Rehabilitating Coleridge: Poetry, Philosophy, Excess

. . . only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency.

—Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense”

In April of 1816, Samuel Taylor Coleridge placed himself voluntarily in the care of a doctor, the benevolent James Gillman. Coleridge had for years been desperate to break his opium habit, trying various cures, but to no avail. The time had come for stringent measures, and he resolved “to submit himself to any regimen, however severe. With this in view,” wrote Dr. Joseph Adams, who had been treating him, “he wishes to fix himself in the house of some medical gentleman, who will have the courage to refuse him any laudanum, and under whose assistance, should he be the worse for it, he may be relieved.” ¹ After an initial interview that left Gillman, like Coleridge’s Wedding Guest, “almost spell-bound, without the desire of release,” the poet committed himself to the doctor’s care for a period of one month. ² He remained eighteen years.

During that time it fell to Gillman not so much to cure Coleridge as to control his habit, watching over the sometime poet and philosopher to secure some semblance of health. Coleridge predicted it would be difficult. In a letter accepting the offer of asylum he promised to cooperate in every way that he could:

My ever wakeful reason, and the keenness of my moral feelings, will secure you from all unpleasant circumstances connected with me save only one, viz. the evasion of a specific madness. You will never hear any thing but truth from me:—prior habits render it out of my power to tell an untruth, but unless carefully observed, I dare not promise that I should not, with regard to this detested poison, be capable of acting one. No sixty hours have yet passed without my having taken laudanum. ³

Although Coleridge cannot tell a lie, he can act one. His “specific madness” splits speech and agency, saying and doing, leaving him subject to a habit that compels behavior he cannot control. The therapeutic aim of his benign confinement is therefore to institute that control, specifically through a regime of surveillance that can regulate not merely his opium habit but more pervasively its characteristic madness. Coleridge finds comfort, if no full cure, in this personal asylum. With it comes renewed vitality as philosopher and moralist—as if asylum and philosophy are somehow allied. Indeed, Coleridge’s turn in his later years toward philosophy involves a turn away, not merely from opium and the lie of his habit, but from poetry, too, and the truth of excess. What, one might ask, has been lost in the interminable task of rehabilitating Coleridge?

I. “Junkie”

Coleridge was an opium eater for well over half of his life. ⁴ By his own effusive testimony this detestable habit was the bane of his existence. “Conceive a miserable wretch,” he wrote to his friend Josiah Wade, “who for many years has been attempting to beat off pain, by a constant recurrence to the vice that produces it.” ⁵ This cycle of medication and withdrawal yielded a drug-dependent Coleridge, a self-medicating subject whose life and writing betrayed the ill effects of his habit. To his contemporaries he presented an appearance of promise unfulfilled. Writing in 1824 William Hazlitt regretted that so prodigious a talent should produce so little: “All that he has done of moment, he had done twenty years ago: since then, he may be said to have lived on the sound of his own voice.” ⁶ Thomas Carlyle advanced similar conclusions about Coleridge’s career: “To the man himself Nature had given, in high measure, the seeds of a noble endowment; and to unfold it had been forbidden him.” ⁷ Then there is Robert Southey, who set the standard for a whole tradition in criticism with his claim that “every person who had witnessed his habits, knows that for the greater—infinitely the greater part—inclination and indulgence are the motives.” ⁸ Such judgments do not openly attribute Coleridge’s apparent failure to...