Richard Matlak. The Poetry of Relationship: The Wordsworths and Coleridge, 1797-1800.(Book Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-JUN-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University

New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. Pp. x+246. $39.95.

Richard Matlak's dense but rewarding The Poetry of Relationship offers anintensely focused psychobiographical account of the interrelations between William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge during the final years of the eighteenth century, the years when William Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated together on the production of the Lyrical Ballads. As Matlak acknowledges at the opening of his introduction, this is fairly familiar critical terrain. A number of studies of the poetic interaction between Wordsworth and Coleridge appeared during the 1980s, and biographers have always been and continue to be interested in exploring the complex personal interaction between the formidable brother-sister pair and their intimate friend. Matlak's claim to add something new to the discussion rests in part on the special role he sees Dorothy playing in her brother's poetic development and his attention to what he calls the "forensic nature of the poetic exchange" between Wordsworth and Coleridge, its argumentative character. There is more to it than that, though. As the book's argument builds--though sometimes a bit too slowly, especially in the first chapter--readers are offered new insights into familiar texts, the poetic interchange between The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere and The Ruined Cottage, the influence of Erasmus Darwin's writing on some of the lyrical ballads, the rhetorical structure of "Tintern Abbey," the "Lucy poems," some of early drafts of the 1799 version of The Prelude, and Michael. It is in the critical insights that accumulate toward the end of the book that its greatest value (for this reviewer, anyway) lies, and the renewed sense of poignancy the reader experiences at the end when it is brought experientially home once again how brief that moment of collaboration between the Wordsworths and Coleridge actually...

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