The God Within

Abstract

It seems to me more than an accident of temperament or circumstance that ‘Dejection…’ marks the end of Coleridge’s career as other than an occasional poet. It is something that in the first instance we might regard as a combination of historical conditions with the peculiarities of writing poetry. Although the careers of some English poets seem to represent a steady maturation of their powers, others make their major contribution early and, if they do not then go off to their graves, add nothing but quantity to their canon. It was part of the myth that the Romantics held about themselves that poets were born bright and hot, ‘in joy and gladness’, but soon faded into ‘despondency and madness’: Chatterton, ‘the marvellous boy’, was the prime example of this largely self-fulfilling prophecy.1 Subsequently, poets have struggled to throw off the yoke. One poet who has in some measure succeeded has also given an indication of the nature of the problem. Eliot believed that ‘nyone who would continue to,be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year’ must obtain ‘the historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well of the temporal and of the timeless and temporal together’. Only by this ‘great labour’ will he discover ‘what makes a writer traditional’ [Selected Essays 14].