Coleridge's Sonnets from Various Authors (1796): a lost conversation poem?

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University

IN AUTUMN 1796, SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE PUT TOGETHER A MODEST little pamphlet (so modest it has no title) which offers a case-history of how texts can gather new and even urgent meanings through the circumstances of their transmission. Hitherto largely ignored by Coleridge scholars, and only once considered as a literary artifact, (1) Sonnets from Various Authors (a title of convenience) is, I want to show, a carefully shaped collection with both a structured argument and a directed message. It is simultaneously a text and a context; it makes meaning in both space and time--through the particular contained circumstances of the sonnet form and of a few weeks during September-November 1796--and under this joint spatial and temporal pressure it creates a Coleridgean text from the individual voices of others. The result is virtually a "lost" Conversation Poem: a dramatic "converse" meditating on themes of self and society, friendship and social action, and moving from single lonely thoughts to a more integrated sense of the "one Life within us and abroad." (2) Coleridge wrote to Tom Poole on 7 November



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.--I have only printed two hundred, as my paper held out to no more; and dispose of them privately, just enough to pay the printing. (3)

This little collection of sixteen pages, an octavo printed in half-sheets, consists of a first leaf containing a prefatory essay on the sonnet (signed "Editor"), followed by fourteen pages of sonnets (printed two to a page). It has no title-page, just a short opening paragraph: "I have selected the following SONNETS from various Authors for the purpose of binding them up with the Sonnets of the Rev. W. L. BOWLES." This "sheaf of sonnets," as it is sometimes known, consists of three by William Lisle Bowles, two by Charlotte Smith, one each by John Bampfylde, Thomas Warton, Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, William Sotheby, Thomas Russell, Thomas Dermody, and Anna Seward, and four each by Coleridge himself, Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd. Not surprisingly, it is a scarce bibliographic item, and of the seven copies known three are indeed bound up with Bowles's sonnets as Coleridge hoped: Stella Thelwall's copy in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and that of Sophia Pemberton (later Mrs Charles Lloyd) at Cornell, are bound with the fourth edition of 1796; and in the Huntington Library Charles Lloyd's own copy accompanies the third edition of 1794. (4)

So--seven years after Coleridge's first ecstatic encounter with Bowles's sonnets as a teenager, memorably described in the opening chapter of Biographia Literaria, they are still a touchstone for his own work, a way of reaching out to his friends, and a gauge of his feelings for them. Looking back in 1815, he felt Bowles's influence had been "for radical good," and remained grateful for "the genial influence of a style of poetry, so tender, and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so dignified, and harmonious, as the sonnets, &c. of Mr. Bowles." During 1789-90 he had "made ... more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to those, who had in any way won my regard," (5) and now in the Autumn of 1796 he is still wanting Bowles's sonnets to circulate, and is binding up himself and his friends with them. In this little collection of sonnets, Coleridge and they are bound together, contextus (from contexo, "to bind or weave together"), like the two pamphlets.

Why at this particular moment think of Bowles and the sonnet? The key is in Coleridge's prefatory essay on the sonnet form, which he defines as "a small poem, in which some lonely feeling is developed." He says:

In a Sonnet then we require a development of some lonely feeling, by whatever cause it may have been excited; but those Sonnets appear to me the most exquisite, in which moral Sentiments, Affections, or Feelings, are deduced from, and associated with, the scenery of Nature. Such compositions ... create a sweet and indissoluble union between the intellectual and the material world.

The sonnet is consequently about finding "union" from loneliness, and about drawing together the internal and external principles. The very confinement of the form makes it assimilable by the human spirit. At this moment for Coleridge the sonnet is intimately internalized, almost an organic part of ourselves: "Easily remembered from their briefness ... these are the poems which we can 'lay up in our heart, and our soul,' and repeat them 'when we walk by the way, and when we lie down and when we rise up.'" In other words, they live with us and become part of our daily routine. In the hands of Bowles, the sonnet becomes for Coleridge the internal equivalent of settled domestic happiness: "Hence, the Sonnets of BOWLES derive their marked superiority over all other Sonnets ... they domesticate with the heart, and become, as it were, a part of our identity." (6)

The period from late September to early November 1796 was a time when domestication was at the forefront of Coleridge's thoughts. Since the collapse of The Watchman in May, his prospects had swung giddily around to the dismay of his friends (Lamb called it his "dancing demon"): to continue journalism in London with the Morning Chronicle? To become a dissenting minister? Engage himself as a private tutor? Translate Schiller? Open a day-school in Derby? Lamb wrote: "I grieve from my very soul to observe you in your plans of life, veering about from this hope to the other, & settling no where ... lies the fault, as I fear it does, in your own mind?" (7) But Coleridge was--at this moment--attempting to settle. His son Hartley had been born on 19 September, and as he assembled his sequence of sonnets he was in Bristol sharing a bed with his new friend Charles Lloyd, now part of the family, all of them intending soon to settle (as he told Lloyd's father on 15 October) to a life of "rustic" retirement as Tom Poole's neighbors in or near Nether Stowey (Griggs 240-41). Lloyd was ecstatic at his new domesticity with his brilliant tutor and friend, who was addressing poems to him, including "To a Young Friend on His Proposing to Domesticate with the Author."

In a very different vein, on 22 September, the "domestic" became the terrifying focus for Charles Lamb's life, on that "day of horrors" when all his prospects seemed to close down. Breaking the news of his mother's killing by his sister Mary, he wrote to Coleridge: "You look after your family,--I have my reason and strength left to take care of mine. I charge you don't think of coming to see me. Write. I will not see you if you come" (Marrs 45). His letters to Coleridge in the weeks that follow convey a sense of someone managing under terrific spatial and mental pressure ("my mother a dead & murder'd corpse in the next room") as he carefully plans out his family's domestic future and finds ways of "managing my mind" (Marrs 48). As for poetry, he declares, he is finished with it for ever. (8) For Coleridge to turn back to the sonnet at this moment, and draw Lloyd, Lamb and himself together under the guiding spirit of Bowles, domesticating with the heart, becomes I think an understandable, even significant, gesture. (9)

This pamphlet is indeed a "turning back" to the sonnet. In his Poems published that Spring, Coleridge had abjured the form, retitling all his earlier sonnets "effusions" and deliberately merging them under that title with the meditative-descriptive poem, Ossianic ballad, and ode. The preface to Poems shows a loss of confidence in his ability to write a true sonnet or even compare himself with Bowles:

Of the following Poems a considerable number are styled "Effusions" ... I might indeed have called the majority of them Sonnets--but they do not posses that oneness of thought which I deem indispensible in a Sonnet--and ... I was fearful...

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