Coleridge the Blogger

In the April 12 issue of the New York Review of Books, Richard Holmes reviews The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge, by Adam Sisman, a chronicle of the mercurial relations between two great poets. Holmes, of course, has written unsurpassed lives of Shelley and Coleridge, and the marvelous Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage. His review of Sisman’s book is both admiring and qualified, but this passage caught my attention:

“Yet there again, Coleridge’s Notebooks, still insufficiently known, may be considered as an inspiration to all confessional writers, and may even become – in their wild informality – the secret bible of Internet bloggers. (Apparently there are over fifty million of these.)”

Five fat volumes of Coleridge’s Notebooks, each accompanied by a comparably hefty doppelgänger of notes, were edited by the late Kathleen Coburn and published by Bollingen between 1957 and 2002. That’s 10 volumes and more than 8,000 pages -- a good 50 pounds of “wild informality.” If it sounds daunting, be grateful to Seamus Perry, who edited the manageably svelte Coleridge’s Notebook: A Selection, published in 2002. It 264 pages, it tips the scale shy of one pound.

Coleridge, especially his prose, is an acquired taste, one I acquired in 1973 when I first read Biographia Literaria. It’s lush, antiquarian, anything-can-happen prose, difficult to emulate well. Melville learned from it, and one of the products of his apprenticeship is Moby-Dick – but so is the unreadable Pierre.

It’s fine to write like Coleridge if you possess his genius. That’s where Holmes’ likening of the Notebooks to blogging falls apart. By nature, notebooks are potting sheds in which some seeds germinate and others wither. Coleridge differs from bloggers in that he wrote privately, for his own consumption, not in a public forum, not even for posterity. We read Coleridge’s withered seeds only because Coleridge wrote them. In his sovereign preserve he could write as wildly, ungrammatically and self-pityingly, and with as much pretentiousness and embarrassing candor, as he wished. Not so in the public realm of blogging. Our thoughts can be unformed, preliminary, tentative, experimental, and so forth, but they ought to be at least provisionally well written. Often I don’t understand a subject until the discipline of articulation permits me to do so. Writing is not therapy. Without editors, bloggers double as their own editors – always a dubious arrangement. Of the 50 million bloggers cited by Holmes, how many are worth a keystroke?

Read the Notebooks for the bottomless fund of surprises they deliver, as do the best blogs. Coleridge wrote not in one voice but many. Even in the throes of opium addiction, when not raging or feeling sorry for himself, he can turn a memorably desolate phrase:

“Whirled about without a center – as in a nightmare – no gravity – a vortex without a center.” And “We all look up to the blue Sky for comfort, but nothing appears there – nothing comforts nothing answers us – & so we die –”

Sometimes he records one-liners:

“Wine – some men = musical Glasses – to produce their finest music you must keep them wet –"

And aphorisms:

“To be sure, some good may be imagined in any evil – as he whose house is on fire in a dark night, his Loss gives him Light to run away –“

And details observed in nature:

“The beautiful Milk Thistle with the milk-blue-white veins or fibers up & athwart its dark green Leaves.”

And unclassifiable fancies:

“Lie with the ear upon a dear friend’s grave –“

Who else could have written this:

“Amid the profoundest and most condensed constructions of hardest Thinking, the playfulness of the Boy starts up, like a wild Fig-tree from monumental Marble.”