, 1796. Although this comment seems to apply to the volume of 1796 only, the Fall of Robespierre had received earlier notice in several reviews. Biographia Literaria, Oxford 1907, i, 2. In a letter to Estlin in 1796 he wrote, “The Reviews have been wonderful. The Monthly has cataracted panegyric on my poems, the Critical has cascaded it, the Analytical has dribbled it with very tolerable civility.'? Coleridge's Letters to the Rev. J. P. Estlin, Philobiblon Society Publications, 1884, vol. xvi, p. 21.

2 Analytical Renew, XXIII, 610-612; Monthly Review, XX, n.s. 194-199; Monthly Magazine, I, 345-348; British Critic, VII, 549-550.

3 For list of these reviews, see Haney, Bibliography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Phila. 1903, pp. 5, 6. Notable exceptions (for political reasons, of course) are the attacks in the Anti-Jacobin (July 9, 1798) and Anti-Jacobin Review (August and September, 1798). Modern critics have noted that Coleridge, when his inspiration flagged, always fell back on the eighteenth-century manner.

4 Under Wordsworth's influence, his views of poetry changed most noticeably between 1797 and 1800. Refer to Biographia Literaria, Oxford 1907, i, 58-64; and ii, 266-267. Cf. Brandl's life of Coleridge (London 1887) pp. 161-166; and Letters, London 1895, pp. 224, 450.

5 Critical Review, 2nd series, XXIV, 197-204; Monthly Review, XXIX, n.s. 202-210; Analytical Review, XXVIII, 583-587; British Critic, XIV, 365-369; Monthly Magazine, VI, 514.

6 Annual Review, II, 556. Critical Review, 3rd s. XIII, 504.

7 Examiner, June 2, 1816 (reprinted in appendix to Hazlitt's Works. London 1904, vol. xi, 580-82). This passage (lines 404-30) was singled out for praise by several critics. Hazlitt commends it later in his Spirit of the Age and in the lecture on the living poets.

8 British Critic, XVI, 393.

9 Literary Speculum, London 1822, II, 145.

10 New Monthly Magazine, X, 329. Monthly Magazine, XLVI, 407.

11 Monthly Review, LXXXII, n.s. 22-25. Literary Gazette, II, 49.

12 Hazlitt's Works, London, 1904, IV, 219. Peter's Letters to His Kinsfolk, London, 1819, ii, 220.

13 Edinburgh Review, XXVII, 58-67. Brandl refers to Coleridge's complaint in the last chapter of the Biographic Literaria, noting that Coleridge believed the reviewer to be Jeffrey, and that he complained the more bitterly of his treatment, because Jeffrey a few years before, had highly applauded the poem (Life, London 1887, 350; Biographia Literaria, i, 36, note). Brandl inclined to believe Tom Moore the reviewer, following Dibdin (Reminiscences, London 1837, 340). Coleridge himself later, Dykes Campbell, and the editors of Hazlitt's Works (1904), believed Hazlitt wrote the article. The whole matter was discussed in Notes and Queries (9th s., X, 388, 429; XI, 170, 269) by Mr. Thomas Hutchinson. His conclusion that Hazlitt was the writer seems inescapable.

14 Blackwood's, VI, 2-12. Cf. V, 286-288. For a list of parodies and imitations of Coleridge's poems, see Haney, Bibliography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Phil. 1903, 139440.

15 Memoir by J. C. Hare, in Essays and Tales of John Sterling, London 1848, I, xiii-xxi. For the essay, see Vol. I, 101-110. A real precursor of Sterling was Leigh Hunt, whose mildly favorable review of Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Ancient Mariner, with its attempted interpretation of the latter poem, appeared in the Examiner October 21, 1821 (p. 664). In the Etonian (No. 4, 1821) N. H. Coleridge had published an interesting though youthful appreciation. It is chiefly valuable in contrast with his later essay, which shows how far the nephew had advanced in critical acumen during the years intervening—the years of association with the poet.

16 Westminster Review, XII, 1-31.

17 Edition of 1834. Review in Quarterly, LII, 1-38. The first page contains the statement that Coleridge is still living, but a note at the end of the periodical announces his death on July 25. Since alarming symptoms did not develop until the 20th, there seems no reason for believing his death was anticipated. Murray's Register is my source of information regarding the authorship of the review. The same source shows that three out of four notable reviews of Coleridge in the Quarterly before 1837 were written by his nephews. John Taylor Coleridge reviewed Remorse in 1814 (XI, 177); and in addition to the article discussed in this paper, Henry Nelson Coleridge wrote the criticism of Literary Remains (LIX, 1). The fourth, a review of Henry Nelson Coleridge's Table Talk (Quarterly, LIII, 79) was by Lockhart. For authorship of critical reviews in the Quarterly up to 1853, see Graham, Tory Criticism in the Quarterly Review, Columbia University Press, 1921, 44. The list is from Murray's Register.