'I Wish That He’d Arrived Much Sooner'

I offended a reader by referring to Samuel Taylor Coleridge as “a brilliant windbag junkie.” Let’s consider each part of the epithet. “Brilliant”? Without question. He wrote three incontestably good poems but Coleridge is an early specimen of the “public intellectual,” bristling with opinions on every topic and happy to share them. Here he is on the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “Gibbon’s style is detestable, but his style is not the worst thing about him . . .” and so forth. 

“Windbag”? I think we covered that. See Max Beerbohm’s rendering of Coleridge the Olympic-class bloviator.

 

“Junkie”? For decades, the poet drank laudanum – raw opium with alcohol as a solvent, readily available from apothecaries and perfectly legal in the England of his day. By early 1834, Coleridge was genuinely sick and his caretaker, Dr. James Gillman, switched him from the drinkable tincture to hypodermic injection. Coleridge died that July.

 

Robert Conquest, in an interview with William Baer collected in Fourteen on Form: Conversations with Poets (2009), contrasts the work of Coleridge with Philip Larkin’s:

 

“Most poets, including most of the English poets, dashed off their odes or whatever very quickly—after all, half to three-quarters of Coleridge is a lot of nonsense. But Philip, although not every poem he ever wrote was first-rate, really worked at his craft with the greatest care. He was one of the most careful artists—artificers—I ever came across. Where does Yeats say, ‘A line will take us hours’?”

 

I think of a couplet by R.L. Barth, “Reading Coleridge”:

 

“God bless the man from Porlock, poem pruner!

Only I wish that he’d arrived much sooner.”