{"id":5344,"date":"2024-07-02T20:24:56","date_gmt":"2024-07-02T20:24:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=5344"},"modified":"2024-07-02T20:24:56","modified_gmt":"2024-07-02T20:24:56","slug":"five-questions-jacob-lloyd-on-coleridges-political-poetics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=5344","title":{"rendered":"Five Questions: Jacob Lloyd on Coleridge’s Political Poetics<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jacob Lloyd is a Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University<\/a>. His work focuses on relationships between poetry and politics, as well as questions of influence, transmission and transformation in Romantic-period literature. He has an especial interest in Samuel Taylor Coleridge – recent publications include \u2018Political Coleridge\u2019<\/a>, for the New Cambridge Companion to Coleridge<\/em>; \u2018\u201cLess gross than bodily\u201d: Berkeleian Idealism in \u201cThis Lime-Tree Bower my Prison\u201d\u2019<\/a> in Romanticism<\/em>; and \u2018The Politics of Superstition in \u201cThe Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,\u201d Osorio<\/em>, and The Borderers<\/em>\u2019<\/a> in The Wordsworth Circle<\/em>. His first monograph, Coleridge\u2019s Political Poetics: Radicalism and Whig Verse, 1794-1802<\/a><\/em>, which we discuss below, was published last year by Palgrave Macmillan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1) How did you come to realise you wanted to write a book on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s early poetry?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In part it goes right back to my undergraduate studies. I remember that I was reading some articles on Coleridge in preparation for a practice exam at the start of my third year and found that I was rather enjoying doing so. I reflected that maybe I should pursue some further study so that I that could spend more time thinking about Romanticism. I subsequently went to Bristol to do an MA, which allowed me to study the period’s literature more widely (it was during this year I read Don Juan<\/em> for the first time) and write a dissertation about politics and subjectivity in Coleridge’s poetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The doctorate originally had a broader scope, covering Coleridge’s entire career and including Percy Bysshe Shelley, but, as so often happens, I had to narrow the focus in order to explore the topic in the depth that I wanted. The advantage of focusing on Coleridge’s early poetry, though, is that it contains most of his greatest verse. Some of my favourite poems of his, such as ‘Constancy to an Ideal Object’ and ‘Limbo’, belong to a later period, but around three quarters of his non-dramatic verse was written by the end of 1802, so ‘Coleridge’s early poetry’ covers quite a lot!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2) In your introduction, you write that ‘when Coleridge alludes to other poets, he does not merely pay homage or indicate a stylistic preference, but incorporates the ideas of other texts, sometimes in order to repurpose them’.  How integral was this practice of incorporation and reinflection to Coleridge’s poetical and political operations?
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I think it was absolutely essential. It is not new to suggest that literary relations are important to Coleridge\u2019s poetry (particularly his relationship with Wordsworth \u2013 the subject of monographs by Lucy Newlyn, Paul Magnuson, and Gene Ruoff in the late 1980s alone), but sometimes this kind of approach gives the impression that Coleridge is a slightly secondary figure. Norman Fruman’s Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel <\/em>(1971) is the most extreme version of such a framing: it is an extremely hostile account that depicts Coleridge as a parasite, utterly dependent on previous verse, and especially on Wordsworth’s poetry. Fruman’s biggest failing, in my view, is that he does not distinguish between different kinds of borrowing: allusion, dialogue, imitation, parody, and other kinds of reworking are all just called plagiarism. One thing I hope I show in my book is how different kinds of appropriation can actually transform a text in creative and distinctive ways. The more I read, the more convinced I am that originality, in the sense of creating something genuinely unprecedented, is vanishingly rare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I first read Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination<\/em>, it was a crucial moment for the formulation of my thesis. I immediately recognized Akenside\u2019s poem as a touchstone for Coleridge, the importance of which had been somewhat lost in the two hundred years since Coleridge published his poetry. I was also struck by how explicitly political The Pleasures of Imagination<\/em> is, meaning that Coleridge’s own metaphysical verse could not but be political when influenced by it. Considering Akenside’s work made me wonder what other contexts I had been missing that could be recovered by investigating Coleridge’s reading. I have tried to reconstruct what a knowledgeable reader of Coleridge’s poetry might have made of it: to identify the allusions and references this reader could have noticed and explore how these connections would shape how they understood Coleridge’s work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3) To what extent did Coleridge’s politics change over the years on which you focus (1794-1802)?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In some ways the change is quite stark: in 1794 Coleridge was a Unitarian, a republican, an opponent of war with France, and advocating the abolition of private property, but by 1802 he was attacking Charles James Fox for his French sympathies and arguing that property had to be the basis of government. It is only really in the last two years of this period that these views crystalize, though, and even then there was quite a lot of back and forth, particularly regarding the relative merits of a republic vs a monarchy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is, though, quite an important difference between Coleridge’s first collection of poetry in 1796 (with a second edition in 1797) and his poetry thereafter. The 1796\/1797 collection culminates in ‘Religious Musings’ which is a visionary poem that is clearly part of a radical, Unitarian tradition. It was written during the same period that Coleridge was giving political lectures in Bristol and then editing his own radical newspaper, The Watchman<\/em>. His verse at this point reflects a belief in direct engagement in political affairs. Afterwards, though, his poetry, especially much of his blank verse, emphasized moral improvement through a relationship with nature instead. This Romantic conception has at times been depicted as a conservative withdrawal from politics, but I see it rather as Coleridge trying to find a different path to the same political ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between 1794 and 1800, then, there is some change, but it is mostly quite subtle. What I was really interested by was the fact that Coleridge does not have some epiphanic moment that converts him, but rather goes through a protracted process of reconsidering his ideas. I’ve argued elsewhere (in a 2022 article for The Wordsworth Circle<\/em><\/a>) that ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ is, in part, about reconsidering one’s ideological assumptions in the light of experience. In late 1798, Coleridge was still testing out ways of refiguring his ideals so as to stay true to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4) How does recognising the occluded influence of poets such as Mark Akenside, William Lisle Bowles, Thomas Percy and William Cowper help us better elucidate Coleridge’s work?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It recontextualizes many of his poems and highlights quite different implications that they have. Although Mark Akenside was half a century older than Coleridge and writing in a different political context, Coleridge’s adoption of an Akensidean poetics, which uses a particular combination of poetic sublimity and metaphysics in support of a political programme, enabled Coleridge both to present himself in a way that was intelligible to his readership and to transfuse this model with a more radical agenda.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Percy’s collection of medieval and Renaissance ballads could be deployed as part of a Whiggish belief that British liberty was embodied in an Ancient Constitution bequeathed by their Goth ancestors. The cultural values of the Goths which underpinned this Constitution were supposedly exemplified in and transmitted through the ballads which Percy collected. I argue that Coleridge’s mock-medieval ballads, ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ and Christabel<\/em>, respond to the influence of Percy’s collection not by endorsing this Whiggish myth but by interrogating it. The horrors and chaos of both poems demonstrate the inadequacy of feudal values and systems as a basis for a modern political settlement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With his older contemporaries, Bowles and Cowper, Coleridge was taking the poetry of people often seen as quite politically mainstream and developing the radical elements within their words. So Fears in Solitude<\/em>, a poem which is sometimes considered to have loyalist or conservative leanings, has, I argue, important affinities with his more obviously radical work, which become more apparent once the presence of Cowper is recognized fully.

This is how I conceive of Romanticism more broadly: it was a reaction to astonishing events and ideas that were current, but it developed its responses through an eighteenth-century understanding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5) What new projects are you currently working on?
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I am in the early stages of a new project exploring the concept of liberty in Romantic poetry. This has developed from two strands that were important in the Coleridge monograph. The first was finding out that Whigs understood liberty quite differently from how we generally understand it today. For them, liberty was about being part of self-governing state without an arbitrary ruler and was related to classical republicanism. The modern conception of liberty as an absence of restrictive laws has seventeenth-century roots, but gains influence after the French Revolution. The Romantic period is thus a time of transition and I want to investigate the extent to which the Romantics were aware of this contest of meanings and were participating in it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other strand comes from thinking about ‘France. An Ode’, in which Coleridge disclaims finding liberty ‘in forms of human power’ and instead turns to its preservation in the natural world. I argue in Coleridge’s Political Poetics<\/em> that he is making the case for liberty as needing moral guidance and as being distinct from licence, which is the indulgence of personal desires. What I want to do in this new project, then, is consider the relationship between verse form and different conceptions of liberty and its relationship to licence. Wordsworth occupies much of my attention for this project, but I also want to have chapters discussing Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte Smith, and Lord Byron, with a bit on Percy Bysshe Shelley as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jacob Lloyd is a Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University. His work focuses on relationships between poetry and politics, as well as questions of influence, transmission and transformation in… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5344"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5344"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5365,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5344\/revisions\/5365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}