Fluttering on the Grate: Revision in "Frost at Midnight"

Abstract

WHILE EXAMINING THE PROOFS OF SIBYLLINE LEAVES IN 1817, SAMUEL Taylor Coleridge found at in an unexpected place, the section of Occasioned by Political Events or Feelings Connected with Them. In addition to providing his publisher with a substantially revised version of the text itself, Coleridge also insisted on relocating the poem within the volume: How comes this Poem here? ... It must, however, be deferred till it[s] proper place among my domestic & meditative Poems. (1) The new position accorded to Frost at Midnight in Sibylline Leaves, as the final piece in the section of Meditative Poems in Blank anticipates the poem's subsequent reputation. Critics have often taken it to be the culmination of Coleridge's achievement in his most influential lyric form, the conversation poem. Coleridge's preference aside, an incisive critical revaluation, begun in the early 1990's, has sought to re-emphasize the poem's political contexts. As Paul Magnuson has reminded us, Frost at Midnight was first published in 1798, concluding a quarto that also features Fears in Solitude and France: An Ode. Like the other poems in this volume, Magnuson argues, Frost at Midnight responds to the repressive political climate that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. (2) Much of the recent commentary on the poem follows Magnuson's lead in renewing attention to the circumstances surrounding the poem's inception. Judith Thompson has elucidated the significant exchanges between Frost at Midnight and John Thelwall's poems of the 1790's; Jerrold E. Hogle has explored the poem in terms of Coleridge's vexed attitude to the Gothic vogue of the late eighteenth century. (3) These studies have proven valuable by reinvigorating our sense of Frost at Midnight as a conversation poem, as a text intricately engaged with the broad social and cultural questions of its day. As salutary as this revaluation has been, however, it has had some unfortunate consequences, not the least of which is the occlusion of Coleridge's own conversation with his earlier self in the process of revising one of his signature texts. Recent anthologies of Romantic era writing--McGann's New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse, Mellor and Matlak's British Literature 1780-1830, and Jonathan and Jessica Wordsworth's New Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry--all provide the poem's earliest published version. The gradual disappearance of the final text Coleridge authorized should give us pause. Indeed, the editors of the Penguin anthology, while defending the inclusion of the 1798 text, express some telling reservations: Frost at is presented in the text of 1798, not because the early version is better than that of 1828 (it isn't), but because in its original form it is the climax of Coleridge's Conversation Poems, and a vital influence on the Wordsworth of Tintern Abbey. (4) Even given our current qualified suspicion of any aesthetic standards distinct from ideological ones, how can the presentation of a probably inferior version of a poem be justified? This essay will explore this question by considering the provenance of Coleridge's revisions of Frost at Midnight. It will begin by interrogating some of the more auspicious claims recent critics have made for the earlier version of the poem by contrasting them with more circumspect readings, advanced by Anya Taylor and Judith Plotz, of Coleridge's relationship to his son Hartley. It has become fashionable to assume that the fuller treatment Hartley receives in the poem's initial version necessarily indicates a more generous paternal attitude. The contention here will be that descriptions of Hartley specific to the 1798 text participate in a troubling practice of foretelling that Taylor has identified in Coleridge's other poems on his first child. Coleridge's revisions of Frost at Midnight read as an attempt to counteract this practice, an attempt motivated in part by a previously unacknowledged presence in the poem. …