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This article examines the literary influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It explains that Coleridge's achievements are so varied and his literary influence so diverse that no generalization can be made. There is no single distinctive Coleridgean idiom or manner for later poets to appropriate or to reject. But among Coleridge's contemporaries, it was William Wordsworth who felt the impact most momentously. The article suggests that Wordsworth would not have become Wordsworth had he evaded Coleridge's sway.

Faced with so admirably, recalcitrantly diverse a range of papers, an introducer or respondent is likely to reach for something appreciative about the rich variety of subjects and approaches on offer: that might amount to not much more than a formula, of course; but in this case, I think, variety really is the point. How should we taxonomise the literature that we read and study? It is an especially nice problem for students of Romanticism, since Romantic (let me call them) writers found the question of classification especially compelling. There might not seem much room for dispute about the line they normally took on the question: the loci classici all suggest themselves quickly enough. "I never judge system-wise of things, but fasten upon particulars" (Lamb, i.163): Charles Lamb strikes what sounds like the characteristic Romantic note. William Blake's marginal rebuke to SirJoshua Reynolds makes the point more obstreperously: "To generalize is be an idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit" (Blake, 641). That nominates just the sort of imaginative excellence which Keats considered wanting in Coleridge, a man (he thought) who "would let go a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge" (Keats, 72). Many of Coleridge's contemporaries took such a view, of course; but, his philosophical idealism and his immense intellectual investment in the notion of system notwithstanding, Coleridge was hardly untouched by a Romantic gusto for the incorrigibly individual: the descriptive power of the Notebooks might imply as much, as would his enthusiasm for the striking particularities of the Shakespearean drama - in the margin of Julius Caesar he exclaims, "why, they really are flesh & blood Individuals" (Coleridge, Marginalia, 806). Certainly, Wordsworth, in The Prelude at least, was ready to praise Coleridge for an alertness to the seamless heterogeneity of things which successfully overcame any categorising ambitions that his abstracting intelligence might have entertained: Thou, my friend, art one More deeply read in thy own thoughts, no slave Of that false secondary power by which In weakness we create distinctions, then Believe our puny boundaries are things Which we perceive, and not which we have made. (Wordsworth, 27) The Goleridgean paradox appropriately stirring in Wordsworth's complimentary lines turns about the one and the many: resisting the mind's false powers of classification promises to leave the world free to live its particularly multiple life; but it also works, here, to restore the world to its deep, abiding oneness. "To thee," Wordsworth goes on to say to Coleridge, "unblinded by these outward shows, -- The unity of all has been revealed." The tribute is finely judged, then, because it points in two directions at once, rather as Coleridge does: his favourite proverb was "Extremes Meet" (which he hoped they would). It certainly might seem a little rum simply to praise Coleridge, of all people, for his firm stand against secondary distinctions, for few thinkers can have taken more delight in distinguishing between things (understanding and reason, fancy and imagination, poem and poetry) that most people had thought pretty much the same -- as Coleridge ruefully acknowledged to his Notebook: "bring me two things that seem the very same, & then I am quick enough to shew the difference, even to hair-splitting" (Coleridge, Notebooks, ii.2372). Coleridge knew very well that an overpowering sense of oneness, while no doubt spiritually impeccable, did not help you to think much, any more than would an awareness of the differentness of things; his thought has a highly distinctive sort of rhythm, swinging between the two principles: "While I am attempting to explain this intimate coalition, I must suppose it dissolved" (Coleridge, Biographia, i. …

‘We live in mental representations of the past’, said Wallace Stevens, which might itself appear a very ‘Romantic’ way of looking at things; and ‘Romanticism’ is one of those representations. We live in mental representations of the present too of course, though, as it happens ‘Romantic’ was not a representation that would have seemed important to the ‘Romantics’ themselves: in English letters it is a retrospective category. ‘Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats did not regard themselves as writing“romantic” poems’, Ian Jack observes, ‘and would not – in fact – have been particularly flattered if they had been told that that was what they were doing.’ The word is current within the period, as it still is, in the sense that Johnson’s Dictionary offers (‘resembling the tales of romances’) before moving on to more judgmental uses, both negative (‘Improbable; false’) and more positive (‘Fanciful; full of wild scenery’) – as in the ‘deep romantic chasm which slanted / Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover’ from ‘Kubla Khan’ (lines 12–13). Jack judiciously omits Coleridge from his list of authors for Coleridge did think of some of his poems as ‘romantic’, and not without pride: he recollected his planned contribution to Lyrical Ballads as poems ‘directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic’. But the word as used at the time is hardly a key to the intricacies of the age: it lacks the implicit ‘structure of dogma’ that William Empson identifies as the heart of a ‘complex word’.

This lecture presents the text of the speech about English poet W.H. Auden delivered by the author at the 2008 Chatterton Lecture on Poetry held at the British Academy. It discusses criticism on Auden as a poet who somehow lived beyond the early moment of his greatest and most amazing genius, and as one whose latest effort represented nothing less than the decline and fall of modernist poetry. The lecture also provides a critical analysis of some of Auden's most notable works.

Stephen Gill, Wordsworth's Revisitings (Oxford University Press, 2011) 280+ $45/25 [pounds sterling]. Just who did Wordsworth think he was? The question occurs to students sometimes, especially when faced with statements of Wordsworthian extraordinariness such as: "Of Genius, Power, Creation and Divinity itself / I have been speaking, for my theme has been / What pass'd within me." What makes him think he can speak in that way? It is one of the many excellences of Stephen Gill's absorbing new book, Wordsworth's Revisitings, that it takes that question perfectly seriously: what exactly was the source of Wordsworth's sense of his own poetic authority? And the answer turns out to be both curious and ramificatory. It is true that Wordsworth can sound at times as though he has been given an inside line on the mysteries of life by something impressive and transcendent, such as Nature or God or those "spirits" who are said to form "favoured" beings with their gentle visitations in the 1799 Prelude. But, in truth, his most compelling voice finds the grounds of its authority somewhere quite different--in a profound drive to ever-greater self-acquaintance. It is not really to accuse him of self-congratulation or vanity to say that Wordsworth simply could not stop thinking about himself. People have been accusing him of "egotism" ever since Hazlitt, but the charge is complicated in any fair-minded account of the matter because Wordsworth was so acutely aware himself that charges of self-congratulation and vanity were all too likely. As he watched his autobiographical epic grow and grow, he self-deprecatingly told his friend Sharp that it seemed "a frightful deal to say about one's self," and such doubts were obviously quite genuine. But still, as Gill says, they did not stop his continuing to say a good deal more and devoting many years to doing so, as though some impulse even more powerful than natural reticence were at work. It is not just a matter of saying a lot about oneself, however: it is, very often, a matter of going back to what you said about yourself before and saying it differently this time. Vladimir Nabokov once said that the point of reading a book, a basically tiresome activity, is that it enables you to do what is really exciting, which is re-reading a book; and Wordsworth seems sometimes to have felt the same way about writing verse. Stephen Gill's central perception in this work is that Wordsworth's drive for self-acquaintance repeatedly expressed itself as an overwhelming urge to re-acquaint himself with his own earlier writings. Many of Wordsworth's finest poems are about going back to a place you have been before, re-discovering who you were then and wondering at how you have become what you are now; but the "revisitings" that are especially in question here are re-encounters with the past made through texts and manuscripts--what Gill calls Wordsworth's "continual return ... to his past in his past writing." Everyone knows that Wordsworth was given to revision: scholars have usually conceived that habit in terms of the editorial challenge (or headache) which it creates, or seen it as a regrettable tic that spoiled good original things with unworthy second thoughts. The power of Gill's study is to see the phenomenon as the main fact to be accounted for in Wordsworth's imaginative life. The compulsion at work is partly the desire further to improve, naturally; but Wordsworthian revision is not that much like, say, Joyce's desire to fine-tune pieces of language closer and closer to a perfection that their author always had in mind. For Wordsworth, says Gill, going back to earlier texts was doing something different and distinctive: it was a way, as he puts it, of articulating "a live engagement with the past" that "reactivates it into conjunction with the present." That cast of mind is exemplified in these expert pages by the textual history of many works. One of its most telling small-scale expressions is Wordsworth's habit of re-using old material in new contexts: "He was always determined that a good line or passage should find its proper home," says Gill, nicely. …