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The Wordsworth-Coleridge Controversy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Stephen Maxfield Parrish
Stephen Maxfield Parrish*
Affiliation:
Cornell University Ithaca, N.Y.
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Extract

When Coleridge, after looking over the third edition of Lyrical Ballads with its enlarged preface, confided to William Sotheby (13 July 1802) his troubled belief that between Wordsworth and himself there lay “a radical Difference” of opinion about poetry, he was recognizing a disagreement that must have dated almost from his earliest talks with Wordsworth. Writing to Robert Southey two weeks later (29 July), Coleridge proposed to “go to the Bottom” of the difference in a forthcoming volume of critical essays. When the proposal finally matured, in scattered chapters of Biographia Lileraria—fifteen years later—Coleridge declared it as a main object “to effect, as far as possible, a settlement of the long continuées, controversy concerning the true nature of poetic diction.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 73 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1958 , pp. 367 - 374
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1958

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References

Note 1 in page 367 Earl Leslie Griggs, ed. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1956), ii, 812, 830.

Note 2 in page 367 Ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1907), i, 1.

Note 3 in page 367 See Thomas Hutchinson, ed. Lyrical Ballads: 1798, 2nd ed. (London, 1907), p. 255.

Note 4 in page 367 The Early Wordsworth, English Association Presidential Address (n.p., Nov. 1936), p. 24.

Note 5 in page 367 According to Coleridge's “Prefatory Note” of 1828; see ?. H. Coleridge, ed. Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1912), i, 286.

Note 6 in page 367 Coleridge, ibid., i, 269.

Note 7 in page 368 Quotations from Pts. ? and p are from the version printed in Coleridge, Works, i, 269-275.

Note 8 in page 368 From the Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, reprinted in de Selincourt and Darbishire, eds. Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1940-49), ii, 384.

Note 9 in page 368 George McLean Harper, almost alone among Words-worthians, has given evidence of reading “The Thorn” in this way. “This poem is generally misunderstood,” he wrote in his notes to the Oxford Standard Wordsworth (1933), “through failure to observe that it is a dramatic monologue, supposed to be uttered by a retired sea-captain who has heard a tale of superstition in a village.” Harper carried his reading no further, and his notes, tucked in behind Hutchinson's, have not attracted the attention they deserve; they were dropped from de Selincourt's “New Edition” of 1950. I have tried to develop a detailed reading in “‘The Thorn’: Wordsworth's Dramatic Monologue,” ELH, xxiv (1957), 153-163.

Note 10 in page 369 When he reprinted the poem in Sibylline Leaves (1817); see Works, I, 267.

Note 11 in page 369 Miscellanies (London, 1886), p. 140.

Note 12 in page 369 Field's MS life of Wordsworth is quoted by de Selin-court, The Early Wordsworth, p. 28, n.

Note 13 in page 370 From the Longman MS. of Lyrical Ballads, 2nd ed., Vol. II, in the Yale University Library.

Note 14 in page 370 Thomas M. Raysor, ed. Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism (London, 1936), p. 394.

Note 15 in page 371 Alexander Grosart, ed. Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols. (London, 1876), iii, 488.

Note 16 in page 374 “Table Talk,” 21 July 1832 (Raysor, pp. 411-412).