Secret(ing) Conversations: Coleridge and Wordsworth

"A Boat becalm'd! dear William's Sky-Canoe!"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
"A Letter to ----" (1802) ¹

I

Around 1795 Samuel Taylor Coleridge began to speak of what he called the "conversational poem." In that year he wrote, among other works, a possible example of the "new genre," "The Eolian Harp"; in 1797 he composed "This Lime-tree Bower my Prison" and, one year later, "Frost as Midnight" and "The Nightingale." "The Nightingale" was added to Lyrical Ballads as the book was going to press, replacing Coleridge's "Lewti, or the Circasian Love-chaunt," and as if to acknowledge the necessity of acknowledging the "new genre" the title appeared with the subtitle, "The Nightingale, a Conversational Poem." Even if Coleridge would later in his Biographia Literaria oppose what Wordsworth was to claim for the language of "conversation" in poetry, Coleridge had himself cleared the way for the use in poetry of what Wordsworth in the 1798 "Advertisement" to Lyrical Ballads called "the conversation in the middle and lower classes of society." ² Although Wordsworth would omit that phrase in the 1800 "Preface" to the book, where he changes the nature of the "experiment" to an examination of "how far" poetry can go in imparting "pleasure" through "a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation" (LB 241), he would nevertheless add to the 1802 version of the Preface "that the language of such Poetry as I am recommending is, as far as is possible, a selection of the language really spoken by men" (LB 254); the poet, he stated in a famous or infamous phrase, "is a man speaking to men" (LB 255).

If a poem is to be a conversation, or the imitation of a conversation, then it will have to consist of a speaker and a person spoken to. It should not come as a surprise then, although it does to Harold Bloom, ³ that Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" ⁴ has an addressee, even if the presence of his sister Dorothy as the person addressed is only acknowledged relatively late in the poem, from line 114 on. We find a similar use of a "hidden" or belatedly revealed addressee in Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," written in 1802, although here the "Lady" is first addressed much earlier in the work, in line 47, and in the very last stanza is revealed as an absence rather than a presence to whom the poet directs his words, or lines. ⁵ In both cases, however, we have "a man speaking," although it is interesting to note that, in spite of Wordsworth's insistence in his 1802 "Preface" on the gender of the addressee, it is a man speaking to a woman.

But a real conversation keeps reversing the roles of speaker and addressee, as one speaker breaks in and the other breaks off. From the point of view of mimesis Coleridge's idea of the "conversational poem" is actually a fragment of a conversation, the isolation of one voice, where the necessary other takes over what one might call "the silent half" of the poem: the listening that should precede and accompany the speaking. The dramatic poem would seem the more accurate mimetic model of an actual conversation, with its exchange of roles and voices, just as the dramatic monologue would seem to summon up more honestly the fragmentary nature of individual speaking in a moment broken off from and suspended in time. Once the other person is denied the possibility of a response, the "con" in "a conversational poem" becomes problematical: the poem turns away from the usual exchange, or sharing, to something else. And since a printed poem is written, and not spoken, the insistence on the spoken voice may inadvertently or advertently conceal its writerly elements. It may be, for example, that the insistence on the presence of an "addressee" masks another presence, not so much spoken to but written to and even against or over. At...