COLERIDGE believed that a "great Poet ... must be a profound Metaphysician. He may not have it in logical coherence, in his Brain & Tongue; but he must have it by Tact: ... the touch of a Blind Man feeling the face of a darling child". That image (in itself a verbal template for a later style of sentimental narrative painting) is curiously dated (conventional before the convention was established, Victorian before Victoria) and yet also, like its author, still contemporary and psychologically disturbing - what we would call inappropriate, Humbert Humbertish with innocence added on. Coleridge was a "thought bewilder'd man" before his time. This selection, brilliantly annotated by Richard Holmes, is less a reassertion of his greatness as a poet than, for us, a first statement of it.
Initially over persuaded by Wordsworth, Coleridge continued piously to cling to the idea that "Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure" and to a Christian faith reliant on hope, or Hope!, as he desperately wrote it. But his true originality lay in his openness to desertion by nature, to the idea that Man is the "Surplus of Nature's dread activity" and to that awareness upon which is based much of our thought and which Coleridge named, fearing it above everything else, "Positive Negation".
He was, at least in the English language, "the first that ever burst/into that silent sea". So many poets have followed there - Paul Celan being the most notable - that we find it difficult now to comprehend the novelty of the horror, but, as Holmes reminds us, "when Byron read `Christabel' aloud at the Villa Diodati, one stormy night in June 1816, Shelley ran out in a fit and Mary Shelley began her novel Frankenstein".
Coleridge said that he had seen far too many ghosts actually to believe in them but for all its neatness and profundity as a remark, it isn't true. He knew full well that there was a necessary nearness in the line: "a thousand slimy things lived on; and so did I..."
That apprehensive connection was both dulled and nurtured by his addiction to opium, though this reader guesses that the clearest expression of its Manichaean dualism, in the Ballads, owes as much to his discovery and exploitation of a sort of prosodic automatism as it does to the drug. "The Ancient Mariner", "Christabel" and the other poems in the ballad form are visionary, but the sight is sound dependent, driven by the senseless possibilities of English rhyme. (Have these poems ever been successfully translated?)
There was something childish about Coleridge's imagination. He knew that "some inward pain/had made up that strange thing, an infant's dream" and was often possessed by an irrational fear of the female, of mother loss and mother hat red: "Beneath the foulest mother's curse/No child could ever thrive;/A mother is a mother still,/The holiest thing alive". What are we to make of the word "still" there?
But to anchor Coleridge's reputation solely on the ballads and on their demon drivenness is to do him less than justice. Holmes, in choosing just 101 works from a sprawling output, has stripped away the dross to reveal a continuing vein of ordinary excitement in Coleridge that this reader at least was unaware of. As an instance of this, the Asra Poems, written to Sara Hutchinson, are particularly moving; like many a weak man, Coleridge spent too much time trying to work out what the public want to hear; the Asra Poems, being private, are free of that anxiety. On the other hand, the Conversation Poems, especially those written in rhyming couplets, combine public intelligence and private emotion in a marvellous way, like a cross between Pope and Cowper.
Coleridge did not often live up to his great idea - is it Blakean or anti Blakean? - that "Suppression prepares for overflow", a thought which, Holmes remarks, "could be said to contain all of Freud", but he did so often enough to continue to astonish us. He was, and he knew he was, "a silly bard", but he kept "the faith of THE ALONE MOST DEAR". Battling with "extreme silentness", he was undoubtedly too much given to Capital Ideas - exclamation marks litter his lines like spent arrows - and yet he survives as more than a "Blank accident! nothing's anomaly!"