[In the following excerpt, Modiano traces the gradual process of alienation that occurred between Wordsworth and Coleridge, focusing on the role of the poets' attitudes regarding nature in the disintegration of their literary and personal relationship.]

It is well known that Coleridge's opinion of himself depended excessively on how others viewed him and that he continuously regarded himself through the eyes of powerful men on whom he bestowed more affection than he would or could hope to get in return. He was given to idolizing his friends and easily disappointed when he sensed the slightest breach of loyalty. He was also easily persuaded of his own worthlessness by comparison with the creative stamina and successful lives he attributed to his friends, while at the same time he knew that he possessed extraordinary powers that, potentially at least, far exceeded those of his rivals. Of all the men Coleridge successively chose as his idols, none engaged his admiration more and none caused him as much anguish and perilous self-doubt as Wordsworth. From the early stages of their collaboration on the Lyrical Ballads and even after their quarrel in 1810, 'The Giant Wordsworth' remained for Coleridge an intimidating example of personal success that far outweighed anything Coleridge thought he had accomplished. While Wordsworth's poetic star was rising, his was setting, and Coleridge saw himself increasingly pushed into the inferior role of a metaphysician. While Wordsworth's private life, after the turbulent episode with Annette Vallon, was finally settling into a peaceful marriage, Coleridge's was disintegrating due to his aggravated opium addiction, increasing marital tensions, and his passionate but hopeless love for Sara Hutchinson. While the women of the Wordsworth household all flocked around his friend, obviously attracted by his masculinity, Coleridge had to struggle for their attention, and he even suspected, to his utmost despair, that Sara Hutchinson was in love with Wordsworth. Wordsworth was constantly in the way, conquering and appropriating more of the territory Coleridge felt should have been his but which he had no power to withhold.

It is apparent that among their friends Wordsworth enjoyed the reputation of being best acquainted with 'Lady Nature' and that Coleridge would have liked to have some recognition on this score. Thus, Coleridge often engaged in competition with Wordsworth—directly, by claiming to perceive more clearly the identity of some misty phenomenon in a landscape they were both observing, or to understand more profoundly the impact of natural forms upon the soul; and indirectly, by trying to impress upon his friends the extent of his passion for nature. To Sara Hutchinson, for instance, he described in great detail his adventurous second tour of the Lakes (1802) and his nearly fatal descent from Scafell, which left him with shaking limbs but a 'fearless' spirit and an even greater confidence in the safe abode of nature, provided one's 'powers of Reason & the Will' were in order. Two years earlier Coleridge wrote to Francis Wrangham about a less risky, though still slightly sacrificial activity stirred by his great attraction to nature: "I seldom shave without cutting myself. Some Mountain or Peak is rising out of the Mist, or some slanting Column of misty Sunlight is sailing cross me / so that I offer soap & blood daily, as an Eye-servant of the Goddess Nature'.

This light and somewhat jocular remark should not mislead us. It is not a casual remark but reflects Coleridge's acute anxieties, voiced earlier in the letter, that in relationship to Wordsworth he was no more than an inferior sort of metaphysician: 'As to our literary occupations they are still more distant than our residences—He [Wordsworth] is a great, a true Poet—I am only a kind of Metaphysician.—He has even now sent off the last sheet of a second volume of his Lyrical Ballads'. In his subsequent confession of his daily sacrifice to nature, Coleridge is clearly trying to subvert the validity of his self-portrait as a metaphysician. He is not, as Charles Lamb fondly remembered him at Christ's Hospital, a man removed from reality by his metaphysical pursuits, but, on the contrary, irresistibly drawn to nature to the point of becoming oblivious to his daily occupations. Coleridge's confession is by no means inauthentic. As his passionate explorations of picturesque scenery attest, he had every right to present himself as a devotee of nature. But the confession betrays a sense of embarrassment. Coleridge, it appears, cannot speak to Francis Wrangham, a friend of Wordsworth, about his interest in nature, except by way of a joke. No doubt Coleridge was sufficiently wary of the mind's surrender to sense objects to resist a complete identification with nature. But the irony injected into his declaration of subservience to 'the Goddess Nature' has more complex sources. At this time Coleridge wanted very much to assert his passion for nature as a testimony that he was not exclusively preoccupied with metaphysics, and by implication, still capable of becoming a 'true Poet'. Coleridge perceived a direct link between one's communion with natural objects and poetic power, a link fully and somewhat painfully confirmed by Wordsworth's fortunes as a poet. Wordsworth was at once completely integrated in his natural environment at Grasmere—a place, Coleridge wrote to Wrangham, 'worthy of him, & of which he is worthy'—and happily productive completing the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads.

The cooperation with Wordsworth on the Lyrical Ballads left Coleridge with a huge complex of poetic inferiority, fostered to a great extent by Wordsworth's insinuation that the supernatural strangeness of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' was largely responsible for the poor reception of the volume as a whole. It is significant that in the letter to Wrangham Coleridge referred to the Lyrical Ballads as Wordsworth's sole property, even though the volume contained some of Coleridge's own poems and was conceived as a joint literary endeavour. But the letter to Wrangham is suggestive in another respect: it shows that Coleridge's feelings of poetic inferiority in relationship to Wordsworth also affected his self-image as a lover of nature. It is as if, having failed to prove himself as a great poet, Coleridge could not seriously claim a great attraction to nature, but only a fated passion for metaphysics. Coleridge's confession of loyalty towards nature has a double edge to it. It serves as a protection against a full surrender to the natural world, which Coleridge found dangerous to the life of the mind. It also allows Coleridge to express his passion for nature by way of self-mockery, thus saving himself from possible ridicule for striking the pose of a devotee of nature, a pose as improbable for Coleridge as that of a successful poet.

The link between Coleridge's sense of poetic failure vis-à-vis Wordsworth and his conflicting desire to attach himself to nature and yet to remain detached from it is not incidental and bears further scrutiny. When Coleridge left for Germany after the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, he had, supposedly, also left behind his career as a poet, returning fully dressed in the garb of a philosopher. This view, to which Coleridge himself gave currency, cannot be taken at face value, though the psychological toll it took of Coleridge cannot be underestimated either. Furthermore, his reputation as a poet had been severely wounded by the publication of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', a work which one reviewer characterized as a 'rhapsody of unintelligible wildness and incoherence' and about which Wordsworth himself had expressed serious reservations. In Wordsworth's eyes Coleridge's experiment in the species of poetry 'directed to persons and characters supernatural' had failed, and Wordsworth was hardly diplomatic in conveying his dissatisfaction with the contribution of his partner, as shown by the apologetic note to the poem he included in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth also refused to include 'Christabel' in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads on the grounds that it was 'disproportionate both in size & merit, & as discordant in it's [sic] character'.

The impact on Coleridge of Wordsworth's disappointment with his supernatural poems was devastating and long-lasting. It virtually maimed the poet in him, as I. A. Richards put it. Wordsworth's rejection of 'Christabel', a poem in which Coleridge was nearer to realizing his ideal, at least in his own estimate, brought him to the verge of a physical breakdown. Coleridge did not publish 'Christabel' until sixteen years after he had begun it, and then only perhaps because Byron urged him to do so. It was also not until 1817 that Coleridge included the revised version of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' in a volume of his own poetry (Sibylline Leaves). That after the Lyrical Ballads Coleridge no longer wrote 'Christabels and Ancient Mariners', as Charles Lamb deplored, is not, therefore, surprising. Coleridge could not bring himself to repeat the creative effort which, in Wordsworth's opinion, resulted in a poetry of questionable quality and taste. Already the composition of 'Christabel' proved to be extremely difficult, and Coleridge left the poem unfinished.

In the period following the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge, despite his protestations to the contrary, was still very much concerned with his prospects as a poet and planned to write a good number of poems and collections of poetry. Many of these projects, interestingly enough, mark a complete break from the supernatural poetry Coleridge undertook to write as part of the Lyrical Ballads experiment. The plans Coleridge frequently announced after 1800 concern topographic poems, poems celebrating the daily performance of nature in the vale of Keswick, or transcriptions of landscape drawings in the form of a 'moral Descriptive poem', 'an Inscription' or 'a Tale'. Consistently, Coleridge's privileged subject for future poetry turned on 'the virtues connected with the Love of Nature', a choice less peculiar than it may seem when we take into account Coleridge's extreme vulnerability to Wordsworth's opinions and his instinct to emulate his influential friend.

When 'Christabel' was dropped from the Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge was to replace it with a group of poems on 'the Naming of Places'—a project that Wordsworth seemed to encourage, making a special trip to Keswick in mid-October 1800 to acquire the poems for the Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge never produced the promised poems, but the plan is itself symptomatic of his willingness to substitute naturalistic poems for a supernatural tale and to produce the kind of poetry that he thought Wordsworth would approve. The poems on 'the Naming of Places' fit in with the characteristic projects on topographic or moral—descriptive subjects Coleridge envisioned writing after 1800. One other project, perhaps the most ambitious of all, should be mentioned here, as it reveals poignantly the extent to which Coleridge felt compelled to imitate the Wordsworthian canon. The plan was conceived during a walk Coleridge took through Borrodale in October 1803 and appears to be no less than an intended replica of The Prelude, which Wordsworth was working on at the time. The immediate occasion that prompted Coleridge to devise this plan was his discovery in Borrodale of a magnificent spot that deserved to be marked with a 'Cross or Heap of Stones' and honoured in verse. Just before announcing his projected poem in his entry, Coleridge drops a casual reference to an argument he and Wordsworth had about the size of 'Bowder Stone' compared to two other rocks in Borrodale. This trivial argument introduces a far more serious battle with Wordsworth that Coleridge does not openly acknowledge—the battle of a dispossessed poet trying to regain his status by borrowing his rival's own means of success. Here is how Coleridge conceives of his autobiographical poem:

Go & build up a pile of three [stones], by that Coppice—measure the Strides from the Bridge where the water rushes down a rock in no mean cataract if the Rains should have swoln the River . . . from this Bridge measure the Strides to the Place, build the Stone heap, & write a Poem, thus beginning—From the Bridge &c repeat such a Song, of Milton, or Homer—so many Lines I will must find out, may be distinctly recited during a moderate healthy man's walk from the Bridge thither—or better perhaps from the other Bridge—so to this Heap of Stones—there turn in—& then describe the Scene.—O surely I might make a noble Poem of all my Youth nay of all my Life—One section on plants & flowers, my passion for them, always deadened by their learned names.

As much as we can infer from this brief description, it appears that Coleridge's 'noble Poem' was to be written in the high style of an epic or perhaps an ode and grafted onto the Wordsworthian topos of adherence to natural spots. It was to be a poem celebrating Coleridge's passion for nature and, possibly, tracing the history of his relationship with nature throughout his life. Coleridge would have found a model for such a poem in 'Tintern Abbey', and from talks with William and Dorothy he might have also anticipated the kind of project Wordsworth was engaged in at the time. There is, however, something altogether peculiar about the way Coleridge proceeds to lay out his poem. It is as if Coleridge is trying not just to evoke a certain place in a poem, but virtually to tailor his composition according to the physical pattern provided by the place. There is a deliberate binding of poem to place or, borrowing one of Coleridge's own phrases in another context, what I would like to call spot fixation 'with a vengeance'. Thus, Coleridge's preliminary concern is to count the number of strides from the bridge to the discovered spot and to schedule the length of his poem accordingly. The writing of the poem is presented as an activity that is continuous with and undifferentiated from the purely mechanical parts of the project: 'measure the Strides to the Place, build the Stone heap, & write a Poem'.

It is to be expected that no Prelude ever emerged from such tight measurements. Coleridge's 'noble Poem', so far as we know, was never written, just as the other projects in the naturalistic mode never materialized. This evidence seems to corroborate the opinion of some critics that Coleridge is not concerned with external objects and incapable of writing good nature poetry because for him the main source of inspiration came from 'the life within', from fantasy and dream. Wordsworth summarized this view best when he told Henry Crabb Robinson in 1812 that Coleridge was addicted to 'his own extraordinary powers summoning up an image or series of images in his own mind' and thus given to 'a sort of dreaminess which would not let him see things as they were' or experience the 'influence of external objects'. But surely this view, while capturing a certain direction in the later Coleridge of which he was himself most critical, is an inadequate description both of his poetry and of his personality as a whole. To say that Coleridge could not write nature poetry or that he was perpetually sleep-walking in an imaginary realm closed to nature's 'living images' is to ignore his having composed a poem like 'This Limetree Bower my Prison', and the fastidiously precise observations of various sensory phenomena in his journals. In fact, comparing Coleridge's description of a spot in the hills of Alfoxden in 'This Lime-tree Bower my Prison' with Wordsworth's own account of this place in 'Lines Written in Early Spring', Stephen Maxfield Parrish concludes that 'Coleridge traces the surfaces of Nature with close attention to realistic detail, only unobtrusively committing the pathetic fallacy, while Wordsworth glances at but moves beyond the surfaces, boldly investing Nature with life and feeling, then turns from Nature to man. In the end, Coleridge's poem is more an outright celebration of nature than Wordsworth's, and closer to the matter-of-fact world of eye and ear'.

If we accept the premise that Coleridge could—and did—write nature poetry, then his failure to turn out the projected topographic and autobiographic poems cannot be attributed to some constitutional handicap of his temperament or to his reputation as a poet of trance. I would like to advance a speculation here that may shed some light on this matter. The history of Coleridge's early collaboration with Wordsworth shows that the two poets could not engage successfully in the same project and that they wrote some of their best work when dealing with completely different subjects and methods of exploration. Coleridge's and Wordsworth's attempts to collaborate on a single poem, which was the earliest plan for the Lyrical Ballads, resulted instead in a more voluminous output of 'two sorts' of poems, one adhering to 'the truth of nature' and lending 'the charm of novelty to things of every day', the other proposing to show 'the dramatic truth' of emotions experienced by 'every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency'. This account given by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria is an accurate description of what came out of the Lyrical Ballads venture, but, as Shawcross pointed out, it is not a reliable testimony of how the volume was originally conceived. In a letter to Humphry Davy written in October 1800, Coleridge presents the Lyrical Ballads as 'an experiment to see how far those passions which alone give any value to extraordinary Incidents, were capable of interesting, in & for themselves, in the incidents of common Life'. This version of the project, which approximates the way Wordsworth himself recalled it in his Fenwick note to 'We Are Seven', makes no provision for 'persons and characters supernatural' or 'the willing suspension of disbelief'. From the written evidence we have and from what we know about Wordsworth's sensibility, it is safe to assume that Wordsworth had in mind a homogeneous volume of poetry by theme and purpose, and not a Coleridgean meeting of extremes, or a synthesis of opposite artistic modes, as his partner presented the case in Biographia Literaria.

If we take into account the fact that Wordsworth was by nature averse to the merging of discordant elements, then his decision to exclude 'Christabel' on the grounds that the poem was 'in direct opposition to the very purpose for which the Lyrical Ballads were published' is understandable, particularly if his expectations of the volume were those conveyed by Coleridge's letter to Davy. When Wordsworth, for the purpose of minimizing the discrepancies in the projected second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, encouraged Coleridge to produce his poems of 'the Naming of Places', he in effect invited Coleridge to surrender his sovereign territory and join in a truly communal enterprise. But in so doing Wordsworth presented Coleridge with a dangerous challenge that Coleridge accepted with determination, though not without some foreboding. Wordsworth held out for Coleridge the attractive prospect of becoming a successful poet, acceptable to his partner, if he abandoned the supernatural ideal and concerned himself instead with the feelings which grow from 'little Incidents' among 'rural Objects'. The extent to which Coleridge accepted the Wordsworthian challenge is evident from the number of naturalistic poems he kept on devising. As much as one might sympathize with Charles Lamb's regret that Coleridge stopped writing 'Christabels and Ancient Mariners', it is important to realize that after 1800 Coleridge tried very hard to do just that, to move away from a supernatural poetry that had incurred Wordsworth's opprobrium. But by giving in to the pressure of becoming a naturalistic poet, Coleridge was forced into an impossible competition on his rival's home ground. In this context, his inability to complete his topographic poems and the obvious self-defeating mechanism ingrained in his formula for a Prelude of his own become increasingly comprehensible.

It was not uncharacteristic of Coleridge to take on unsuitable projects of various magnitude and kinds, especially during times of personal unhappiness, which would usually deepen his feelings of inadequacy, guilt and self-reproach. His failure, therefore, to write poems in the naturalistic vein cannot be seen simply as externally induced by Wordsworth's demands, but as related to Coleridge's personality as well as his fluctuating views regarding the value of nature poetry. In this respect one may recall that Coleridge vigorously encouraged Wordsworth to write philosophical poetry, and was most critical of his friend's unwise devotion to small projects of the kind he produced for the Lyrical Ballads. If this reflects at all Coleridge's ideal of high poetry, then his attitude towards poems set in a rural setting and dealing with commonplace incidents could only be unenthusiastic if not downright disparaging. It is as if Coleridge were willing to assume the burden of writing minor poetry in order to allow Wordsworth to devote himself to the great task of becoming 'the first & greatest philosophical Poet'. The fact that Coleridge did not go ahead with his projected naturalistic poems reveals the limits of such self-sacrificial generosity in this literary relationship and of Coleridge's own capacity for self-denial.

In a later notebook entry, recalling the painful, humiliating reception that his supernatural poems received from the Wordsworths, Coleridge reflected on their 'cold praise and effective discouragement of every attempt of mine to roll onward in a distinct current of my own'. Although this statement may be more indicative of Coleridge's excessive need for approval than of the total disapproval he met with in his relationship with the Wordsworths, it offers, none the less, a valuable insight into the nature of the crisis of poetic power Coleridge encountered during the years of his literary association with Wordsworth on the Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge's supernatural poems, which clearly signalled a 'distinct current' of his own, were not appreciated by the Wordsworths. On the other hand, naturalistic poems of the kind Wordsworth seemed to like did not fully satisfy Coleridge's standards for good poetry. Coleridge's disorientation as to what should be his own direction in poetry accounts to a large extent for the feelings of creative paralysis he experienced especially in 1802 and dramatized in 'Dejection: An Ode'. Though this perspective does not offer a full explanation of how Coleridge lost his poetic momentum after 1800, it provides a useful corrective to the view enunciated by Coleridge in 'Dejection' that metaphysics killed the 'shaping spirit' of his imagination, and with it, his sensitivity to nature.

Coleridge's relationship with Wordsworth thus had a direct influence on his ambivalent response to nature and his damaged confidence regarding his prospects as a poet. In the early stages of their association, while mutual admiration and love were still the overriding sentiments between them, Coleridge's interest in nature was undoubtedly stimulated by the spirited nature talk they conducted during their walks and travels. His successful composition of 'This Lime-tree Bower my Prison' might owe something to a more relaxed attitude towards nature that Coleridge derived from his communication with the Wordsworths and that helped him to overcome the feelings of guilt fostered by earlier encounters with the natural world, as conveyed in 'Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement' or 'The Eolian Harp'. By March 1798, in a letter to his brother George, Coleridge already presents himself as a poet of nature, inspired by 'fields & woods & mountains with almost a visionary fondness' and seeking to 'elevate the imagination & set the affections in right tune by the beauty of the inanimate impregnated, as with a living soul, by the presence of Life'. Coleridge illustrates his position by quoting some lines from 'The Ruined Cottage', thus showing his eagerness to align his poetic goals with those of Wordsworth, though, of course, the sentiment and theme of 'the one Life' were indigenous to Coleridge. It is worth remembering that at the time Coleridge assumed the identity of a poet of nature, 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' was for the most part written. This, as well as the close proximity between the composition of 'This Lime-tree Bower my Prison' and 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', indicates that before his relationship with Wordsworth deteriorated, Coleridge could function successfully as a poet both of nature and of the supernatural, just as prior to 1800 he was tormented neither by his identity as a metaphysician nor by the conviction that metaphysics was detrimental to poetry.

While the relationship with Wordsworth in its early, benevolent phase greatly spurred Coleridge's passion for nature, it also had the opposite effect of turning Coleridge's rapport with nature into a highly complicated affair. Two related matters show how a weakening of Coleridge's ties with nature can be linked to the increasing tensions caused by his collaboration with Wordsworth. The first pertains to Coleridge's tormented struggle for poetic survival after Wordsworth assumed sole authorship of the Lyrical Ballads. We have already seen that Coleridge, despite frequent announcements to friends that he had surrendered poetry to Wordsworth, tried to keep a low profile as a naturalistic poet. Moreover, he continued to look on nature as a revitalizing source of creative energy. In a sense, as the relationship with Wordsworth became less reassuring, Coleridge transferred his dependency from his friend to nature, from a stern father-figure to a more forgiving, motherly guardian. This transference is most clearly seen in a notebook entry written around the time of Coleridge's severe rift with Wordsworth in 1810. Here, adapting a consoling passage from Richter's Geist, Coleridge speaks of nature as a steadfast and loyal companion, lulling one's grief and extending generous protection and sympathy 'even when all men have seemed to desert us'. While the 'Love of Nature is ever returned double to us', the love of man appears to Coleridge as a one-way, inconstant and disappointing affair. In his rift with Wordsworth, Coleridge experienced the reversal of the Wordsworthian mythos 'love of Nature leads to love of Man'. Instead, love of man leads, via negativa, to an appreciation of nature.

The transference of dependency from Wordsworth to nature took place much earlier than the time of the quarrel in 1810 and caused, as relationships of dependency normally do, a disquieting awareness of an imperfect guardianship. When his prospects as a poet became uncertain after his banishment from the Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge often turned to nature with hopes of finding an immediate stimulus for poetic productivity. His expectations of the bountiful gifts nature held in store for him and his mode of gaining possession of such gifts are best represented by a few lines from Coleridge's free translation of Stolberg's 'Hymne an die Erde':

Thrilled with thy beauty and love in the
wooded slope of the mountain
Here, great mother, I lie, thy child, with his
head on thy bosom!
Playful the spirits of noon, that rushing soft
through thy tresses,
Green-haired goddess! refresh me; and hark!
as they hurry or linger,
Fill the pause of my harp, or sustain it with
musical murmurs.
(11. 7-11)

What Coleridge found, however, is that while nature might perform miraculous acts of benevolence for a loving and needy child, it does not fill those pauses of the poetic lyre with a steady voice 'but half its own'. Consistently, Coleridge discovered that the strategy of courting nature to gain instant poetic recovery did not succeed. As his notebooks show, Coleridge's repeated efforts to provoke inspiration by dwelling on 'outward forms' finally convinced him that, while his sensitivity to nature was ample and visitations of 'poetic feeling' did occur in the midst of natural objects, without 'the combining Power, the power to do, the manly effective Will, such visitations finally dissipated into nothingness. This experience differs from the crisis Coleridge dramatizes in 'Dejection: An Ode'. It is not the failure of responding to the natural world, but the very amplitude of this response that makes the absence of the 'genial spirits' so much more evident and painful to endure. While Coleridge could persuade himself (as he tried to persuade Francis Wrangham) that his love of metaphysics by no means overshadowed his devotion to the 'Goddess Nature', he could not thereby also prove that he was, like Wordsworth, a great poet. In the decline of a poetic career, Coleridge recognized that encounters with the natural world that merely tease but do not satisfy the 'genial spirits' were hopelessly defective and self-defeating.

Coleridge's growing alienation from nature also originated from his need, contrary to the dependency drive, to dissociate himself from Wordsworth's values. Several small incidents show that Coleridge found Wordsworth's nature worship irritating, just as he began to find fault with his friend's self-involuted personality and artistic principles. In a letter of August 1801, Coleridge invited Francis Wrangham for a visit to the Lakes, mentioning in a tone of light mockery that Wordsworth would undoubtedly introduce him to nature's 'best things in all her mollissima tempora—for few men can boast, I believe, of so intimate an acquaintance with her Ladyship'. There is here a covert criticism of Wordsworth's engagement with the transitory 'superficies of Objects', an activity which, as Coleridge remarked, is bound to weaken 'the Health and manhood of Intellect'. We find again that during their tour through Scotland Coleridge conducted a silent battle with the Wordsworths on an issue most likely pertaining to the picturesque, referring specifically to the authority of the mind in its dealings with nature:

Those who hold it undignified to illustrate Nature by Art—how little would the truly dignified say so—how else can we bring the forms of Nature within our voluntary memory!—The first Business is to subjugate them to our Intellect & voluntary memory—then comes their Dignity by Sensation of Magnitude, Forms & Passions connected therewith.

We are familiar with Wordsworth's aversion to applying the 'rules of mimic art' to nature and can infer from Coleridge's note that he must have spoken vehemently against a standard presupposition about the picturesque. Coleridge privately replies to Wordsworth that the dignity of nature depends upon man's intellectual mastery, and that the function of art is therefore to provide the medium through which the mind can assimilate, control and retain the forms of nature, thereby endowing them with the 'life and passion' they do not by themselves possess. The view that the mind must be granted dominion over the world of the senses is not unusual in Coleridge, but the recommendation that nature must be 'subjugated' by the mind, which would undoubtedly have irritated Wordsworth, has a more extreme edge to it that comes from the controversial dispute with Wordsworth. Such origins are important to bear in mind. As a way of asserting his independence from Wordsworth, Coleridge is likely to make radical claims that are not fully representative of his view of nature at a given time.

During the years of growing disaffection with Wordsworth, Coleridge identified an area of difference between himself and his friend where he could, comfortably, prove Wordsworth to be in the wrong. It concerned Wordsworth's tendency to place the mind in a relationship of servitude to the great 'Green-haired goddess'. (This is not, of course, the Wordsworth we know, though Coleridge's interpretation of Wordsworth's cult of nature is not different from the view of other contemporaries, such as Blake or Shelley.) It concerned, moreover, Wordsworth's taste for the accidental and transitory aspects of nature, his stubborn matter-of-factness and unwillingness to devote himself to 'great objects & elevated Conceptions'. Coleridge used this line of criticism in Biographia Literaria, where he adopted in opposition to Wordsworth's views the Aristotelian notion that 'poetry is essentially ideal, that it avoids and excludes all accident'. Earlier, before he could turn his disagreement with Wordsworth into a fully-fledged literary theory, he charted out a private region of sensibility in which he took great pride. But in sorting out his differences from his partner, Coleridge found himself in an ambivalent position as to how prominent a place he should allot to nature. A good example of Coleridge's dilemma in this regard is provided by a notebook entry written during his Malta journey in April 1804.

The entry commemorates Coleridge's first sight of the coast of Africa and his discovery that the continents of Europe and Africa, so distinct by names, are in nature nothing but two undivided 'Mountain Banks, that make a noble River of the interfluent Sea'. The discovery prompted Coleridge to meditate on the 'Power of Names to give Interest' to certain objects or places and on his inability to derive more than light amusement from contingent associations such names might carry. 'Of all men, I ever knew', Coleridge writes, 'Wordsworth himself not expected, I have the faintest pleasure in things contingent & transitory. I never, except as a forced Courtesy of Conversation, ask in a Coach Stage, whose House is that . . . I am not certain, whether I should have seen with any Emotion the Mulberry Tree of Shakespeare.' The knowledge that Shakespeare planted the tree would in effect intrude upon any 'unity of Feeling' he might have experienced otherwise, preventing him from losing himself 'in the flexures of its Branches & interweaving of its Roots'. There are, however, 'conceivable circumstances', Coleridge adds, where 'the contrary would be true', where the knowledge that Giordano Bruno or Milton inhabited a certain 'Rock by this Sea' or 'Bank' would greatly enhance one's experience of the place. Coleridge explains the difference as follows:

At certain times, uncalled and sudden, subject to no bidding of my own or others, these Thoughts would come upon me, like a Storm, & fill the Place with something more than Nature.—But these are not contingent or transitory / they are Nature, even as the Elements are Nature / yea, more to the human mind / for the mind has the power of abstracting all agency from the former, & considering as mere effects & instruments, but a Shakespere, a Milton, a Bruno, exist in the mind as pure Action, defecated of all that is material & passive / .—And the great moments, that formed them—it is hard & an impiety against a Voice within us, not to regard as predestined, & therefore things of Now & For Ever and which were Always. But it degrades this sacred Feeling; & is to it what stupid Superstition is to enthusiastic Religion, when a man makes a Pilgrimage to see a great man's Shin Bone found unmouldered in his Coffin . . .

On the surface Coleridge's argument is fairly clear and consistent. Coleridge distinguishes between an artificially programmed association of a place with a famous person or incident in history and a completely spontaneous train of thought that transcends the immediate material object or circumstantial event which provoked it. His point is that by trying to induce some heightened thrill through linking Shakespeare to the mulberry tree he planted, one does neither the tree nor Shakespeare any service. On the one hand, one could not immerse oneself in a fully empathic experience of the tree due to the expectations of what an experience of Shakespeare's tree should be, along with the ensuing disappointment when the actual feelings were found to be ordinary. On the other hand, to link Shakespeare to his tree is in effect to confuse a spiritual presence, a thing of the mind existing as 'pure Action' in the mind, with a material object. The failure to distinguish between 'things of Now & For Ever' and 'contingent or transitory' things is at the root of all idolatry and superstition. So far Coleridge's argument proceeds evenly and seems sure-footed. But it is by no means completed. Towards the end of his entry Coleridge's tone becomes more vehement as he launches an attack against the 'mass of mankind' who 'whether from Nature or . . . Error of Rearing & the Worldliness of their after Pursuits, are rarely susceptible of any other Pleasures than those of amusement, gratifications of curiosity, Novelty, Surprize, Wonderment from the Glaring, the harshly Contrasted, the Odd, the Accidental: and find in the reading of Paradise Lost a task, somewhat alleviated by a few entertaining Incidents'. Next follows an attack on Johnson, both for his lack of interest in nature and his view of Milton, and finally, a brief memorandum on the subject of 'the virtues connected with the Love of Nature' for Coleridge's projected volume of poetry 'Comforts and Consolations'.

There is something intriguing about the closure of Coleridge's entry. The last three steps in Coleridge's line of argument have a distinctly Wordsworthian genealogy. Wordsworth himself had severely chastised the public for its 'craving for extraordinary incident' and 'degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation' to the extent that the 'works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect'. It is unclear whether Coleridge had Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads in mind towards the end of his entry. If, however, we assume (and this must remain a tentative speculation) that the reference to Wordsworth at the beginning of the entry is not a casual one but a stimulus for the whole entry, then the final part of Coleridge's argument acquires added significance. By suggesting that Wordsworth was not free from the love of the 'contingent' and by linking such habits with the vulgar taste for novelty, Coleridge has in effect included Wordsworth in the very category of people he criticized in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. At the same time, Coleridge has located himself within the sacred circle of those who respect the pure act of the mind—a circle which excludes 'all that is material and passive'. The nice Wordsworthian touch at the end of the entry concerning the 'virtues connected with the Love of Nature' does not cancel the fact that midstream in his argument Coleridge identified certain forms of nature worship as superstitious idolatry and circumscribed the area of the sacred as that which contains 'something more than Nature', the spirituality of the human mind itself.

Characteristically, Coleridge's ambivalent feelings of dependence on and rejection of the Wordsworthian canon were not confined to private utterances in his journals but left their mark on his published works as well. I shall refer here to one example from Coleridge's poetry, namely 'Dejection: An Ode', and deal briefly with only a few moments in the dramatic development of the poem. It need hardly be emphasized that the relationship with Wordsworth was at the heart of the crisis of imaginative inhibition that Coleridge analysed in 'Dejection'. As de Selincourt pointed out, 'the root idea of "Dejection"' was 'a conscious and deliberate contrast' between Coleridge and his more fortunate friend. Predictably, in Coleridge's case such comparison led to a painful and debilitating complex of inferiority. By following the textual variants of the poem we can almost follow chronologically the effects of Coleridge's subordination to and gradual liberation from Wordsworth's commanding authority.

An examination of the several versions of 'Dejection' clearly reveals Coleridge's uncertainty in deciding whom he wanted to address in the ode. Coleridge successively changes the form of address from Sara ('Letter—',) to William (Letter to William Sotheby of 19 July 1802 and to Sir George Beaumont of 13 August 1803), to 'Edmund' (the Morning Post text published on 4 October 1802), and finally to the anonymous 'Lady' of the 1817 Sibylline Leaves version. Beverly Fields attributes this uncertainty to Oedipal tensions that made it difficult for Coleridge 'to separate his feelings for men from his feelings for women'. This is why the 'object of his emotions' in the poem can be interchangeably a male or a female. But there is a significant difference in the ending of the various versions of the poem, depending on whether a man or a woman is the intended love object. As the closing lines in the following four versions indicate, Coleridge assumes a much more subordinate role towards his friend when he addresses Wordsworth or Edmund (a 'transparent sobriquet for Wordsworth', as de Selincourt puts it), than towards Sara or the anonymous 'Lady':

1. 'Calm stedfast Spirit guided from above, / O Wordsworth! friend of my devoutest choice, / Great Son of Genius! full of Light & Love / Thus, thus dost thou rejoice. / To thee do all things live from pole to pole . . .' (Letter to Sotheby)
2. 'O EDMUND, friend of my devoutest choice . . . Joy lifts thy spirit, joy attunes thy voice, / To thee do all things live from pole to pole . . .' (Morning Post)
3. 'By the Immenseness of the Good & Fair / Which thou see'st every where—/ Thus, thus should'st thou rejoice! To thee would all Things live from Pole to Pole . . .' (Letter to Sara)
4. 'Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice; / To her may all things live, from pole to pole . . .' (Sibylline Leaves) [my italics]

In the first two versions, the poet-friend is presented as positively possessing the joy that ensures poetic creativity and, therefore, hardly needing protective prayers from the speaker. The Morning Post version makes clear that the friend is capable not only of maintaining his 'genial spirits', but also of teaching the speaker how 'to rejoice' with 'his lofty song'. The speaker's prayer in the end that his friend be visited by 'gentle Sleep, with wings of healing' seems incongruous, because there is no indication that things are other than 'good and fair' for the friend. In the early versions where Coleridge unfolds his doleful tale under the imagined scrutiny of Wordsworth, he virtually pushes himself into a position of complete uselessness. Years later when Coleridge revised the poem for his collection Sibylline Leaves, at a time when he experienced a period of significant productivity and, through the writing of Biographia Literaria, defined more clearly his differences with Wordsworth, he replaced Wordsworth with the anonymous 'lady' and at the same time granted the speaker a much more meaningful role in the end. This change is marked by a subtle shift from the present indicative of the letter to Sotheby and Morning Post versions to the optative mood that was present in the original letter to Sara. Thus, it no longer appears that the friend is in full possession of joy as a fait accompli, and by implication more dependent on the speaker's selfless guidance and prayers.

There is in 'Dejection' another Wordsworthian moment that also reveals Coleridge in the typically helpless role he assumed towards his friend: the story of the little lost child in Part vii, which alludes to Wordsworth's 'Lucy Gray'. As Irene Chayes notes, 'partly seeking a similar lyric inspiration from without and partly coming on it unexpectedly during his impromptu literary survey, the poet of "Dejection" begins in his reverie to re-compose another man's poem and for the moment become a poet again'. As we have seen, Coleridge was in the habit of imitating Wordsworth in a desperate attempt at poetic survival, and such attempts usually failed. In a similar fashion, in 'Dejection' the very act of reformulating another man's work points to the absence of radical creativity on the part of the speaker, confirming his worst fears about the state of his 'genial spirits'. The one revision Coleridge introduced in his version of 'Lucy Gray', namely the change of focus from the parents' to the child's despair, indicates Coleridge's own self-projection as a dependent and helpless being, rather than an actual rebirth of poetic vigour at the heels of his poet-master.

But dependency is not the only mood voiced in 'Dejection'. We have seen previously that Coleridge's sense of inferiority towards Wordsworth was invariably accompanied by a strong drive towards self-assertion. The speaker of 'Dejection' repeatedly slips in and out of two roles that closely parallel Coleridge's divided reactions to Wordsworth: one is the role of a defeated poet, opening his wounds, so to speak, to dwell on his despair and to invite the pity and protection due to the defenceless; the other is that of a man who finds considerable power in speculative insights and the benediction of a friend. It is certainly not from a position of a defenceless and injured poet that Coleridge formulates the doctrine of creative joy in stanzas iv and v. The tone here is as assertive as it is confident, and as Suther sensed, it is even a little overly insistent. The speaker is aware that he is in possession of a precious gift, the knowledge of nature's complete dependence on the life of the mind, a knowledge that is not given to the 'sensual and the proud' and, evidently, needs to be preached even to the 'pure of Heart'. In effect, Coleridge holds before Wordsworth the bright torch of higher knowledge, which he is willing to pass on to his friend in order to protect him from the dark passage of dejection where Coleridge remains imprisoned and alone. Coleridge thus achieves a double victory on both intellectual and moral grounds. He becomes the enlightened philosopher-poet, teaching, as he had hoped Wordsworth would, that the mind rules over and is not ruled by the senses. At the same time Coleridge presents himself in the flattering posture of a disinterested poet, seeking nothing for himself and keeping nothing to himself, but caring only for the well-being of another.

The partial record I have reconstructed here of the progressive alienation of Coleridge and Wordsworth shows all the conflicting attitudes and desires that are at the heart of such separations. Coleridge's inclination to surrender both poetry and nature to Wordsworth often brought him into the arena where courteous chivalry gave way to contest, just as his desire to subordinate his artistic goals to those of his partner merely intensified his need for independence. In his effort to locate a 'distinct current' of his own, Coleridge found it imperative to reject Wordsworth's cult of nature and isolate himself in the magic sphere of the mind which contained 'pure Action, defecated of all that is material & passive'. It is difficult to tell whether Coleridge's existing ambivalence towards nature led to his disagreement with Wordsworth, or whether the Wordsworthian challenge provoked a much more radical denial of nature than would otherwise have occurred. But the difficulty itself suggests that much of the text of Coleridge's love song and breach of loyalty to the 'Goddess Nature' is buried in the psychic history of a most extraordinary literary friendship.