An Autumnal Blast, a Killing Frost: Coleridge's Poetic Conversation with John Thelwall

Abstract

IDELY REGARDED AS AMONG HIS MOST SUCCESSFUL WORKS, COLE ridge's conversation poems have long been taken as typical of that broad transition in voice and vision that defines romanticism: from public genres to private, lyric modes, from the world of radical political activism to the solitary, transcendent realm of imagination. In this respect their collective title is perhaps somewhat misleading, for what poems like Lime Tree Bower and The Nightingale seem to record is not true dialogic utterance, but an intimate exchange among a coterie which often approaches the nature of soliloquy. This tendency is perhaps most evident in Frost at Midnight, a poem in which the words themselves at times seem to be merely accessories, external markers of a silent, spiritual com munion between Coleridge and his sleeping child (or his imagination, nature, God) which issues in a psychic and poetic transformation as invis ible, as effortless, as organic as the secret ministry of the frost. Such a poem appears as distant from the public debates and political divisions of its historical period as its quiet, sincere meditations are from the zealous exhortations and rhetorical excesses of Coleridge's lectures and more topi poems. Yet as Paul Magnuson has recently suggested, this least politi cal of Coleridge's poems1 has more in common with Coleridge's more partisan productions and activities than it appears, for it was published in a volume together with two explicitly political poems (Fears in Solitude and France: An Ode), which ensured that, whatever the circumstances of its composition, it would be received not as a personal lyric reflecting w