THE COLERIDGE CIRCLE AND THE ‘ANSWER TO GODWIN’

Abstract

IN March 1798 Wordsworth placed '1300 lines' of blank verse within his plan for a master-poem called The Recluse.1 As a recent critic has shown, 'he did so as a convert to the philosophical system of the One Life', inspired by Coleridge to project 'an updating and expansion of Religious Musings'.2 But The Recluse, like Religious Musings, is grounded in a larger, Unitarian reformation of radical thought: Wordsworth's epic, and the poetry written for it in 1798, are the most significant products of Coleridge's opposition to Godwinian atheism. The zeal in promoting an 'Answer to Godwin' seen in the 1795 Lectures extends more widely, and more diversely, than has been recognized. From the time of his declaration, '[Southey] is Christianizing apace' (CL i. 153), and on through his later relations with Wordsworth, Coleridge consistently helped to subvert allegiances to Political Justice.3 Further, he gave Dissenters a language in which to express their Christian antipathy to its atheism. Coleridge's anti-Godwinism, at once associationist and Unitarian, is visible in the work of several of his contemporaries. The ways in which he proselytized friends and correspondents, of surprisingly different sympathies, reveal The Recluse as itself originating in his wish to generate an 'Answer to Godwin'. Though complicated by his friendship with Southey (who 'all but worshipped' the philosopher4), Coleridge's own attitude to Godwin emerges in the overtly 'complimentary sonnet'5 of December 1794: