Biography: This is a fine example of the new genre of professional biography, written with great skill by someone who is not an academic specialist and can turn their hand to very different subjects, the line of Claire Tomalin and Fiona MacCarthy.
Books about the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge have appeared steadily during the past 100 years. The first reviewers bundled the pair together under the title of the Lake Poets and the Victorians were fascinated by the conjunction of their eminent Poet Laureate with the brilliant failure who wasted his life in talk. How did the year in which the poets lived as neighbours become a turning point in both their lives? What did a pillar of the moral establishment have to learn from one who, with the revelations of every passing decade, appeared to have wrecked his life with drugs, plagiarised his better ideas, courted failure?
The arguments have gone to and fro over the years but they are still alive. The amount of scholarship that has accumulated around Wordsworth preserves his position at the centre of British Romanticism, although the young are more likely to be enthused by Blake or newly recovered women writers. Recent scholarship on Coleridge has revealed the extent of what he did achieve, which complicates the argument that he was a failure. Even so, the relationship remains difficult to evaluate without taking sides. Why was Wordsworth so reliant on Coleridge? Was it in Coleridge's nature to play second fiddle? Did Coleridge's belief that Wordsworth had the capacity to write a great philosophical poem impose an impossible burden, causing Wordsworth to set aside completed poems that are only now seeing the light of day? Did Wordsworth's irritated rejection of Coleridge accelerate the downward spiral into drug abuse that ruined Coleridge's career?
The problem is that all the questions are relevant and contain some grain of truth. One recent solution has been to consider the relationship alongside others of the same period. Coleridge was evidently attracted to self-sufficient men - what he called "sheet-anchors" - and so his friendship with Wordsworth can be measured against similar relationships with Robert Southey and Thomas Poole, Charles Lamb and John Morgan. Adam Sisman's solution is to take the biography of a friendship altogether literally; that is, to tell the intertwined story of the two lives and to omit what does not bear on it. He therefore has Coleridge going to Germany simply to accompany Wordsworth and underplays Thomas Beddoes' urgings two years earlier; he expatiates on the death of Coleridge's son, Berkeley, while Coleridge was at Göttingen, but says nothing about the course of study Coleridge was engaged on at the university. This is a biography of people in movement, and the fact that they were preoccupied with the reading and writing of books gets less attention.
Sisman weaves his double narrative with great skill. It does not rest on archival research: a book of such length usually brings forward a few newly discovered facts, but this one doesn't. However, it is up to date and acute in its assessment of sources. Its strength is to keep multiple considerations in play concerning the personalities involved; the author maintains an open mind on questions that are so often closed down too early. It should be emphasised that the suggestion that Part I of Christabel was completed in February 1798, ahead of The Ancient Mariner, is indeed speculative; and that the word cure that Sisman has trouble with (and suggests emending to cave!) refers simply to the Unitarian living Coleridge expected to take up at Shrewsbury. But these are niggling details.
Because the story has been told so many times and is familiar, one's attention is caught by the masterful way it is organised, and the distinguishing quality I have praised is achieved at a price. One reads with an awareness of the seamless continuity of the book, as events are woven together and misunderstandings separated out. The same quality prompted me to return to the list of contents to get a better sense of how the argument was building, and it was marked out clearly: "Part I: Strangers, Part II: Friends, Part III: Acquaintances". Individual chapters are likewise titled to suggest the same dialectic progression: "Revolution, Reaction, Idealism, Sedition"; "Contact, Friends, Communion, Collaboration, Separation, Amalgamation"; and so on. However, the sense of movement suggested by the titling is stronger than the working out. All the right quotations balance each other out, as intended, but the concentration on neutrality leaves the story lacking point, supplying materials for a debate that is never properly engaged.
In his Introduction, Sisman says the names of Wordsworth and Coleridge have passed into legend as a pair, like Lennon and McCartney. This is nicely said but it's as if he had written a joint biography without being interested in the music. He is up to date with biographical facts, he quotes the poetry to illustrate the story, he is adept with historical materials, but the way the encounter changed the sound, the movement, the scope of what each writer wrote: that is the thing that changed the world, and the annus mirabilis in Somerset brought about a revolution of which we are still in the aftermath.
Coleridge articulated the nature of his and Wordsworth's different contributions in Biographia Literaria in a way that transcends differences of personality, and this is part of the full story too. Biography must encompass more than people when those people are great poets, great philosophers.
JCC Mays was an editor of the Bollingen Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His N11: A Musing will be reissued later this month by Coracle Books in its Little Critic series
The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge By Adam Sisman HarperPress, 480pp. £20