Coleridge's 'On a Supposed Son' and Friedrich von Logau's 'Auf ein Zweifelkind'

Abstract

COLERIDGE’s epigram ‘On a Supposed Son’, which was published under that title on 5 February 1800 in the Morning Post, was recorded as item 31 in a notebook entry consisting of a series of epigrams ‘mostly adapted from the German’.1 Jim Mays’ headnote to ‘Epigram on a Supposed Son’ in the Poetical Works states that ‘the present lines might well derive from a German original which has not been traced’ (597). Apart from its appearance in the Morning Post the epigram was not reprinted by Coleridge, and Kathleen Coburn’s note refers to item 31 as ‘Unpublished’ (CN I, 625n). David Erdman includes it in Appendix D of the Essays on his Times as a new attribution (III, 301). Coburn’s note to notebook entry 625 echoes Ernest Hartley Coleridge’s edition of The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford, 1912) with an indication that most items are adaptations from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Sinngedichte and other German writers (CN I, 625n). Because item 31 was not included in The Complete Poetical Works it may have remained unidentified.