The Dialectic of Experience: A Study of Wordsworth's Resolution and Independence

Abstract

Coleridge considered Resolution and Independence a flawed masterpiece. He says of it (Biographia Literaria, Chap, xxii): “Indeed this fine poem is especially characteristic of the author. There is scarce a defect or excellence in his writings of which it would not present a specimen.” It is singular that Coleridge, who did so much to undermine the eighteenth century school of “faults and beauties” in Shakespeare criticism, should have dealt with Wordsworth in this fashion. When Wordsworth talked of the old man, as he became to the poetic imagination, “motionless as a cloud” or “wandering about alone and silently,” Coleridge was content; but when he tried to fix the old man in the here and now of 1802, Coleridge took offence and accused him of inconstancy of style. It is true that many of the corrections Wordsworth made in the poem were prompted by Coleridge's critique; but what is useful criticism to a craftsman is not necessarily so to his patrons.