SOURCE: “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, edited by Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom, Oxford University Press, 1965, pp. 527-57.

[In the following excerpt, Abrams examines a mystery that has puzzled many literary scholars; that is, why such a minor poet as Bowles would inspire such enthusiastic praise from major Romantic poets, particularly Samuel Taylor Coleridge.]

COLERIDGE AND BOWLES

I have quoted Coleridge's derogation of Gray from the first chapter of the Biographia Literaria, in which Coleridge reviewed his own early development as a poet. To Gray's style he opposed that of three poems, the only contemporary models he mentioned with approval; and all three, it is important to note, were of a type which combines local description with associated meditation. One was William Crowe's conventional prospect poem, Lewesdon Hill (1788) and another was Cowper's The Task, which incorporated a number of episodic meditations evoked by the environs of the river Ouse. Both these poems, however, he read later—The Task, he says, “many years” later—than a publication which at once seized irresistibly upon his sensibility, William Lisle Bowles's Sonnets of 1789. By these poems he was “year after year … enthusiastically delighted and inspired,” and he worked zealously to win “proselytes” to his poetic divinity by buttonholing strangers and friends alike, and by sending out as gifts more than forty copies of Bowles's volume, which he had himself transcribed.¹

Coleridge mentioned also Bowles's Monody Written at Matlock (1791), which is a long prospect-poem written in blank verse. But most of Bowles's poems of 1789 were obvious adaptations of this local-meditative formula to the sonnet form. As in both the local poems and the Romantic lyric, a number of Bowles's titles specify the place, and even the time: “To the River Wensbeck”; “To the River Itchin Near Winton”; “On Dover Cliffs. July 20, 1787”; “Written at Ostend. July 22, 1787.” The whole was “Written,” as the title of 1789 points out, “Chiefly on Picturesque Spots, during a Tour,” and constitutes a sonnet-sequence uttered by a latter-day wandering penseroso who, as the light fades from the literal day, images his life as a metaphoric tour from its bright morning through deepening shadow to enduring night. Within this over-arching equation, the typical single poem begins with a rapid sketch of the external scene—frequently, as in so many of Denham's progeny, a river scene—then moves on to reminiscence and moral reflection. The transition is often managed by a connecting phrase which signalizes the shift from objects to concepts and indicates the nature of the relation between them: “So fares it with the children of the earth”; “ev'n thus on sorrow's breath / A kindred stillness steals”; “Bidding me many a tender thought recall / Of summer days”; “I meditate / On this world's passing pageant.”

Bowles wrote in a Preface of 1805, when his poems had already achieved a ninth edition, that his sonnets “describe his personal feelings” during excursions taken to relieve “depression of spirits.” They exhibit “occasional reflections which naturally rose in his mind” and were

in general suggested by the scenes before them; and wherever such scenes appeared to harmonise with his disposition at the moment, the sentiments were involuntarily prompted.²

The local poem has been lyricized. That is, Bowles's sonnets present a determinate speaker, whom we are invited to identify with the author himself, whose responses to the local scene are a spontaneous overflow of feeling and displace the landscape as the center of poetic interest; hence the “occasional reflections” and “sentiments,” instead of being a series of impersonal sententiae linked to details of the setting by analogy, are mediated by the particular temperament and circumstances of the perceiving mind, and tend to compose a single curve of feelingful meditation. “To the River Itchin, Near Winton”—which so impressed Coleridge that he emulated it in his sonnet “To the River Otter”—will represent Bowles's procedure, including his use of the recollection of an earlier visit to stimulate the meditation:

Itchin, when I behold thy banks again,
          Thy crumbling margin, and thy silver breast,
          On which the self-same tints still seem to rest,
Why feels my heart the shiv'ring sense of pain?
          Is it—that many a summer's day has past
Since, in life's morn, I carol'd on thy side?
Is it—that oft, since then, my heart has sigh'd,
          As Youth, and Hope's delusive gleams, flew fast?
Is it—that those, who circled on thy shore,
Companions of my youth, now meet no more?
          Whate'er the cause, upon thy banks I bend
Sorrowing, yet feel such solace at my heart,
          As at the meeting of some long-lost friend,
          From whom, in happier hours, we wept to part.

Why Coleridge should have been moved to idolatry by so slender, if genuine, a talent as that of Bowles has been an enigma of literary history. It is significant, however, that Bowles's Sonnets of 1789 had an impact both on Southey and Wordsworth which was also immediate and powerful. As Wordsworth later told Samuel Rogers:

I bought them in a walk through London with my dear brother. … I read them as we went along; and to the great annoyance of my brother, I stopped in a niche of London Bridge to finish the pamphlet.³

And if we take into account Coleridge's intellectual preoccupations between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five, as well as his growing discontent with current modes of poetry, including his own, we find a sufficiency of reasons to explain the power of Bowles over his sensibility and his practice as a poet. Some of these are literary reasons, pertaining to Bowles's characteristic subjects and style, while others concern the philosophy of mind and its place in nature which, Coleridge believed, was implicit in Bowles's habitual manner of proceeding.

Bowles's sonnets represent the lonely mind in meditation, and their fin de siècle mood of weary and self-pitying isolation—what Coleridge called their “lonely feeling”⁴—proved irresistible to a vigorous young newcomer to poetry. Of much greater and more enduring importance, however, as Coleridge emphasized in his Biographia, was the revelation to him of the possibility of a style “so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets etc. of Mr. Bowles!”⁵ Even while he was absorbedly reading and tentatively imitating Bowles, Coleridge himself in his major efforts was primarily the poet “To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear,” of Byron's unadmiring comment. In his poetic volume of 1796, as enlarged in 1797, the most ambitious undertakings were the “Religious Musings” and “Ode on the Departing Year.” Of this publication Coleridge said in the Biographia that though, even then, he clearly saw “the superiority of an austerer and more natural style” than his own obscure and turgid language, he failed to realize his ideal, partly out of “diffidence of my own comparative talent,” and “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.”⁶ In the turbulence and crises of the early period of the French Revolution, he had been obsessed with the need to give public voice to his political, religious, and philosophical beliefs, and he had tried to poetize such materials in the fashion current in the 1790's.⁷ That is to say, he had adopted a visionary and oracular persona—in accordance, as he said in the Dedication to his “Ode on the Departing Year,” with the practice of the ancients, when “the Bard and the Prophet were one and the same character”⁸—and had compounded Biblical prophecy, the hieratic stance of Milton, and the formal rhetoric, allegorical tactics, and calculated disorder of what he called “the sublimer Ode” of Gray and Collins, in the effort to endow his subjects with the requisite elevation, passion, drama, and impact. As Coleridge wrote to Southey in December of 1794, while Bowles's poems were his “morning Companions,” helping him, “a thought-bewilder'd Man,” to discover his own defects: “I am so habituated to philosophizing, that I cannot divest myself of it even when my own Wretchedness is the subject.”

And I cannot write without a body of thought—hence my Poetry is crowded and sweats beneath a heavy burthen of Ideas and Imagery! It has seldom Ease.⁹

This “Ease” Coleridge had early discovered in Bowles. And as he said in the Biographia, the example of Bowles—together with Cowper the first of the living poets who, in the style “more sustained and elevated” than in Percy's collection of popular ballads, “combined natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head”—rescued him from the unnatural division between intellect and feeling, and consonantly, from his use of “a laborious and florid diction”; but only, as he adds, “gradually.”¹⁰ The reason for the delay in making, as he put it, his “practice” conform to his “better judgment” is, I think, plain. Coleridge succeeded in emulating Bowles's ease only after he learned to adopt and commit himself to the lyric persona which demands such a style. That is, in place of philosophical, moral, and historical pronouncements translated into allegoric action by Pindaric artifice and amplified for public delivery in a ceremonious bardic voice, Bowles's sonnets opened out to Coleridge the possibilities in the quite ordinary circumstances of a private person in a specific time and place whose meditation, credibly stimulated by the setting, is grounded in his particular character, follows the various and seemingly random flow of the living consciousness, and is conducted in the intimate yet adaptive voice of the interior monologue. (Bowles's style, as Coleridge said, unites the possibilities both of colloquialism and elevation—it is “natural and real, and yet … dignified and harmonious.”) It was in “the compositions of my twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth years,” Coleridge goes on to say, including “the shorter blank verse poems”—that is, the poems of 1796-97, beginning with “The Eolian Harp,” which established the persona, idiom, materials, and ordonnance of the greater Romantic lyric—that he achieved his “present ideal in respect of the general tissue of the style.”¹¹ No doubt the scholars are right who claim some influence on these poems of the relaxed and conversational blank verse of Cowper's The Task,¹² in the recurrent passages, within its mock-Miltonic manner, of serious description or meditation. I see no reason, however, to doubt Coleridge's repeated assertion that Bowles's sonnets and blank-verse poems were for him the prior and by far the pre-eminent models.

So much for the speaker and voice of Bowles's sonnets. Now what of their central structural trope, by which, as Coleridge described it in 1796, “moral Sentiments, Affections, or Feelings, are deduced from, and associated with, the scenery of Nature”? Even so early in his career Coleridge was an integral thinker for whom questions of poetic structure were inseparable from general philosophic issues, and he at once went on to interpret this device as the correlate of a mode of perception which unites the mind to its physical environment. Such compositions, he said,

create a sweet and indissoluble union between the intellectual and the material world. … Hence the Sonnets of Bowles derive their marked superiority over all other Sonnets; hence they domesticate with the heart, and become, as it were, a part of our identity.¹³

This philosophical and psychological interpretation of Bowles's lyric procedure was not only, as Coleridge indicates, a cardinal reason for his early fascination with Bowles, but also the chief clue to his later disenchantment, and it merits attention.

THE COALESCENCE OF SUBJECT AND OBJECT

In the opening chapter of his Literary Life, Coleridge introduces Bowles's sonnets not on their own account, but as representing a stage in his total intellectual development—“as introductory to the statement of my principles in Politics, Religion, and Philosophy, and an application of the rules, deduced from philosophical principles, to poetry and criticism.”¹⁴ Hence he moves from his account of the shaping influence of Bowyer, Bowles, and Wordsworth into a summary review of the history of philosophy, as preliminary to establishing his own metaphysical and critical premises, of which the culmination was to be the crucial distinction between fancy and imagination.

In the course of his survey of the dominant philosophy of the preceding age, it becomes clear that Coleridge found intolerable two of its main features, common both to philosophers in the school of Descartes and in the school of Locke. The first was its dualism, the absolute separation between mind and the material universe, which replaced a providential, vital, and companionable world by a world of particles in purposeless movement. The second was the method of reasoning underlying this dualism, that pervasive elementarism which takes as its starting point the irreducible element or part and conceives all wholes to be a combination of discrete parts, whether material atoms or mental “ideas.”

Even in 1797, while Coleridge was still a Hartleian associationist in philosophy, he had expressed his recoil from elementarist thinking. The fault of “the Experimentalists,” who rely only on the “testimony of their senses,” is that “they contemplate nothing but parts—and all parts are necessarily little—and the Universe to them is but a mass of little things.” “I can contemplate nothing but parts, & parts are all little—!—My mind feels as if it ached to behold & know something great—something one & indivisible. …”¹⁵ And he wrote later in The Friend about that particular separation between part and part which divides mind from nature:

The ground-work, therefore, of all true philosophy is the full apprehension of the difference between … that intuition of things which arises when we possess ourselves, as one with the whole … and that which presents itself when … we think of ourselves as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind, as object to subject, thing to thought, death to life.¹⁶

As to Coleridge, so to Wordsworth in 1797-98, “solitary objects … beheld / In disconnection” are “dead and spiritless,” and division, breaking down “all grandeur” into successive “littleness,” is opposed to man's proper spiritual condition, in which “All things shall live in us and we shall live / In all things that surround us.”¹⁷ Absolute separation, in other words, is death-dealing—in Coleridge's words, it is “the philosophy of Death, and only of a dead nature can it hold good”¹⁸—so that the separation of mind from nature leads inevitably to the conception of a dead world in which the estranged mind is doomed to lead a life-in-death.

To the Romantic sensibility such a universe could not be endured, and the central enterprise common to many post-Kantian German philosophers and poets, as well as to Coleridge and Wordsworth, was to join together the “subject” and “object” that modern intellection had put asunder, and thus to revivify a dead nature, restore its concreteness, significance, and human values, and re-domiciliate man in a world which had become alien to him. The pervasive sense of estrangement, of a lost and isolated existence in an alien world, is not peculiar to our own age of anxiety, but was a commonplace of Romantic philosophy. According to Friedrich Schelling, the most representative philosopher of that age, division from unity was the fall of man consequent upon his eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge in the Enlightenment. The guilt of modern men must be

ascribed to their own will, which deviated from unity. … [This is] a truly Platonic fall of man, the condition in which man believes that the dead, the absolutely manifold and separated world which he conceives, is in fact the true and actual world.¹⁹

Long before he read Schelling, and while at the height of his enthusiasm for Bowles, Coleridge had included in his visionary “Religious Musings” (1794) an outline of human history in which mankind's highest good had been “to know ourselves / Parts and proportions of one wondrous whole”; the present evil was defined as a fall into an anarchic separation in which each man, “disherited of soul,” feels “himself, his own low self the whole”; and man's redemption at the Second Coming was anticipated as a reintegration into his lost unity by a “sacred sympathy” which makes “The whole one Self! Self, that no alien knows! … all of all possessing!”²⁰ And in 1815 Coleridge recalled that the plan of Wordsworth's projected masterpiece, The Recluse, as he had understood it, had also been to affirm “a Fall in some sense, as a fact,” to be redeemed by a

Reconciliation from this Enmity with Nature … by the substitution of Life, and Intelligence … for the Philosophy of mechanism which in every thing that is most worthy of the human Intellect strikes Death.²¹

In the Biographia Literaria, when Coleridge came to lay down his own metaphysical system, he based it on a premise designed to overcome both the elementarism in method and the dualism in theory of knowledge of his eighteenth-century predecessors, by converting their absolute division between subject and object into a logical “antithesis,” in order to make it eligible for resolution by the Romantic dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. The “primary ground” of his theory of knowledge, he says, is “the coincidence of an object with a subject” or “of the thought with the thing,” in a synthesis, or “coalescence,” in which the elements lose their separate identities. “In the reconciling, and recurrence of this contradiction exists the process and mystery of production and life.”²² And the process of vital artistic creation reflects the process of this vital creative perception. Unlike the fancy, which can only rearrange the “fixities and definites” of sense-perception without altering their identity, the “synthetic and magical power” of the secondary imagination repeats the primal act of knowing by dissolving the elements of perception “in order to recreate” them, and “reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities”—including the reconciliation of intellect with emotion, and of thought with object: “the idea, with the image.”²³

In short, the reintegration of the divided self (of “head and heart”) and the simultaneous healing of the breach between the ego and the alien other (of “subject and object”) was for Coleridge a profound emotional need which he translated into the grounds both of his theory of knowledge and his theory of art. How pivotal the concept of human-nonhuman reconciliation came to be for Coleridge's aesthetics is apparent in his essay “On Poesy or Art,” in which he specifically defined art as “the reconciler of nature and man … the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into every thing which is the object of his contemplation.” It is “the union and reconciliation of that which is nature with that which is exclusively human.”²⁴

.....

Perhaps now, to return at last to the sonnets of Bowles, we can understand better why those seemingly inconsequential poems made so powerful an impact on Coleridge, in their materials as well as their structure and style. Bowles's primary device by which sentiments and feelings “are deduced from, and associated with, the scenery of Nature” had seemed to Coleridge evidence of a poetry which not only “reconciled the heart with the head,” but also united the mind with nature; in the terms available to him in 1796, it created “a sweet and indissoluble union between the intellectual and the material world.” Through the next half-decade, however, Coleridge carried on his own experiments in the descriptive and meditative lyric, came to know the early poetry of Wordsworth, had his introduction to German metaphysics, and, in intense and almost fevered speculation, groped his way out of the mechanism and associationism of David Hartley and other English empiricists. Increasingly in the process he became dissatisfied with the constitution of Bowles's poems, and the reasons came sharply into focus in 1802, at about the time he was recasting his verse “Letter to [Asra]” into his highest achievement in the greater Romantic lyric, “Dejection: An Ode.” On 10 September he wrote a letter to William Sotheby which shows that his working his way through and beyond Bowles was an integral part of his working his way toward a new poetry, a new criticism, and a new world view. The letter is a preliminary sketch for the Biographia Literaria, for like that work it moves from a critique of Bowles through a view of the relation of mind to nature in perception to a theory of poetic production, and culminates in Coleridge's first explicit distinction between the elementaristic fancy and the synthetic imagination.

Bowles had just published a new edition of his sonnets, supplemented by several long poems in blank verse which reverted to a process of scenic inventory and incidental meditation very close to the eighteenth-century local poem. Bowles's second volume, Coleridge begins, “is woefully inferior to it's Predecessor.”

There reigns thro' all the blank verse poems such a perpetual trick of moralizing every thing—which is very well, occasionally—but never to see or describe any interesting appearance in nature, without connecting it by dim analogies with the moral world, proves faintness of Impression. Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes & feels, that every Thing has a Life of it's own, & that we are all one Life. A Poet's Heart & Intellect should be combined, intimately combined & unified, with the great appearances in Nature—& not merely held in solution & loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal Similes. … The truth is—Bowles has indeed the sensibility of a poet; but he has not the Passion of a great Poet. … He has no native Passion, because he is not a Thinker.²⁵

Bowles's exaggeration in his later poems of his earlier devices has opened out to Coleridge his inherent failings. Bowles is able to reconcile the heart with the head, but only because of an equality of weakness in the antagonist powers of intellect and passion. And what Coleridge had earlier described as an “indissoluble union between the intellectual and material world” now turns out to be no better than “a loose mixture,” in which the separate parts, instead of being “intimately combined & unified,” are merely held together by the rhetorical expedient of “formal Similes.” In other words, what to Coleridge, the Hartleian associationist, had in 1796 appeared to be an adequate integration of mind and its milieu reveals itself—when he has learned to think of all higher mental processes in terms of a synthesis of contraries—to be what he later called the “conjunction-disjunctive” of neoclassic unity by a decorum of the parts.

In the letter to Sotheby, Coleridge goes on to draw a parallel distinction between the treatment of nature in Greek mythology and in the Hebrew poets, and ends by assigning the former type to the collocative process of the lower productive faculty, or Fancy. To the Greek poets

all natural Objects were dead—mere hollow Statues—but there was a Godkin or Goddessling included in each. … At best it is but Fancy, or the aggregating Faculty of the mind—not Imagination, or the modifying, and co-adunating Faculty. … In the Hebrew Poets each Thing has a Life of it's own, & yet they are all one Life.

Bowles's poems, it becomes apparent, remain in the mode of the Fancy because they fail to overcome the division between living mind and a dead nature by that act of the coadunating Imagination which fuses the two into “one Life”; for when Bowles joins the parts a and b they form an aggregate ab, instead of “interpenetrating” (in terms of Coleridge's critique of elementarist thinking) to “generate a higher third, including both the former,” the product c.²⁶ For the “mystery of genius in the Fine Arts,” as Coleridge said in “On Poesy or Art,” is

so to place these images [of nature] … as to elicit from, and to superinduce upon, the forms themselves the moral reflexions to which they approximate, to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature.²⁷

The shift in Coleridge's theory of descriptive poetry corresponded with a change in his practice of the form; and in the sequence of sonnets and conversation poems that he wrote under Bowles's influence we can observe him in the process of converting the conjunction of parts, in which nature stays on one side and thought on the other, into the Romantic interfusion of subject and object. W. K. Wimsatt has acutely remarked that Coleridge's sonnet “To the River Otter”—though written in express imitation of Bowles's “To the River Itchin,” perhaps so early as 1793—has begun to diverge from Bowles's “simple association … simply asserted” by involving the thought in the descriptive details so that the design “is latent in the multiform sensuous picture.”²⁸ “The Eolian Harp” (1795-96) set the expanded pattern of the greater lyric, but in it the meditative flight is a short one, while the thought is still at times expressed in the mode of sententiae which are joined to the details of the scene by formal similes. We sit

          beside our Cot, our Cot o'ergrown
With white-flower'd Jasmin, and the broad-leav'd Myrtle,
(Meet emblems they of Innocence and Love!)
And watch the Clouds, that late were rich with light,
Slow-sadd'ning round, and mark the Star of eve
Serenely brilliant (such should wisdom be!)
Shine opposite.

In “Frost at Midnight,” however, written two years later, the images in the initial description are already suffused with an unstated significance which, in Coleridge's terms, is merely “elicited” and expanded by the subsequent reflection, which in turn “superinduces” a richer meaning upon the scene to which it reverts. “Fears in Solitude,” a few months after that, exemplifies the sustained dialogue between mind and landscape which Coleridge describes in lines 215-20 of the poem: the prospect of sea and fields

                                                            seems like society—
Conversing with the mind, and giving it
A livelier impulse and a dance of thought!

And “Dejection: An Ode,” on which Coleridge was working in 1802 just as he got Bowles's poems into critical perspective, is a triumph of the “coadunating” imagination, in the very poem which laments the severance of his community with nature and the suspension of his shaping spirit of imagination. In unspoken consonance with the change of the outer scene and of the responsive wind-harp from ominous quiet to violent storm to momentary calm, the poet's mind, momentarily revitalized by a correspondent inner breeze, moves from torpor through violence to calm, by a process in which the properties earlier specified of the landscape—the spring rebirth, the radiated light of moon and stars, the clouds and rain, the voice of the harp—reappear as the metaphors of the evolving meditation on the relation of mind to nature; these culminate in the figure of the one life as an eddy between antitheses:

To her may all things live, from pole to pole,
Their life the eddying of her living soul!

On Coleridge's philosophical premises, in this poem nature is made thought and thought nature, both by their sustained interaction and by their seamless metaphoric continuity.

The best Romantic meditations on a landscape, following Coleridge's examples, all manifest a transaction between subject and object in which the thought incorporates and makes explicit what was already implicit in the outer scene. And all the poets testify independently to a fact of consciousness which underlay these poems, and was the experiential source and warrant for the philosophy of cognition as an interfusion of mind and nature. When the Romantic poet confronted a landscape, the distinction between self and not-self tended to dissolve. Coleridge asserted that from childhood he had been accustomed to “unrealize … and then by a sort of transfusion and transmission of my consciousness to identify myself with the Object”; also that

in looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking … I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing any thing new.

So with Wordsworth: “I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature.” Shelley witnessed to “the state called reverie,” when men “feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being. They are conscious of no distinction.” Even Byron's Childe Harold claimed that “I live not in myself,” but that mountains, waves, and skies become “a part / Of me, and of my soul, as I of them.” Keats's experience differs, but only in the conditions that, instead of assimilating the other to the self, the self goes out into the other, and that the boundary of self is “annihilated” when he contemplates, not a broad prospect, but a solid particular endowed with outline, mass, and posture or motion. That type of poet of which “I am a Member … has no self” but “is continually [informing] and filling some other Body”—a moving billiard ball, a breaking wave, a human form in arrested motion, a sparrow, an urn, or a nightingale.²⁹

Notes

1. Ibid. pp. 8-16.

2. The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, ed. George Gilfillan (2 vols.; Edinburgh, 1855), I, 1.

3. Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers (New York, 1856), p. 258, note. For Bowles's effect on Southey see William Haller, The Early Life of Robert Southey (New York, 1917), pp. 73-6. As late as 1806-20, in The River Duddon, Wordsworth adopted Bowles's design of a tour represented in a sequence of local-meditative sonnets.

4. Coleridge, Introduction to his “Sheet of Sonnets” of 1796, The Complete Poetical Works, II, 1139. As early as November of 1797, however, Coleridge as “Nehemiah Higginbottom” parodied “the spirit of doleful egotism” in the sonnet. See Biographia Literaria, I, 17, and David Erdman, “Coleridge as Nehemiah Higginbottom,” Modern Language Notes, LXXIII (1958), 569-80.

5. Biographia Literaria, I, 10.

6. Ibid. pp. 2-3, and pp. 203-4, note. Coleridge's claim that he had recognized the defects of the “swell and glitter” of his elevated style, even as he employed it, is borne out by his Preface to the Poems of 1797, Complete Poetical Works, II, 1145.

7. See M. H. Abrams, “English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age,” in Romanticism Reconsidered, ed. Northrop Frye (New York, 1963), pp. 37-72.

8. Complete Poetical Works, II, 1113-14; see also p. 1145.

9. 11 December 1794, Collected Letters, I, 133-7.

10. Biographia Literaria, I, 10, 15-16.

11. Ibid. p. 16.

12. See, for example, Humphry House, Coleridge (London, 1953), Chap. III; George Whalley, “Coleridge's Debt to Charles Lamb,” Essays and Studies (1958), pp. 68-85; and Max F. Schulz, The Poetic Voices of Coleridge (Detroit, 1963), Chap. 5. A comment of Lamb to Coleridge in December 1796 substantiates Coleridge's own statements about the relative importance for him of Bowles and Cowper: “Burns was the god of my idolatry, as Bowles of yours. I am jealous of your fraternising with Bowles, when I think you relish him more than Burns or my old favourite, Cowper.” The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (7 vols.; London, 1903-5), VI, 73.

13. Introduction to the “Sheet of Sonnets” of 1796, Complete Poetical Works, II, 1139.

14. Biographia Literaria, I, 1.

15. Collected Letters, I, 354, 349. See also ibid. IV, 574-5, and The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York, 1957), II, note 2151.

16. The Friend (3 vols.; London, 1818), III, 261-2.

17. The Ruined Cottage, addendum to MS. B (1797-98), The Poetical Works, V, 402.

18. Theory of Life, ed. Seth B. Watson (London, 1848), p. 63.

19. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart and Augsburg, 1857), Pt. I, Vol. VII, 81-2.

20. “Religious Musings,” ll. 126-58, Complete Poetical Works, I, 113-15.

21. To Wordsworth, 30 May 1815, Collected Letters, IV, 574-5.

22. Biographia Literaria, I, 174-85.

23. Ibid. I, 202; II, 12. See The Friend, III, 263-4, on the “one principle which alone reconciles the man with himself, with other [men] and with the world.”

24. In Biographia Literaria, II, 253-5. Though “On Poesy or Art” takes its departure from Schelling's “On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature,” the quoted statements are Coleridge's own.

25. 10 September 1802, Collected Letters, II, 864.

26. Theory of Life, p. 63.

27. In Biographia Literaria, II, 258.

28. “The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery,” in The Verbal Icon (New York, 1958), pp. 106-10.

29. Coleridge, Collected Letters, IV, 974-5, and The Notebooks, II, 2546; Wordsworth, Poetical Works, IV, 463; Shelley's Prose, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque, 1954), p. 174; Byron, Childe Harold, III, lxxii, lxxv; Keats, The Letters, I, 387.