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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University
New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xvii+171. 25 illus. $55.00.
Painting Coleridge boils down to this fundamental problem: the man looked nothing like a romantic poet. Unlike the expressive faces of his well-known contemporaries, which all in one way or another hint at the visionary rumblings beneath the surface, Coleridge's face was wide, fleshy, and inert. He looked more like a barrister from Bleak House than a winged seraph. Although his eyes were penetrating and luminous and his forehead solid, everything else was a bit pulpy: a wide, plump nose and thick moist lips bobbed in a vague ocean of cheek and jowl washed by the sea-drift of sideburns. The complexion was oily, the forehead and nose glistening on occasion with perspiration, either from corpulence or opium-addiction. In a number of portraits his mouth is slightly open, revealing two dingy-looking front teeth like a pair of tombstones. These characteristics are of course not as pronounced in the youthful portraits, where the face is more elastic and alert, but it is the later portraits that have had more currency and have come to shape our image of the man. Commenting on James Northcote's attempt to render Coleridge in 1805, Wordsworth summed up the problem with his usual tact: "I consider C.'s as a face absolutely impracticable" (40).
Coleridge himself, as Paley says, did not like his own face, maintaining that it was "not ... representable" (53). His friends, however, were of a different opinion and often noticed a distinct change in his features once they were animated by...
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