Coleridge by S.L. Bensusan — Read

Before entering upon any attempt, however brief and inadequate it be, to estimate the multiform genius of Coleridge, it is well to remember that its permanent expression was, at least, three-sided. To-day he is regarded chiefly as a poet; for a dozen who know something of his poetry, there is hardly one who troubles to read his prose. The _Biographia Literaria_, for example, attracts few students; the _Table Talk_ recorded by his nephew, and Thomas Allsop's _Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge_, passed out of fashion about the middle of the Victorian Era. His _Aids to Reflection_ is only now returning to public notice after long neglect. The book enjoyed about twenty years' popularity in England and America, and then seemed to pass from the service of readers. But it is clear that quite apart from his poetry and prose, Coleridge's gifts found complete expression not only in lectures and letters, but in those casual discourses which held complete strangers entranced. He has been described as the finest conversationalist since Samuel Johnson. The printed work that bears his name falls far short of doing him justice.

It suffers on the prose side from the modern lack of interest in his precise attitude towards the metaphysical speculations that meant so much to him and his times. On the side of poetry it suffers from the widening of the boundaries that then marked the confines of legitimate poetic expression, and from the unfortunate truth that the poet in him died young. Coleridge the poet employed a very limited palette, not because he had no more colours, but because their use was discountenanced by his own early training and by the canons of contemporary criticism. To estimate the tradition that went to the making of the poet, and the long road he had to follow before he could find himself, turn to his Sonnet to the Evening Star, written when he was eighteen. It opens: