Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

next class I will talk about his friend, collaborator, and, finally, polemicist, Coleridge, the other great poet from the beginning of the romantic movement.

CLASS 13

    THE LIFE OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. A STORY BY HENRY JAMES. COLERIDGE AND MACEDONIO FERNÁNDEZ, COMPARED. COLERIDGE AND SHAKESPEARE.
IN COLD BLOOD
, BY TRUMAN CAPOTE.

    WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1966
    One of a writer’s most important works—perhaps the most important of all—is the image he leaves of himself in the memory of men, above and beyond the pages he has written. Now, Wordsworth was himself a better poet than Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom we will speak about today. But when one thinks of Wordsworth, one thinks of an English gentleman of the Victorian era, similar to so many others. When one thinks of Coleridge, on the other hand, one thinks of a character from a novel. All of this is interesting for a critical analysis and for the imagination, and soHenry James, the great American novelist, believed. Coleridge’s life was a collection of failures, frustrations, unfulfilled promises, vacillations. There is a story by Henry James called“The Coxon Fund,” which was inspired by his reading of one of the first biographies of Coleridge. 1 The protagonist of the story is a man of genius, a genius conversationalist, that is, someone who spends his life at the homes of his friends. They expect him to write a great work. They know that for him to carry out this work he needs time and rest. And the heroine is a young lady whose responsibility it is to choose the fellow for this foundation, the Coxon Foundation, established by one of her aunts, Lady Coxon. The young lady sacrifices her chance to be married, sacrifices her own life, so that the person who receives the award will be a man of genius. The protagonist accepts the annuity, which is considerable, and then the author leaves us to understand—or he states it directly, I don’t remember—that the great man writes nothing, barely a few rough drafts. And we can say the same thing about Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was at the center of a brilliant circle, called the “Lake School,” because they lived in the Lake District. He was Wordsworth’s friend and DeQuincey’s teacher. He was friends with the poet RobertSouthey, who left among his many works a poem called “A Tale of Paraguay,” based on the texts of the JesuitDobrizhoffer, a missionary in Paraguay. 2 a> The members of this group considered Coleridge their master, they considered themselves inferior to him. Nevertheless, Coleridge’s work, which fills many volumes, actually consists of only a few poems—unforgettable poems—and a few pages of prose. Some of the pages are in the
Biographia Literaria
; others are of lectures he gave aboutShakespeare. 3 Let’s first look at Coleridge’s life, and then we will examine his work, not infrequently unintelligible, tedious, and plagiarized.
    Coleridge was born in1772, two years after Wordsworth, who was, as you know, born in the year 1770, which is easy to remember. (I’m saying this now because you are about to have an exam.) Coleridge dies in the year 1834. His father is a Protestant vicar in the south of England. Reverend Coleridge was a vicar in a country town, and he impressed his listeners because he would always weave into his sermons what he called “the immediate tongue to the Holy Ghost.” In other words, long passages in Hebrew that his rustic parishioners did not understand, but which made them venerate him. When Coleridge’s father died, his parishioners scorned his successor because he did not interweave unintelligible passages in the immediate language of the Holy Ghost.
    Coleridge studied at Christ Church, where his classmate was CharlesLamb, who wrote a description of him. 4 He then attended Cambridge University, where he met Southey, and there they planned to found a socialist colony in a remote and dangerous region of the United States. Then, for some reason that has never been fully explained, but is just one of the many mysteries that constitutes Coleridge’s life, Coleridge enlists in a regiment of dragoons. “I am,” as Coleridge said, “the least equestrian of men.” He never learned to ride a horse. After a few months, one of the officers found him writing poems in Greek on one of the barrack walls, poems in which he expressed his despair at his impossible fate as a horseman, which he had inexplicably chosen. The officer spoke with him and managed