Coleridge's Political Poetics : Radicalism and Whig Verse 1794 - 1802

This book considers Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s engagement with ‘Whig poetry’: a tradition of verse from the eighteenth century which celebrated the political and constitutional arrangements of Britain as guaranteeing liberty. It argues that, during the 1790s, Coleridge was able to articulate radical ideas under the cover of widely accepted principles through his references to this poetry. He positioned his poetry within a mainstream discourse, even as he favoured radical social change. Jacob Lloyd argues that the poets Mark Akenside, William Lisle Bowles, and William Cowper each provided Coleridge with a kind of Whig poetics to which he responded. When these references are understood, much of Coleridge’s work which seems purely personal or imaginative gains a political dimension. In addition, Lloyd reassess Coleridge’s relationship with Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry , to provide an original, political reading of ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’. This book revises our understanding of the political and poetic development of a major poet and, in doing so, provides a new model for the origins of British Romanticism more broadly Acknowledgements 5 Contents 7 About the Author 9 Abbreviations 10 Chapter 1: Introduction 12 1.1 ‘Divinest Liberty!’ 12 1.2 Political Influences 14 1.3 Poetic Influences 20 1.4 Structure of the Book 26 Chapter 2: Coleridge and Whig Politics, 1794–1796 29 2.1 Whig Politics 30 2.2 Coleridge’s Politics, 1794–1796 35 Chapter 3: Whig Poetics and Akenside 43 3.1 Whig Poetics 43 3.2 Coleridge and Akenside 53 Chapter 4: Coleridge, Enthusiasm, and Bowles 65 4.1 Discourses of Enthusiasm 65 4.2 Coleridge’s Response to Godwin 69 4.3 Bowles, Coleridge, and the Politics of Sensibility 72 Chapter 5: Coleridge’s Poetry of 1796 and 1797 81 5.1 Coleridge’s 1796 Collection 81 5.2 Coleridge’s Appropriation of the Whig Sublime in ‘Religious Musings’ 91 5.3 Rewriting Patriot Whig Assumptions in the Ode on the Departing Year 103 Chapter 6: The Politics of Ancient Ballads: ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ and Christabel 115 6.1 Whiggism and the Gothic Inheritance 115 6.2 Coleridge’s Attitude to the Gothic 120 6.3 The Politics of the Gothic 122 6.4 The Presence of Percy’s Reliques in ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ 128 6.5 Chivalry in the Reliques 131 6.6 The Gothic in ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ 133 6.7 Christabel’s Gothic Politics 146 Chapter 7: Retirement Politics in the Fears in Solitude Quarto 156 7.1 The Context of Poetic Retirement 156 7.2 The Political Significance of Cowper’s Influence 158 7.3 Fears in Solitude 165 7.4 ‘France. An Ode’ 191 7.5 ‘Frost at Midnight’ 205 Chapter 8: ‘Dejection. An Ode’ and the Renunciation of Political Poetics 220 8.1 The Dangers of Abstraction 220 8.2 Coleridge’s Shifting Politics, 1798–1802 226 8.3 Odes and Political Poems in the Morning Post, 1801–1802 230 8.4 ‘Dejection. An Ode’ 235 Chapter 9: Conclusion 256 Bibliography 262 Primary Sources 262 Secondary Sources 268 Unpublished 279 Index 280