Coleridge, Revision, and Public Self-Fashioning: Versioning the Poems of “Lyric Improvisation”

Abstract

Samuel Taylor Coleridge`s poems of imaginative failure lay thematic emphasis on the immediacy of emotional response; but an examination of their publishing history and the author`s conflicting motives for rewriting them challenges the received accounts of the poems as a deeply meditative genre in which Coleridge describes a moment of personal crisis confessing private, lyrical impulses at the breakdown of creative power. Employing a biblio-textual method focusing on the production of literary works and the process (rather than end product) of writing, this article compares multiple authoritative versions of Coleridge`s poems of “lyric improvisation.” The essay reads Coleridge`s tropes of containment and lyric failure as a vehicle for not merely subjective, aesthetic affairs, but also pragmatic and social ones, illustrating discontinuities in the Romantic poet`s social circumstances figured prominently in the revising process of his metapoetic discourse.