Coleridge's "The Raven" and the Forging of Radicalism

Abstract

Read in the context of eighteenth-century and romantic forgeries and political verse fables, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Raven" (1798) appears as a serious literary hoax. Published during the controversy over William Henry Ireland's forged Shakespeare Papers, Coleridge's poem performs a playful metacommentary on literary forgery at the same time that it addresses contemporary political issues surrounding the French Revolution crisis. This article argues that "The Raven" forges in various senses: it counterfeits an existing text (by Edmund Spenser), and it also forms social, political, and linguistic meaning.