Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

announcing the publication of vast works, of an encyclopedic or psychological nature. When Coleridge died, in the year 1834, his friends had the impression, that is, they felt, that he had already died a long time before. And there is a famous page written by the English essayist CharlesLamb, who had been a classmate of his, where he says, “I grieve that I could not grieve.” Coleridge had turned into a kind of aesthetic ghost for many of them. But Lamb says that in spite of this, everything he himself has written, everything he is writing, and everything he would write later, he wrote for Coleridge. And he speaks—as all his interlocutors did—ofColeridge’s splendid conversation. He says that his words were “the very music of thought.” But people stopped thinking that as soon as they understood what he was saying. That’s why he had no friends at that time. Well, many still loved him, they welcomed him into their homes, they sent him anonymous charity, as did DeQuincey. (Coleridge accepted all of this as if it were something natural. He felt no gratitude or even any curiousity about these gifts from friends. He lived essentially for thought and in thought.) He was not very interested in contemporary poetry. He was shown some poems byTennyson, by the young Tennyson, who was also famous for the musicality of his poetry. Coleridge said, “He seems not to have understood the essential nature of English verse,” a judgment that is completely unfair. The fact is that Coleridge wasn’t interested in other people. Nor was he interested in convincing an audience or convincing his interlocutor. His conversations were monologues; and he accepted visits from strangers, but that was because it gave him the opportunity to talk out loud. I said in the last class that Coleridge’s poetic oeuvre, counted in pages, is considerable. The Oxford edition [of his work] has three or four hundred pages. However, that of the distinguished Everyman’s Library, which you will hear about—the word “Everyman” is the name of a play from the Middle Ages—is probably two hundred pages. 1 It is called
The Golden Book of Coleridge
, and is an anthology of his poetic oeuvre. 2 However, we can reduce that to five or six poems, and I will begin with the least important.
    There is “France: An Ode.” There is a curious poem—not more than just curious—titled “Time,Real and Imaginary,” whose subject is the difference between the two existing times: abstract time, which is what can be measured by watches, and the one that is essential for expression, for fear, and for hope. Then there is a poem, chiefly of autobiographical interest, called“Ode on Dejection,” in which, as in Wordsworth’s“Intimations of Immortality,” Coleridge speaks about the difference between the way he felt life when he was young and how he felt it later. He said he had contracted “the habit of despair.” 3
    And then, we come to Coleridge’s three essential poems, those that have led some to call him the greatest poet or one of the greatest poets of English literature. Not long ago a book was published, whose author I don’t remember, called
The Crystal Dome
. 4 This book analyzes the three poems by Coleridge we are discussing today. The author says that these three poems of Coleridge’s are a kind of miniature
Divine Comedy
, for one alludes to hell, one to purgatory, and the other to paradise. One ofDante’s sons explained that the first part shows man as a sinner, as guilty; the second shows man as repentant, as penitents; and the third shows man as just and blessed. 5 Speaking about Coleridge, it seems so natural to make these digressions. He would have done the same. I want to use this opportunity to say, as an aside, that we have no reason at all to assume that Dante, when he wrote
Inferno
,
Purgatorio
, and
Paradiso
, wanted to describe those ultra-earthly regions the way he imagined them. There is no reason at all to make that supposition. Dante himself, in a letter to Cangrande della Scala, said that his book could be read in four ways, that there were four levels for the reader. 6 That is why I think it right what Flaubert said: that when Dante died, he must have been amazed to see that hell, purgatory, or paradise—let us assume he made it into the last region—did not match his imagination. I think that Dante, when he wrote the poem, did not believe that he had done anything more than find adequate symbols to sensitively