Pig Looks, Snake Looks: Coleridge’s Poetics of the Unsaid

Abstract

ABSTRACT Conversation is a distinctive form of communication that balances verbal and nonverbal cues, and these qualities have marked affinities with how Romantic writers conceived of poetry’s unique effects upon readers, listeners, and poets themselves. As an example of these “conversational poetics,” this essay examines how Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who both authored the “conversation poems” and was a notoriously one-sided talker, was fixated on what Romantics would have called “natural signs” in his poetry and personal writings. Far from always having delivered monologues, Coleridge had a talent for multisensory communication. However, this same talent left him vulnerable in his intimate relationships, leading him to withdraw from close, communicative friendships into solipsistic lecturing. As a young poet, though, he had an ambitious concept of sympathy whose achievement sometimes proved too much to bear if he could not regulate it with verse. Examples include an 1803 notebook entry in which Coleridge and Wordsworth exchange a disconcerting “pig look.” This look is contrasted to Geraldine’s “serpent’s eye” in “Christabel.” The essay concludes that poems such as “Christabel” should inform our understanding of what constitutes a conversation poem, especially if we acknowledge Coleridge’s own attitudes toward conversation and the nonverbal components of poetry.