The Conversation Poems

Abstract

‘The Nightingale’, which appeared in Lyrical Ballads (1798) with the subtitle ‘a Conversational Poem’, is the only one of his poems to which Coleridge himself ever applied this particular epithet. However, following a suggestion made in 1925 by G. M. Harper,1 twentieth-century readers have generally grouped together six poems composed between 1795 and 1798 as Coleridge’s Conversation Poems: ‘The Eolian Harp’, ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’, ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’, ‘Frost at Midnight’, ‘Fears in Solitude’ and ‘The Nightingale’. Although arguments have sometimes been made to extend the canon to include other poems — notably, ‘Lines Written at Shurton Bars’ (1795), ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (1802), and ‘To William Wordsworth’ (1807)2 — majority opinion has resisted any such extension.