Coleridge did not lie undisturbed for very long. At the end of August 1807, Poole received an urgent letter from Davy on the subject of the lectures in London. “The Managers of the Royal Institution are very anxious to engage him; and I think he might be of material service to the public, and of benefit to his own mind, to say nothing of the benefit his purse might receive. In the present condition of society, his opinions in matters of taste, literature, and metaphysics must have a healthy influence; and unless he soon becomes an actual member of the living world, he must expect to be brought to judgment ‘for hiding his light’…”1
This time there was no Wordsworth to dissuade him, and no Asra to distract him (though both had been the subject of painful Notebook entries at Stowey, one of them about the bedroom incident, ending “Awakened from a dream of Tears, & anguish of involuntary Jealousy, 1/2 past 2…”).2
Coleridge wrote back to Davy with surprising promptitude on 9 September, accepting the proposal on a revised plan. After helpful discussions with Poole, he had decided to abandon the visual art aspect of the lectures (his Mediterranean materials still lying marooned with Stoddart at Malta) and to concentrate purely on the literary side. His subject would be “the Principles of Poetry”. He would try to do something largely new in English criticism: to isolate and define the psychology of the creative imagination on systematic, philosophical grounds.
He would illustrate his theory with a grand sweep through the history of English literature: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Pope and the Moderns. Everything would be subordinated to his central concept, elaborated over many years, of the dynamic connection between the structure of poetry and the structure of the human mind. “In the course of these I shall have said, all I know, the whole result of many years’ continued reflection on the subjects of Taste, Imagination, Fancy, Passion, the source of our pleasures in the fine Arts in the antithetical balance-loving nature of man, & the connections with moral excellence.”3
At the heart of Coleridge’s thesis would emerge a concept of the poetic imagination which acted as a single unifying force within all creative acts. This idea, which was to become a defining doctrine of Romanticism, may well have been partly triggered by Davy’s own scientific theories about the nature of energy and matter, which he too was exploring that autumn at the Royal Society in a series of brilliant lectures and demonstrations. Coleridge wrote later that Davy’s “own great discovery, of the identity of electricity and chemical attraction”, had opened the way to a unified theory of energy in the universe. “Davy supposes that there is only one power in the world of the senses; which in particles acts as chemical attractions, in specific masses as electricity, & on matter in general, as planetary Gravitation…When this has been proved, it will then only remain to resolve this into some Law of vital Intellect – and all human Knowledge will be Science and Metaphysics the only Science.”4
This was an early premonition of the modern physicist’s search for a “Grand Unified Theory” applicable to the entire cosmos. Coleridge’s fascination with the idea of “the one power in the world of the senses”, led him to seek for an equivalent unifying dynamic within the human mind, the “one power” of Imagination. Certainly it encouraged him to believe that his “experimental” knowledge of poetry, and his endless private reflections in the Notebooks on his own mental processes, were no longer to be lost or wasted, but could be mounted into a general body of critical theory. This belief that all was not lost, that he still had a role to play as a poet and thinker, and that his light might not in the end be hidden, proved one of the most sustaining visions of his life. Out of all his dark sufferings and failures, some brightness might still be salvaged. As he observed of a battered peacock picking quietly around Tom Poole’s yard: “The molting Peacock with only two of his long tail-feathers remaining, & those sadly in tatters, yet proudly as ever spreading out his ruined fan in the Sun & Breeze.”5
Much of the rest of Coleridge’s long and grateful letter to Davy was, of course, a lament over his troubles – among which Mrs Coleridge and the Ottery family débâcle featured in “wearying Detail”, and his own “bodily derangement” with a medical exactitude that nonetheless excluded opium. The decision to send his wife and children back to Keswick is given without regret, and one wonders how Coleridge had explained this to Hartley, the abrupt end to his “annus mirabilis” with his father. Perhaps this was one of the “far crueller Calamities” that he did not explain to Davy either.
But in general Coleridge felt his time in the Quantocks had been immensely restoring. He had received “such manifest benefit from horse exercise, a gradual abandonment of fermented & total abstinence from spirituous liquors, & by being alone with Poole & the renewal of old times by wandering about among my dear old walks, of Quantock & Alfoxden, that I have now seriously set about composition…”6
Work in hand still included the Mediterranean “Travels”, though the Longman two-volume edition of “all my poetic scraps” would be held over – as it turned out for nearly a decade. It was his serious determination “not to give a single Lecture till I have in fair writing at least one half of the whole course”. Either at Stowey, or at Bristol, he began a new Notebook7 which sketched out his preliminary themes, especially with reference to Shakespeare’s “endless activity of Thought” as the primary example of “poetic Power” exercised through language.8
Coleridge returned to Bristol in late September, hoping to be with Davy in London by the end of the month, where concentrated work could begin. But first he had to arrange for his family’s departure north, which instantly revived all the old frictions. Here young De Quincey’s reappearance as willing acolyte at College Street smoothed Coleridge’s passage. Sara Coleridge, writing privately to Poole (as she would do increasingly in coming years), gave her own wifely account of Coleridge’s exasperating behaviour. “When he at length joined us in Bristol in such excellent health and improved looks, I thought of days ‘lang syne’ and hoped and prayed it might continue. Alas! in three or four days it was all over. He said he must go to town immediately about the Lectures, yet he stayed three weeks without another word about removing, and I durst not speak lest it should disarrange him. Mr De Quincey, who was a frequent visitor to C. in College Street, proposed accompanying me and the children into Cumberland, as he wished much to pay Wordsworth and Southey a visit. This was a pleasant scheme to me…”9
Sara’s brisk practicality, which affords no mention of Coleridge’s profound professional doubts or deep anxieties about the future of those children, suggests the gulf of misunderstanding which now divided husband and wife. Yet her impatience at Coleridge’s apparent vagaries – was it really the husband or the wife who “durst not speak” about the departure? – also suggests at a deeper level some abiding, loyal affection. For her it is evident that the “separation” could not easily be acknowledged, and this too was to remain a source of pain and resentment.
Coleridge’s delay in Bristol was partly caused by the delicate negotiations, undertaken through Cottle, over De Quincey’s anonymous loan, which continued through October. Coleridge was concerned that his “unknown Benefactor” should not “transgress” his other duties; and also wanted his identity revealed “at the expiration of one year”. De Quincey told Cottle that he was drawing on an expected inheritance of £2,600, at which Cottle urged a lower sum of £300.10 This figure was eventually made over on 12
