5 - Coleridge: fields of liberty

Summary

Coleridge's landscape-descriptions, made in dialogue with Wordsworth, searched for a common order conceived in terms that became increasingly different from those of the poet of The Prelude. In this chapter I wish to examine that search in order to focus upon the tensions that beset it. To do so I shall place Coleridge in a number of contexts that will illuminate the strategies he adopted in order to formulate discourses of poetic and critical authority. Many of these were developed from those used by poets and critics earlier in the eighteenth century. In particular, I shall argue, Coleridge learnt from Cowper, from the picturesque, and from a new understanding of biblical poetry as he sought to empower his voice to overcome his own divided loyalties and articulate a vision of national unity. Landscape poetry, fusing eighteenth-century traditions, became for Coleridge a way of retrieving a personal consistency endangered in his daily life and his political journalism. It became a radical nationalism as he preached, like Cowper before him but with a deeper intensity, of an England renewed as a moral and spiritual community of harmony and liberty, free from division and repression.

But Coleridge's own position as a writer was not free from conflict and repression and his landscapes of liberty often reinscribed, beneath their ostensible terrain of freedom, personal, religious and social subordination. Much of his landscape-description can, I shall suggest, be seen as an attempt to control the instabilities of his own authority.