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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University
"I love Sonnets; but upon my honor I do not love my Sonnets."
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge
PERHAPS BECAUSE FROM A FORMAL STANDPOINT HE WAS SO DOGGEDLY unconventional, Samuel Taylor Coleridge seems an unlikely sonneteer. Fourteen lines, it would seem, hardly could contain his expansive imagination. Coleridge's muse, unlike Wordsworth's, naturally would "fret" at the narrow confines of its convent. While not as prolific a sonneteer as Wordsworth or even Keats, Coleridge, however, did play an important role in the romantic-era sonnet revival, beginning in 1788 when he composed "To the Autumnal Moon" and continuing through 1796 when he published a volume of his own sonnets as well as the pamphlet Sonnets from Various Authors, with its prefatory essay, one of the few coherent statements of the theory and practice of the romantic-period sonnet. The essay is also where Coleridge credits Charlotte Smith and William Lisle Bowles with reviving the English-language sonnet, "deducing its laws," he says emphatically, "from their compositions" instead of Petrarch's.(1) Bowles's early influence on Coleridge has been the subject of much curiosity and study, wonder even, but few scholars have studied Coleridge as a sonneteer or have considered his sonnets in light of the romantic-era sonnet revival, particularly in the decade prior to Wordsworth's serious adoption of the form.(2) Doing so puts into sharper focus his complex attitude towards the sonnet during the 1790s, the period of his most active involvement with the form. As a sonneteer, Coleridge, not surprisingly, is deferential to Bowles, his model; but he also is curiously defensive about the sonnet itself. His active participation in the sonnet revival, his preoccupation with the form, and his admiration for Bowles's sonnets reveal that the sonnet is the source of anxiety and embarrassment for Coleridge. As he wrote to fellow sonneteer John Thelwall in 1796, "I love Sonnets; but upon my honor I do not love my Sonnets."(3) The form itself becomes for Coleridge a locus of considerable angst, troping his personal worries in sonnets that are, in fact, the most intimate poems in his oeuvre. The sonnet, with its considerable formal demands, becomes, moreover, the site of Coleridge's most self-conscious and deliberate poetic composition and ultimately of his self-perceived inadequacies as a poet. Coleridge's sonnet writing is, as he later would call it, "work without hope."
1. "So tender, and yet so manly"
The anxieties of form Coleridge associates with the sonnet are complicated by the embarrassments of gender. Considering Coleridge's participation in the female-dominated sonnet revival sheds new light on the ways in which male poets, such as Coleridge, Bowles, Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd, followed directly Charlotte Smith's lead. First published in 1784, Smith's Elegiac Sonnets, as Coleridge's praise indicates, revived the sonnet form and became part of the cultural consciousness during the 1780s and '90s.(4) Smith's feminization of the sonnet also became somewhat of an embarrassment for the sonnet tradition. The sonnets are not themselves defective; rather, their popularity and influence made them perfect targets for parroting and parody.(5) Even Coleridge published, in 1796, an imitation of Smith's Elegiac Sonnets in subject, tone, and form, the sonnet "To the Autumnal Moon":
Mild Splendour of the various-vested Night! Mother of wildly-working visions! hail! I watch thy gliding, while with watery light Thy weak eye glimmers through a fleecy veil; And when thou lovest thy pale orb to shroud Behind the gather'd blackness lost on high; And when thou dartest from the wind-rent cloud Thy placid lightning o'er the awaken'd sky. Ah such is Hope! as changeful and as fair! Now dimly peering on the wistful sight; Now hid behind the dragon wing'd Despair: But soon emerging in her radiant might She o'er the sorrow-clouded breast of Care Sails, like a meteor kindling in its flight.(6)
The sonnet is undoubtedly an "elegiac sonnet," developing its melancholy expression in elegiac quatrains like Smith's. Several other features of the sonnet suggest Smith's influence: its personification of the feminine moon recalls Smith's "Queen of the silver bow"; its "dragon-wing'd Despair" is a relative of Smith's personified abstractions of Despair, Sorrow, and Woe; and its pensive wonder of the moon gives way to melancholy, Smith's favored mood. However, this sonnet's Hope, while "as changeful and as fair" as Smith's, emerges from the dark clouds to cheer the brooding speaker; as a result, the sonnet is more optimistic than Smith's usually are. Smith's influence on this sonnet, furthermore, is particularly strong because, though it was published in 1796, Coleridge wrote it, at age 16, in 1788--a year before the publication of Bowles's Fourteen Sonnets, which made an indelible impression upon Coleridge and became his primary model for sonneteering. "To the Autumnal Moon," then, suggests the extent to which Smith's revival of the sonnet made an early impression on Coleridge, who was a copious imitator of other poets, particularly in his youth.
It was Bowles, however, not Smith, whom Coleridge, in the years prior to his association with Wordsworth, adored to idolatry. Coleridge's 1796 pamphlet Sonnets from Various Authors is an emblem of his admiration for Bowles, compiled, as he says, "for the purpose of binding them up with the Sonnets of the Rev. W.L. BOWLES" (Sonnets I).(7) He wrote to Thomas Poole in November of 1796, "I amused myself the other day (having some paper at the Printer's which I could employ no other way) in selecting 28 Sonnets, to bind up with Bowles's--I charge sixpence for them, and have sent you five to dispose of" (Letters 1.252). He goes on to express his satisfaction with the prefatory essay. The contents of the volume reveal the influence of Smith's and Bowles's sonnets on Coleridge in his taste for sonnets that "domesticate with the heart, and become, as it were, a part of our identity" (Sonnets 1). Most of them are sonnets of sensibility. As Paul M. Zall points out, Coleridge's selection of sonnets also has a polemical purpose: "all the poems reveal Coleridge's intent to display the superiority of the loose English sonnet over the regular Italian (Petrarchan or Miltonic) sonnet, to take sides in a popular controversy that had raged for a decade: which form was better suited to the English language?" (51). Smith's preference for the English form makes her Elegiac Sonnets central to this debate, so Coleridge includes two of her sonnets in the series. Coleridge's highest praise, however, is reserved for Bowles, whose sonnets display a "marked superiority over all other Sonnets" (Sonnets I). Putting aside (probably indefinitely) the larger issue of the ultimate superiority of Bowles's sonnets, we instead might wonder why Coleridge singles out Bowles here when he has already made such an explicit association of Bowles with Smith.(8)
Is it because Bowles is a man? To begin answering this question more fully, however, I would like to consider Coleridge's more famous tribute to Bowles written years later and published in chapter one of the Biographia Literaria. He omits mention of Smith here as he says nothing of the sonnet revival. His emphasis in the Biographia has changed, understandably, from Bowles's role in the revival of the sonnet to Bowles's more personal influence on Coleridge's appreciation of poetry. Coleridge tells us that he became familiar with Bowles's sonnets at seventeen and became increasingly "delighted and inspired."(9) He also remarks that the moral tenor and reflective qualities of Bowles's sonnets rescued him from the metaphysical and theological speculation that had killed his interest in literature. He was struck, he says, "by the genial influence of a style of poetry, so tender, and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so dignified, and harmonious" (Biographia 1.17).(10) Bowles's poetry, Coleridge asserts, also provided him with an alternative to "fantastic and arbitrary" eighteenth-century poetic diction: Bowles and Cowper, whom he read after Bowles, were "the first who combined natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head" (Biographia 1.23, 25). The significance of Bowles's influence in this regard cannot be overestimated: as James McKusick puts it, "All of Coleridge's subsequent career, according to the account given in the Biographia, was conditioned by his initial preference for the `natural' language of Bowles over the `arbitrary' language of Pope."(11) If this is true, Bowles's sonnets are key for appreciating one of the traditional innovations of romanticism--the move away from poetic diction. Donald Reiman points out, moreover, that, through Bowles, Coleridge retrospectively is able to claim for himself an influence free from dependence on Wordsworth (346-47). This is particularly important since, in so much of the Biographia, Coleridge is concerned resolutely with distinguishing himself from Wordsworth and his ideas from Wordsworth's ideas. Bowles gives Coleridge the provenance in which to do so.(12)
In addition to the pamphlet of sonnets, Coleridge's personal correspondence from the 1790s confirms his enthusiasm for Bowles, whom he calls "the bard of my idolatry," and his admiration for Bowles's diction: defending Bowles from Thelwall's charge of "Della Cruscanism," or poetic artifice, Coleridge calls Bowles "the most tender, and, with the exception of Bums, the only always-natural poet in our Language" (Letters 1.164). McKusick, who puts Coleridge's praise of Bowles in the context of contemporary theories of language, interprets this remark as Coleridge's appreciation of poetry that "recaptures, or at least seeks to recapture" the sounds of speech while mingling "the description of natural objects with the expression of human feeling" (17). Bowles's poetry, particularly the first edition of Fourteen Sonnets, does not strike us today as particularly "natural," but Coleridge, in the Biographia, clings to Bowles as a sentimental relic of his youth who had a shaping influence on his literary life. Herbert Marshall McLuhan years ago remarked that "the languid sentiment of Bowles struck Coleridge as tender, natural, and bracing amidst the rhetorical posturings of the later eighteenth century."(13) Many critics have puzzled over Coleridge's admiration of Bowles in the first place, even to the extent of doubting Coleridge's sincerity. Raimon & Modiano, for instance, considers Coleridge's praise of Bowles in the Biographia Literaria "speciously exaggerated"(113). Coleridge's brief career as a sonneteer, however, puts his praise in a different light, making it difficult to underestimate so baldly Bowles's influence.(14)
The emphasis Coleridge places on Bowles in the Biographia Literaria, furthermore, provides some insight into Coleridge's promotion of Bowles during the 1790s. Zall convincingly argues that Bowles appealed to Coleridge at this particular point in his career because Bowles "provided a model for poetry of revolution aimed at social happiness and moral order, just as Milton had provided the model for political revolution" (56).(15) Bowles's poetry had a decidedly Christian and philanthropic thrust that appealed to Coleridge's increasing social awareness; in 1790, for example, Bowles published the popular Verses on the Benevolent Institution of the Philanthropic Society, For Protecting and Educating the Children of Vagrants and Criminals. Zall notes that the 1794, third edition of Bowles's poetry had turned from "a kind of feminine pathos" towards "political poetry with a new, muted tone," implying that Coleridge responded to what he perceived as a more masculine voice (56, 57). I would add, however, that the change in Bowles's 1794 poetry is his first significant departure from Smith's "feminine" mode. This is not to say, of course, that Smith's poetry does not develop humanitarian themes--many of her other lyrics and ballads certainly do this. Bowles, as an Oxford-educated clergyman, however, brings to his poetry a masculine social authority that Smith could not and that would have appealed particularly to the young clerically-minded Coleridge. Coleridge's preference for Bowles, then, begins to make sense in the context of the sonnet revival, so clearly dominated by Smith. It is certainly significant that Coleridge includes in his collection only two sonnets by Smith and one by Seward; the other 25 sonnets are by men, many of whom, Charles Lloyd, Charles Lamb, and Robert Southey, were friends and acquaintances. As Stuart Curran notes, the sonneteers Coleridge assembles seem to exist in "a circumference already defined by Bowles," but the other poets also widen "the intellectual and political circle" (36). Many of these men's sonnets, as Zall points out, express "pity and righteous indignation for the plight of the poor" and thus they make a stronger, more overt political statement than had been common in the eighteenth-century sonnet prior to this collection (50).(16) Bowles, after initially imitating Smith, was able, by...
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