Biographia Literaria - Chapter I (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Biographia Literaria
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Chapter I [of XXII]
Motives to the present work—Reception of the Author's first publication—
Discipline of his taste at school—Effect of contemporary writers on youthful minds—
Bowles's Sonnets—Comparison between the poets before and since Pope.
conversation, and in print, more frequently than I find it easy to
explain, whether I consider the fewness, unimportance, and limited
circulation of my writings, or the retirement and distance, in which I
have lived, both from the literary and political world. Most often it
has been connected with some charge which I could not acknowledge, or
some principle which I had never entertained. Nevertheless, had I had
no other motive or incitement, the reader would not have been troubled
with this exculpation. What my additional purposes were, will be seen
in the following pages. It will be found, that the least of what I
have written concerns myself personally. I have used the narration
chiefly for the purpose of giving a continuity to the work, in part
for the sake of the miscellaneous reflections suggested to me by
particular events, but still more as introductory to a statement of my
principles in Politics, Religion, and Philosophy, and an application
of the rules, deduced from philosophical principles, to poetry and
criticism. But of the objects, which I proposed to myself, it was not
the least important to effect, as far as possible, a settlement of the
long continued controversy concerning the true nature of poetic
diction; and at the same time to define with the utmost impartiality
the real poetic character of the poet, by whose writings this
controversy was first kindled, and has been since fuelled and fanned.
In the spring of 1796, when I had but little passed the verge of
manhood, I published a small volume of juvenile poems. They were
received with a degree of favour, which, young as I was, I well know
was bestowed on them not so much for any positive merit, as because
they were considered buds of hope, and promises of better works to
come. The critics of that day, the most flattering, equally with the
severest, concurred in objecting to them obscurity, a general
turgidness of diction, and a profusion of new coined double epithets
[1]. The first is the fault which a writer is the least able to detect
in his own compositions: and my mind was not then sufficiently
disciplined to receive the authority of others, as a substitute for my
own conviction. Satisfied that the thoughts, such as they were, could
not have been expressed otherwise, or at least more perspicuously, I
forgot to inquire, whether the thoughts themselves did not demand a
degree of attention unsuitable to the nature and objects of poetry.
This remark however applies chiefly, though not exclusively, to the
Religious Musings. The remainder of the charge I admitted to its full
extent, and not without sincere acknowledgments both to my private and
public censors for their friendly admonitions. In the after editions,
I pruned the double epithets with no sparing hand, and used my best
efforts to tame the swell and glitter both of thought and diction;
though in truth, these parasite plants of youthful poetry had
insinuated themselves into my longer poems with such intricacy of
union, that I was often obliged to omit disentangling the weed, from
the fear of snapping the flower. From that period to the date of the
present work I have published nothing, with my name, which could by
any possibility have come before the board of anonymous criticism.
Even the three or four poems, printed with the works of a friend [2],
as far as they were censured at all, were charged with the same or
similar defects, (though I am persuaded not with equal justice),—with
an excess of ornament, in addition to strained and elaborate diction.
I must be permitted to add, that, even at the early period of my
juvenile poems, I saw and admitted the superiority of an austerer and
more natural style, with an insight not less clear, than I at present
possess. My judgment was stronger than were my powers of realizing its
dictates; and the faults of my language, though indeed partly owing to
a wrong choice of subjects, and the desire of giving a poetic
colouring to abstract and metaphysical truths, in which a new world
then seemed to open upon me, did yet, in part likewise, originate in
unfeigned diffidence of my own comparative talent.—During several
years of my youth and early manhood, I reverenced those who had re-
introduced the manly simplicity of the Greek, and of our own elder
poets, with such enthusiasm as made the hope seem presumptuous of
writing successfully in the same style. Perhaps a similar process has
happened to others; but my earliest poems were marked by an ease and
simplicity, which I have studied, perhaps with inferior success, to
impress on my later compositions.
At school, (Christ's Hospital,) I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of
a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master, the
Reverend James Bowyer. He early moulded my taste to the preference of
Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of
Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius, (in such
extracts as I then read,) Terence, and above all the chaster poems of
Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the, so called, silver and
brazen ages; but with even those of the Augustan aera: and on grounds
of plain sense and universal logic to see and assert the superiority
of the former in the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and
diction. At the same time that we were studying the Greek tragic
poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they
were the lessons too, which required most time and trouble to bring
up, so as to escape his censure. I learned from him, that poetry, even
that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a
logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult,
because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more
fugitive causes. In the truly great poets, he would say, there is a
reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of
every word; and I well remember that, availing himself of the
synonymes to the Homer of Didymus, he made us attempt to show, with
regard to each, why it would not have answered the same purpose; and
wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the word in the original
text.
In our own English compositions, (at least for the last three years of
our school education,) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or
image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might
have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words [3].
Lute, harp, and lyre, Muse, Muses, and inspirations, Pegasus,
Parnassus, and Hippocrene were all an abomination to him. In fancy I
can almost hear him now, exclaiming "Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink,
boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? Your nurse's daughter, you mean!
Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose!" Nay certain
introductions, similes, and examples, were placed by name on a list of
interdiction. Among the similes, there was, I remember, that of the
manchineel fruit, as suiting equally well with too many subjects; in
which however it yielded the palm at once to the example of Alexander
and Clytus, which was equally good and apt, whatever might be the
theme. Was it ambition? Alexander and Clytus!-Flattery? Alexander and
Clytus!--anger—drunkenness—pride—friendship—ingratitude—late
repentance? Still, still Alexander and Clytus! At length, the praises
of agriculture having been exemplified in the sagacious observation
that, had Alexander been holding the plough, he would not have run his
friend Clytus through with a spear, this tried, and serviceable old
friend was banished by public edict in saecula saeculorum. I have
sometimes ventured to think, that a list of this kind, or an index
expurgatorius of certain well-known and ever-returning phrases, both
introductory, and transitional, including a large assortment of modest
egoisms, and flattering illeisms, and the like, might be hung up in
our Law-courts, and both Houses of Parliament, with great advantage to
the public, as an important saving of national time, an incalculable
relief to his Majesty's ministers, but above all, as insuring the
thanks of country attornies, and their clients, who have private bills
to carry through the House.
Be this as it may, there was one custom of our master's, which I
cannot pass over in silence, because I think it imitable and worthy of
imitation. He would often permit our exercises, under some pretext of
want of time, to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be
looked over. Then placing the whole number abreast on his desk, he
would ask the writer, why this or that sentence might not have found
as appropriate a place under this or that other thesis: and if no
satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same kind
were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, the
exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced,
in addition to the tasks of the day. The reader will, I trust, excuse
this tribute of recollection to a man, whose severities, even now, not
seldom furnish the dreams, by which the blind fancy would fain
interpret to the mind the painful sensations of distempered sleep; but
neither lessen nor dim the deep sense of my moral and intellectual
obligations. He sent us to the University excellent Latin and Greek
scholars, and tolerable Hebraists. Yet our classical knowledge was the
least of the good gifts, which we derived from his zealous and
conscientious tutorage. He is now gone to his final reward, full of
years, and full of honours, even of those honours, which were dearest
to his heart, as gratefully bestowed by that school, and still binding
him to the interests of that school, in which he had been himself
educated, and to which during his whole life he was a dedicated thing.
From causes, which this is not the place to investigate, no models of
past times, however perfect, can have the same vivid effect on the
youthful mind, as the productions of contemporary genius. The
discipline, my mind had undergone, Ne falleretur rotundo sono et
versuum cursu, cincinnis, et floribus; sed ut inspiceret quidnam
subesset, quae, sedes, quod firmamentum, quis fundus verbis; an
figures essent mera ornatura et orationis fucus; vel sanguinis e
materiae ipsius corde effluentis rubor quidam nativus et incalescentia
genuina;—removed all obstacles to the appreciation of excellence in
style without diminishing my delight. That I was thus prepared for the
perusal of Mr. Bowles's sonnets and earlier poems, at once increased
their influence, and my enthusiasm. The great works of past ages seem
to a young man things of another race, in respect to which his
faculties must remain passive and submiss, even as to the stars and
mountains. But the writings of a contemporary, perhaps not many years
older than himself, surrounded by the same circumstances, and
disciplined by the same manners, possess a reality for him, and
inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a man. His very
admiration is the wind which fans and feeds his hope. The poems
themselves assume the properties of flesh and blood. To recite, to
extol, to contend for them is but the payment of a debt due to one,
who exists to receive it.
There are indeed modes of teaching which have produced, and are
producing, youths of a very different stamp; modes of teaching, in
comparison with which we have been called on to despise our great
public schools, and universities,
in whose halls are hung
Armoury of the invincible knights of old—
modes, by which children are to be metamorphosed into prodigies. And
prodigies with a vengeance have I known thus produced; prodigies of
self-conceit, shallowness, arrogance, and infidelity! Instead of
storing the memory, during the period when the memory is the
predominant faculty, with facts for the after exercise of the
judgment; and instead of awakening by the noblest models the fond and
unmixed love and admiration, which is the natural and graceful temper
of early youth; these nurslings of improved pedagogy are taught to
dispute and decide; to suspect all but their own and their lecturer's
wisdom; and to hold nothing sacred from their contempt, but their own
contemptible arrogance; boy-graduates in all the technicals, and in
all the dirty passions and impudence of anonymous criticism. To such
dispositions alone can the admonition of Pliny be requisite, 'Neque
enim debet operibus ejus obesse, quod vivit. An si inter eos, quos
nunquam vidimus, floruisset, non solum libros ejus, verum etiam
imagines conquireremus, ejusdem nunc honor prasentis, et gratia quasi
satietate languescet? At hoc pravum, malignumque est, non admirari
hominem admiratione dignissimum, quia videre, complecti, nec laudare
tantum, verum etiam amare contingit.' Plin. Epist., Lib. I.
I had just entered on my seventeenth year, when the sonnets of Mr.
Bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto
pamphlet, were first made known and presented to me, by a schoolfellow
who had quitted us for the University, and who, during the whole time
that he was in our first form (or in our school language a Grecian,)
had been my patron and protector. I refer to Dr. Middleton, the truly
learned, and every way excellent Bishop of Calcutta:
qui laudibus amplis
Ingenium celebrare meum, calamumque solebat,
Calcar agens animo validum. Non omnia terra
Obruta; vivit amor, vivit dolor; ora negatur
Dulcia conspicere; at fiere et meminisse relictum est.
Petr. Ep., Lib. I.
It was a double pleasure to me, and still remains a tender
recollection, that I should have received from a friend so revered the
first knowledge of a poet, by whose works, year after year, I was so
enthusiastically delighted and inspired. My earliest acquaintances
will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous
zeal, with which I laboured to make proselytes, not only of my
companions, but of all with whom I conversed, of whatever rank, and in
whatever place. As my school finances did not permit me to purchase
copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty
transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to those, who had
in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight did I receive
the three or four following publications of the same author.
Though I have seen and known enough of mankind to be well aware, that
I shall perhaps stand alone in my creed, and that it will be well, if
I subject myself to no worse charge than that of singularity; I am not
therefore deterred from avowing, that I regard, and ever have regarded
the obligations of intellect among the most sacred of the claims of
gratitude. A valuable thought, or a particular train of thoughts,
gives me additional pleasure, when I can safely refer and attribute it
to the conversation or correspondence of another. My obligations to
Mr. Bowles were indeed important, and for radical good. At a very
premature age, even before my fifteenth year, I had bewildered myself
in metaphysics, and in theological controversy. Nothing else pleased
me. History, and particular facts, lost all interest in my mind.
Poetry—(though for a school-boy of that age, I was above par in
English versification, and had already produced two or three
compositions which, I may venture to say, without reference to my age,
were somewhat above mediocrity, and which had gained me more credit
than the sound, good sense of my old master was at all pleased with,)
—poetry itself, yea, novels and romances, became insipid to me. In my
friendless wanderings on our leave-days [4], (for I was an orphan, and
had scarcely any connections in London,) highly was I delighted, if
any passenger, especially if he were dressed in black, would enter
into conversation with me. For I soon found the means of directing it
to my favourite subjects
Of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, fore-knowledge absolute,
And found no end in wandering mazes lost.
This preposterous pursuit was, beyond doubt, injurious both to my
natural powers, and to the progress of my education. It would perhaps
have been destructive, had it been continued; but from this I was
auspiciously withdrawn, partly indeed by an accidental introduction to
an amiable family, chiefly however, by the genial influence of a style
of poetry, so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so
dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets and other early poems of Mr.
Bowles. Well would it have been for me, perhaps, had I never relapsed
into the same mental disease; if I had continued to pluck the flower
and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving
in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. And if in
after time I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged
sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and
subtilty of the understanding without awakening the feelings of the
heart; still there was a long and blessed interval, during which my
natural faculties were allowed to expand, and my original tendencies
to develop themselves;—my fancy, and the love of nature, and the
sense of beauty in forms and sounds.
The second advantage, which I owe to my early perusal, and admiration
of these poems, (to which let me add,) though known to me at a somewhat
later period, the Lewesdon Hill of Mr. Crowe bears more immediately on
my present subject. Among those with whom I conversed, there were, of
course, very many who had formed their taste, and their notions of
poetry, from the writings of Pope and his followers; or to speak more
generally, in that school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated
by English understanding, which had predominated from the last
century. I was not blind to the merits of this school, yet, as from
inexperience of the world, and consequent want of sympathy with the
general subjects of these poems, they gave me little pleasure, I
doubtless undervalued the kind, and with the presumption of youth
withheld from its masters the legitimate name of poets. I saw that the
excellence of this kind consisted in just and acute observations on
men and manners in an artificial state of society, as its matter and
substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong
epigrammatic couplets, as its form: that even when the subject was
addressed to the fancy, or the intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock,
or the Essay on Man; nay, when it was a consecutive narration, as in
that astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity Pope's
Translation of the Iliad; still a point was looked for at the end of
each second line, and the whole was, as it were, a sorites, or, if I
may exchange a logical for a grammatical metaphor, a conjunction
disjunctive, of epigrams. Meantime the matter and diction seemed to me
characterized not so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts
translated into the language of poetry. On this last point, I had
occasion to render my own thoughts gradually more and more plain to
myself, by frequent amicable disputes concerning Darwin's Botanic
Garden, which, for some years, was greatly extolled, not only by the
reading public in general, but even by those, whose genius and natural
robustness of understanding enabled them afterwards to act foremost in
dissipating these "painted mists" that occasionally rise from the
marshes at the foot of Parnassus. During my first Cambridge vacation,
I assisted a friend in a contribution for a literary society in
Devonshire: and in this I remember to have compared Darwin's work to
the Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold and transitory. In the
same essay too, I assigned sundry reasons, chiefly drawn from a
comparison of passages in the Latin poets with the original Greek,
from which they were borrowed, for the preference of Collins's odes to
those of Gray; and of the simile in Shakespeare
How like a younker or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,
Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal doth she return,
With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails,
Lean, rent, and beggar'd by the strumpet wind!
(Merch. of Ven. Act II. sc. 6.)
to the imitation in the Bard;
Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows
While proudly riding o'er the azure realm
In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes,
Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm;
Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway,
That hush'd in grim repose, expects it's evening prey.
(in which, by the bye, the words "realm" and "sway" are rhymes dearly
purchased)—I preferred the original on the ground, that in the
imitation it depended wholly on the compositor's putting, or not
putting, a small capital, both in this, and in many other passages of
the same poet, whether the words should be personifications, or mere
abstractions. I mention this, because, in referring various lines in
Gray to their original in Shakespeare and Milton, and in the clear
perception how completely all the propriety was lost in the transfer,
I was, at that early period, led to a conjecture, which, many years
afterwards was recalled to me from the same thought having been
started in conversation, but far more ably, and developed more fully,
by Mr. Wordsworth;—namely, that this style of poetry, which I have
characterized above, as translations of prose thoughts into poetic
language, had been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise from, the
custom of writing Latin verses, and the great importance attached to
these exercises, in our public schools. Whatever might have been the
case in the fifteenth century, when the use of the Latin tongue was so
general among learned men, that Erasmus is said to have forgotten his
native language; yet in the present day it is not to be supposed, that
a youth can think in Latin, or that he can have any other reliance on
the force or fitness of his phrases, but the authority of the writer
from whom he has adopted them. Consequently he must first prepare his
thoughts, and then pick out, from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, or perhaps
more compendiously from his Gradus, halves and quarters of lines, in
which to embody them.
I never object to a certain degree of disputatiousness in a young man
from the age of seventeen to that of four or five and twenty, provided
I find him always arguing on one side of the question. The
controversies, occasioned by my unfeigned zeal for the honour of a
favourite contemporary, then known to me only by his works, were of
great advantage in the formation and establishment of my taste and
critical opinions. In my defence of the lines running into each other,
instead of closing at each couplet; and of natural language, neither
bookish, nor vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp, nor of the kennel,
such as I will remember thee; instead of the same thought tricked up
in the rag-fair finery of,
———thy image on her wing
Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring,—
I had continually to adduce the metre and diction of the Greek poets,
from Homer to Theocritus inclusively; and still more of our elder
English poets, from Chaucer to Milton. Nor was this all. But as it was
my constant reply to authorities brought against me from later poets
of great name, that no authority could avail in opposition to Truth,
Nature, Logic, and the Laws of Universal Grammar; actuated too by my
former passion for metaphysical investigations; I laboured at a solid
foundation, on which permanently to ground my opinions, in the
component faculties of the human mind itself, and their comparative
dignity and importance. According to the faculty or source, from which
the pleasure given by any poem or passage was derived, I estimated the
merit of such poem or passage. As the result of all my reading and
meditation, I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to
comprise the conditions and criteria of poetic style;—first, that not
the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the
greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of
essential poetry;—secondly, that whatever lines can be translated
into other words of the same language, without diminution of their
significance, either in sense or association, or in any worthy
feeling, are so far vicious in their diction. Be it however observed,
that I excluded from the list of worthy feelings, the pleasure derived
from mere novelty in the reader, and the desire of exciting wonderment
at his powers in the author. Oftentimes since then, in pursuing French
tragedies, I have fancied two marks of admiration at the end of each
line, as hieroglyphics of the author's own admiration at his own
cleverness. Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous
undercurrent of feeling! it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere
as a separate excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm, that it would
be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the Pyramids with
the bare hand, than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in
Milton or Shakespeare, (in their most important works at least,)
without making the poet say something else, or something worse, than
he does say. One great distinction, I appeared to myself to see
plainly between even the characteristic faults of our elder poets, and
the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley,
we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most
pure and genuine mother English, in the latter the most obvious
thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty
elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to
the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to
the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous
imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image,
and half of abstract [5] meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the
head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.
The reader must make himself acquainted with the general style of
composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to
understand and account for the effect produced on me by the Sonnets,
the Monody at Matlock, and the Hope of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar
to original genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to
its success in improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries.
The poems of West, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction;
but they were cold, and, if I may so express it, only dead-coloured;
while in the best of Warton's there is a stiffness, which too often
gives them the appearance of imitations from the Greek. Whatever
relation, therefore, of cause or impulse Percy's collection of Ballads
may bear to the most popular poems of the present day; yet in a more
sustained and elevated style, of the then living poets, Cowper and
Bowles [6] were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who combined
natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled the
heart with the head.
It is true, as I have before mentioned, that from diffidence in my own
powers, I for a short time adopted a laborious and florid diction,
which I myself deemed, if not absolutely vicious, yet of very inferior
worth. Gradually, however, my practice conformed to my better
judgment; and the compositions of my twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth
years—(for example, the shorter blank verse poems, the lines, which
now form the middle and conclusion of the poem entitled the Destiny of
Nations, and the tragedy of Remorse)—are not more below my present
ideal in respect of the general tissue of the style than those of the
latest date. Their faults were at least a remnant of the former
leaven, and among the many who have done me the honour of putting my
poems in the same class with those of my betters, the one or two, who
have pretended to bring examples of affected simplicity from my
volume, have been able to adduce but one instance, and that out of a
copy of verses half ludicrous, half splenetic, which I intended, and
had myself characterized, as sermoni propiora.
Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an
excess, which will itself need reforming. The reader will excuse me
for noticing, that I myself was the first to expose risu honesto the
three sins of poetry, one or the other of which is the most likely to
beset a young writer. So long ago as the publication of the second
number of the Monthly Magazine, under the name of Nehemiah
Higginbottom, I contributed three sonnets, the first of which had for
its object to excite a good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful
egotism, and at the recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double
defect of being at once trite and licentious;—the second was on low
creeping language and thoughts, under the pretence of simplicity; the
third, the phrases of which were borrowed entirely from my own poems,
on the indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language and
imagery. The reader will find them in the note [7] below, and will I
trust regard them as reprinted for biographical purposes alone, and
not for their poetic merits. So general at that time, and so decided
was the opinion concerning the characteristic vices of my style, that
a celebrated physician (now, alas! no more) speaking of me in other
respects with his usual kindness, to a gentleman, who was about to
meet me at a dinner party, could not however resist giving him a hint
not to mention 'The house that Jack built' in my presence, for "that I
was as sore as a boil about that sonnet;" he not knowing that I was
myself the author of it.
[Here ends chapter 1. To read other chapters of Biographia Literaria, click here.]
* * *
FOOTNOTES [by Samuel Taylor Coleridge]
[1] The authority of Milton and Shakespeare may be usefully pointed
out to young authors. In the Comus and other early poems of Milton
there is a superfluity of double epithets; while in the Paradise Lost
we find very few, in the Paradise Regained scarce any. The same remark
holds almost equally true of the Love's Labour Lost, Romeo and Juliet,
Venus and Adonis, and Lucrece, compared with the Lear, Macbeth,
Othello, and Hamlet of our great Dramatist. The rule for the admission
of double epithets seems to be this: either that they should be
already denizens of our language, such as blood-stained, terror-
stricken, self-applauding: or when a new epithet, or one found in
books only, is hazarded, that it, at least, be one word, not two words
made one by mere virtue of the printers hyphen. A language which, like
the English, is almost without cases, is indeed in its very genius
unfitted for compounds. If a writer, every time a compounded word
suggests itself to him, would seek for some other mode of expressing
the same sense, the chances are always greatly in favour of his
finding a better word. Ut tanquam scopulum sic fugias insolens verbum,
is the wise advice of Caesar to the Roman Orators, and the precept
applies with double force to the writers in our own language. But it
must not be forgotten, that the same Caesar wrote a Treatise for the
purpose of reforming the ordinary language by bringing it to a greater
accordance with the principles of logic or universal grammar.
[2] See the criticisms on the Ancient Mariner, in the Monthly and
Critical Reviews of the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads.
[3] This is worthy of ranking as a maxim, (regula maxima,) of
criticism. Whatever is translatable in other and simpler words of the
same language, without loss of sense or dignity, is bad. N.B.—By
dignity I mean the absence of ludicrous and debasing associations.
[4] The Christ's Hospital phrase, not for holidays altogether, but for
those on which the boys are permitted to go beyond the precincts of
the school.
[5] I remember a ludicrous instance in the poem of a young tradesman:
"No more will I endure love's pleasing pain,
Or round my heart's leg tie his galling chain."
[6] Cowper's Task was published some time before the Sonnets of Mr.
Bowles; but I was not familiar with it till many years afterwards. The
vein of satire which runs through that excellent poem, together with
the sombre hue of its religious opinions, would probably, at that
time, have prevented its laying any strong hold on my affections. The
love of nature seems to have led Thomson to a cheerful religion; and a
gloomy religion to have led Cowper to a love of nature. The one would
carry his fellow-men along with him into nature; the other flies to
nature from his fellow-men. In chastity of diction however, and the
harmony of blank verse, Cowper leaves Thomson immeasurably below him;
yet still I feel the latter to have been the born poet.
[7] SONNET I
Pensive at eve, on the hard world I mused,
And m poor heart was sad; so at the Moon
I gazed and sighed, and sighed; for ah how soon
Eve saddens into night! mine eyes perused
With tearful vacancy the dampy grass
That wept and glitter'd in the paly ray
And I did pause me on my lonely way
And mused me on the wretched ones that pass
O'er the bleak heath of sorrow. But alas!
Most of myself I thought! when it befel,
That the soothe spirit of the breezy wood
Breath'd in mine ear: "All this is very well,
But much of one thing, is for no thing good."
Oh my poor heart's inexplicable swell!
SONNET II
Oh I do love thee, meek Simplicity!
For of thy lays the lulling simpleness
Goes to my heart, and soothes each small distress,
Distress the small, yet haply great to me.
'Tis true on Lady Fortune's gentlest pad
I amble on; and yet I know not why
So sad I am! but should a friend and I
Frown, pout and part, then I am very sad.
And then with sonnets and with sympathy
My dreamy bosom's mystic woes I pall:
Now of my false friend plaining plaintively,
Now raving at mankind in general;
But whether sad or fierce, 'tis simple all,
All very simple, meek Simplicity!
SONNET III
And this reft house is that, the which he built,
Lamented Jack! and here his malt he pil'd,
Cautious in vain! these rats, that squeak so wild,
Squeak not unconscious of their father's guilt.
Did he not see her gleaming thro' the glade!
Belike 'twas she, the maiden all forlorn.
What the she milk no cow with crumpled horn,
Yet, aye she haunts the dale where erst she stray'd:
And aye, beside her stalks her amorous knight
Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn,
And thro' those brogues, still tatter'd and betorn,
His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white.
Ah! thus thro' broken clouds at night's high noon
Peeps to fair fragments forth the full-orb'd harvest-moon!
The following anecdote will not be wholly out of place here, and may
perhaps amuse the reader. An amateur performer in verse expressed to a
common friend a strong desire to be introduced to me, but hesitated in
accepting my friend's immediate offer, on the score that "he was, he
must acknowledge, the author of a confounded severe epigram on my
Ancient Mariner, which had given me great pain." I assured my friend
that, if the epigram was a good one, it would only increase my desire
to become acquainted with the author, and begged to hear it recited:
when, to my no less surprise than amusement, it proved to be one which
I had myself some time before written and inserted in the "Morning
Post," to wit
To the Author of the Ancient Mariner.
Your poem must eternal be,
Dear sir! it cannot fail,
For 'tis incomprehensible,
And without head or tail.
Posted by Jesus Crisis at 7/1/2009 9:31 AM 
Categories: Coleridge (Samuel T), British, Autobiography, Writing, Philosophy, 1800s
Tags: Biographia Literaria Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Categories: Coleridge (Samuel T), British, Autobiography, Writing, Philosophy, 1800s
Tags: Biographia Literaria Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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