Coleridge, by Richard Holmes

...oleridge in his student days was as One cannot fail to notice that there wild as any young aristocratic has always been an ideological element blood, despite his being the son of a in critical approaches to Coleridge...

...where, in order to escape financial emHolmes's biography tells a rather dif- barrassment, he enlisted in the army ferent story...

...In 1793, when the seeming tri- year...

...country clergyman and having been Critics of the left have generally treated educated at an austere charitable estabhim as a turncoat, a radical who be- lishment...

...children under the roofs of fellow poets, notably that of Wordsworth, with whose sister-in-law, Sara Hutchinson, he unwisely fell in love...

...No other poet of the appearance of the second volume, in house or let him live with them at age possessed what Coleridge had: the which we may expect Holmes to give theirs...

...idea of setting up a colony on the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1990 banks of the Susquehanna River with of Western culture, helping to propel ridge, aged thirty-two, setting sail for his fellow poet Robert Southey and the spirit of the times from the values Malta to assume a wartime post as act-twenty-two other friends...

...At Cambridge he carried his trayed his radicalism, relapsing into drinking and gambling to the point bourgeois torpor and Anglican sloth...

...Today his standing is revolutionists forsook liberty in the as high as it has ever been, and the ap- pursuit of other ends...

...But, unlike so and as a lecturer at Unitarian chapels many others, he saw the French Revolu- in provincial ( as...

...On leaving Cam-with most freedom-loving Englishmen bridge, he had many offers of employ-and Americans in welcoming gladly the ment, both on newspapers in London events of 1789 in Paris...

...Con- what freedom meant...

...He did not lose his own wars...

...In 1798, he quit the society of his wife and child to go to the University of Gottingen to study romanticism at the feet of its leading exponents, and it was there that he really matured as a thinker...

...island...

...It ing the period from Coleridge's birth seems he was such a clumsy soldier that in 1772 to his departure from England the army was only too pleased to re-as a colonial official in 1804, Holmes lease him when his brothers discovered points out that Coleridge reached ma- him and arranged for his return to turity in the years of the French Revo- Cambridge...

...pearance of this new biography has already served as an occasion for handsome tributes...

...Aged seventeen when the Bastille tism that was equidistant from radical-was stormed, Coleridge was in tune ism and reaction...

...He was often ill...

...On their trip, municant in the Church of England...

...Young Coleridge had not the polit- He soon found himself at odds with ical insight of Edmund Burke, his sen- both Whigs and Tories, and, although for by forty-three years, who was al- he continued to move in radical circles, most alone in discerning the true char- we can already discern in his thinking acter of the French Revolution from the an effort to define a kind of conservastart...

...disillusionment...

...Health, moreover, was not really a necessity to the sort of poet that Coleridge aspired to be—a romantic one, on the model of Rousseau, a suffering, brooding anti-hero, wandering in the mountains and yearning for the unattainable, and also neglecting, in a most irresponsible fashion, the duties of home and family...

...His enthu- of the Enlightenment to those of a new ing secretary to the governor of that siasm for this project, which they called post-revolutionary era...

...In this first volume, cover- under the name of "Cumberbache...

...This enabled him to dedicate umph of liberty turned into a Reign of himself full-time to poetry and philosTerror, Coleridge reproached the ophy, apart from an interval of govern-French for turning aside from their ment service during the Napoleonic own ideals...

...Coleridge was constantly striving either Wordsworth could not even be bothered Readers will await with impatience the to have friends live with him at his to learn German...

...By the age of thirty, Coleridge had put away what he called his "squeaking baby trumpet of sedition" and no longer appeared as a lecturer on Unitarian platforms or as a columnist in the radical press...

...France: An nected in the public mind with roman- Ode," which he wrote as the French ticism, idealism, and conservatism, revolutionary armies invaded Switzer-Coleridge has generally been in favor land, gave eloquent expression to his when such things have been in fashion...

...Instead, he began to produce those writings that established him as a seminal figure in the history THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1990 39...

...The Pennsylvania colony was academic training needed to construct the latter half of Coleridge's life the never started, but Coleridge spent more a coherent philosophical system...

...His need to be nursed gave him increased attention from Sara Hutchinson and Dorothy Wordsworth, who were more disposed to nurse him than was his wife...

...same sympathetic scrutiny he has given and more time away from his wife and The present volume ends with Cole- to these earlier years...

...He was spared the tion not as a single phenomenon but need to accept a paid job when the as a series of developments in which philanthropist Josiah Wedgwood be-different ends were pursued at different stowed on him an annuity of £150 a times...

...The experience was to prove less a "pantisocracy," was perhaps as much Wordsworth, who dominated Cole- than wholly satisfactory, and the poet personal as ideological, for Coleridge's ridge in the earliest years of their col- was to experience many more ordeals marriage to Sara Fricker, into which he laboration and who accompanied him and emotional crises before he found had been more or less dragooned by to Germany, could not have achieved tranquility and responsibility as a corn-Southey, was not a happy one, and what Coleridge did...

...Coleridge's contemporaries—Wordsworth, Southey, Blake —were more or less instinctive romantics, but Coleridge was a reflective one, and he became absorbed as much in the theory of romanticism as in the practice of romantic poetry...

...For months he toyed with the Jacques Rousseau...

...22.95 Maurice Cranston T he prestige of Samuel Taylor Cole- faith in freedom, but claimed that the 1 ridge, poet and philosopher, has French had lost their understanding of fluctuated since his death in 1834...

...H olmes suggests that unconsummated love for Sara Hutchinson, coupled with guilt about the other Sara, his wife, accounted for much of the anxiety and depression that clouded Coleridge's early manhood...

...The habit of taking opium—not especially unusual among highly strung young Englishmen of the nineteenth century—together with an addiction to brandy and tea (the latter the substance he considered most harmful) —further undermined his health...

...He continued to speak of the possiMaurice Cranston is professor of bility of the regeneration of society, if political science at the London School only through experiments in communal of Economics and a biographer of Jean- living...

...He worked out for himself a Weltanschauung merging his political ideas and his literary criticism into a coherent philosophy that lay somewhere between Kant and Hegel...

...That is when Coleridge lution, and that it was less a case of the began to make himself heard as a dissipoet's opinions changing than of the dent voice in the political debates of the Revolution changing—from a move- time, and revealed talents as a jourment for liberty into a regime of popu- nalist and public lecturer as well as a list dictatorship...

...The word "liberal" Yet I can remember when, more than had not yet come into use, so we may thirty years ago, his grave at Highgate say of Coleridge that he was a liberin north London was so neglected that tarian who ended up on the side of his very bones were visible inside the Burke precisely because the French crumbling tomb...