Michael Dirda
The timeless verse -- and turbulent lives -- of the founders of Romantic poetry.

By Michael Dirda
Sunday, February 11, 2007

THE FRIENDSHIP

Wordsworth and Coleridge

By Adam Sisman

Viking. 480 pp. $27.95

Like many people, I love William Wordsworth's poetry, from his simplest lyric about daffodils to his autobiographical "The Prelude." His passionate sincerity about the life-enhancing powers of nature touches even my jaded, urban soul: "Enough of science and of art;/ Close up these barren leaves;/ Come forth, and bring with you a heart/ That watches and receives" (from "The Tables Turned"). His "Tintern Abbey" might well be the best medium-length poem in English, while the only slightly less good "Immortality" ode never fails to elicit that thrill to the back of the neck that A.E. Housman maintained was the only infallible sign of poetic genius:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;

Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

That note of loss -- "Whither is fled the visionary gleam?" Wordsworth writes later in the poem -- is one that we associate even more strongly with Wordsworth's friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose "Kubla Khan" concludes with the youthful poet's agonizing cry, "Could I revive within me/ Her symphony and song." His later "conversation poem," "Dejection," speaks even more plaintively of "a grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear/ a stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,/ Which finds no outlet, no relief/ In word, or sigh, or tear." Fearing that his imagination has dried up, the greatest all-round genius of his time can only look up at the loveliness of the moon and stars and sadly confess, "I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!"

Adam Sisman's detailed account of the friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge makes for an unhappy story: a brief period of dazzling poetic brilliance, followed by decades of artistic confusion and failure. Both men repeatedly likened the imagination to the wind -- Coleridge's ancient mariner is saved from death-in-life when the wind begins to blow again on his becalmed ship; Wordsworth's "Prelude" famously speaks of the poet's creative powers as "a correspondent breeze" within his soul that will gradually build to a raging tempest. Alas, all too soon, Coleridge's poems had virtually stopped coming, and Wordsworth's verse had grown arthritic and dull. The latter would never achieve the great epic that his friend had outlined as his immortal destiny. Imagination's breeze had blown itself out.

In The Friendship, Sisman naturally focuses on the 10 or so good years -- roughly from the early 1790s through the early 1800s -- when the pair formed a kind of mutual admiration society. The two often lived near each other (most notably in the Lake District), traveled to Germany together, and published the groundbreaking Lyrical Ballads (1798) as an experiment in dual authorship. The original edition -- without Wordsworth's now celebrated defense of a natural poetic idiom based on spoken language -- opened with Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and closed with "Tintern Abbey." (Initial critical response to this work ranged from the dismissive to the lukewarm.) Alas, by the time of the book's second edition (1802), it had become less an emblem of the two poets' friendship than its memorial.

In his preface, Sisman mentions that people often feel as if they have to choose between the two poets, like the friends of a newly divorced couple. Sisman refuses this simplistic option -- he tries to be fair to both men -- but sometimes even the most sympathetic reader is likely to murmur "a plague on both their houses." They may have been supremely great poets, but as human beings they could be -- what's the word I want? -- yucky.

Wordsworth was utterly self-centered, inordinately ambitious (without ever quite being aware of it), unsociable yet exploitative of others and very nearly a cad. As a young man, he spent several months in France during the early part of the French Revolution and there got a young woman pregnant. He left for England and never returned -- until he wanted to marry; then he traveled back to make some kind of token settlement with poor Annette Vallon and the child, Caroline. During his many years living alone with his sister Dorothy, their oddly close relationship grew into a sort of sexless marriage. (The night before Wordsworth's actual wedding, the distraught Dorothy spent the night weeping -- and wearing the wedding ring her brother would give to his bride.) There's worse: When that second edition of Lyrical Ballad s came out, Wordsworth made sure that (1) only his name appeared on the title page, (2) he got all the money, (3) "The Ancient Mariner" was moved from the lead-off position to the middle of the book, and (4) "Christabel," at which Coleridge had been working desperately hard, was left out entirely. This last rejection, according to Sisman, was the blow that destroyed Coleridge's confidence in his poetic abilities. As the years went by, Wordsworth became even more of a cold, bloodless, dried-up stick, revered by the establishment, scorned by the rising generation, especially after he was made poet laureate. As the young Robert Browning proclaimed: "Just for a handful of silver he left us,/ Just for a riband to stick in his coat."

Coleridge fares little better. Good at many things -- polemicist, lead editorial writer for the major London newspaper of the day, poet, translator, literary critic, philosopher -- he was nonetheless the very embodiment of human weakness. He could never really finish any project and would start magazines or new jobs, imagine great ventures (with Robert Southey he planned a utopian community on the banks of the Susquehanna) and talk convincingly of the great works that would be ready for the press in just a little while. He acted abominably to his wife and family. Sara Coleridge actually had to deliver one of their children by herself, since her husband was off gallivanting, and the nurse arrived only in time to clean up the afterbirth. When their son Berkeley died, Coleridge didn't even bother to come home for six months -- the study of German philosophy was more important than his wife's broken heart. Worse still, he spent years mooning for Sara Hutchinson -- Asra, he called her -- and permitted the Wordsworths to subtly badmouth his long-suffering wife as an ignorant shrew. In later years, he was a broken wreck, addicted to opium, fat, aged before his time, the voluble and half-revered, half-laughed-at "sage of Highgate."

In his previous book, Boswell's Presumptuous Task, Sisman dexterously elucidated the genesis of the greatest biography in English, James Boswell's Life of Johnson. Here, he takes up English literature's most famous "couple" and, to some degree, the background of Lyrical Ballads. But The Friendship is a much less satisfying book. It moves slowly and, because of its dual focus, is constantly tick-tocking from one of its subjects to the other. There's a lot of detail about households and country living, and much of it is dull: Almost nobody is particularly witty or amusing, aside from Coleridge's friend the essayist Charles Lamb, who is one of the few normal and sensible people in the book (even after his sister Mary murders their mother in a maniacal fit).

Sisman does take pains to link the two poets to the political excitement stirred up by the French Revolution. Both men were young rebels who grew more and more conservative with time, an all too common pattern. But he only skims over their later careers in a quick summary chapter at the end. One might also argue with some of Sisman's conclusions. While he emphatically views Wordsworth's rejection of "Christabel" as a killing blow, other biographers regard Coleridge as much more of a survivor. Richard Holmes, for instance, views Coleridge's later life as a gradual triumph over his weaknesses and sees his notebooks and the Biographia Literaria-- a memoir-cum-philosophic manifesto -- as monuments to his fertile, quicksilver intellect. Some critics have even maintained that Wordsworth's later poetry is better than it seems. But then critics will say almost anything.

The Friendship comes with a beautiful dust jacket -- a painting of Ullswater, bathed in a golden light, by Joseph Wright of Derby. You can understand why Wordsworth and Coleridge wanted, deeply needed, to live in the Lake District. A few weeks there, and any of us might start to write poetry. ·

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com.