A Connection between Chatterton and Wordsworth in Two Coleridge Poems

Chatterton's precocious display of talent, the scandal surrounding the creation of the so-called Rowley manuscripts, his premature death by suicide at the age of seventeen and a half in 1770 all conspired to turn him into the Romantic embodiment of young, misunderstood genius, the "marvellous Boy, / The Sleepless Soul that perished in his pride" (ll. 43–44) of Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence," the dedicatee of Keats's Endymion, the inspiration behind Shelley's "Adonais."¹ David Fairer points out that "ode-writers who wished to address a personified Fancy, Pity or Despair, found they could address Chatterton and thereby evoke all three."² Over the course of his much longer life, Coleridge identified closely with Chatterton's plight, and most biographical and critical studies about Coleridge dwell on his and others' interpretation of him as someone whose precocious promise did not lead to the results one might have expected of one so talented.

Coleridge's "Monody on the Death of Chatterton" has received relatively little critical attention despite the fact that Coleridge worked on various versions of this poem from 1785, when he was thirteen years old, until the year of his death, 1834.³ I agree with I. A. Gordon that a "poem which for half a century continued to exercise an author of Coleridge's abilities cannot be regarded as insignificant" (49). The fact that the "Monody" has been ignored by Romantic scholars may be because its eighteenth-century features are too prominent to be ignored and do not fit the conception of Coleridge as the Romantic, experimental poet who gave us the conversation poems, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan. Gordon's 1942 article astutely analyzes the successive versions of "Monody on the Death of Chatterton," which ranged "from schoolboy admiration to Romantic melancholy wherein Chatterton becomes to Coleridge a projection of his own frustration; from the young poet's [Coleridge] delight in eighteenth-century epithets and diction to the Romantic's disgust with glittering verbiage; and then (the influence of Dove Cottage and Nether Stowey fading into the past) a final surrender to the Augustan manner" (50). In a rather linear story of the multiple versions, Gordon traces a formal development from irregular Pindaric, to Romantic ode, to Johnsonian couplets, a process reflecting Coleridge's "changing conceptions of the poet's art" (50). Gordon relates the portrayal of Chatterton specifically to the construction of Coleridge by himself, and he emphasizes how one tradition gets discarded for another as the poem develops over time. Without taking anything away from Gordon's excellent piece of textual scholarship, I want to suggest in this paper that Coleridge did not discard eighteenth-century conventions and ideas about the poetical character to quite the radical extent that he is sometimes believed to have done. Gordon emphasizes that Coleridge successively discards one tradition for another (irregular Pindaric > Romantic ode > Johnsonian couplets), while I believe that the eighteenth-century conventions and ideas are part of the picture throughout. I also think that Coleridge had the "Monody" and its poetic ideals in mind when he wrote his tormented tribute "To William Wordsworth" in early 1807, and the dynamic depicted between poets in the "Monody" is not just about Coleridge and Chatterton, but also about Wordsworth.

One of the reasons for the relative neglect of the "Monody" is that Coleridge himself, at certain moments in his life, told us to ignore it. We tend to think of the "Monody" as an early poem, steeped in the trappings of sensibility that Fairer alluded to, and firmly placed in a class of juvenile poems in the 1829 and 1834 editions of the Poetical Works, even though those versions differ substantially from the early versions that were published and circulated in 1790, 1794, 1796, 1797, and 1803.⁴ Most authors distance themselves from their earlier work, and Coleridge is no exception; in the preface to the 1797 edition he dissociates himself from Della Cruscan excess: "My poems have been rightly charged with a profusion of double-epithets, and a general turgidness. I have...