In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

MaryColeridge,1883 Breaking the Quiet Surface: The Shorter Poems of Mary Coleridge She fights a losing battle without being hardened or alarmed, finding unexpected consolations and always looking at things in her own way, so that even the defeats enhance the value, because they add to the profundity, of life. —Edward Thomas Vanessa Furse Jackson Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi MARY COLERIDGE is almost completely unknown as a poet today, her work rarely anthologised or critically considered, except by a few feminist publications, in spite of a reawakening of interest in much late nineteenth-century poetry. Yet her work was once widely admired, especially by other writers: *[A]ssuredly," Laurence Binyon wrote in 1918, "her place is secure among the lyric poets of England."1 The fact that this has not been the case is puzzling, for although both in style and sentiment there are poems of hers that we might naturally find less congenial than the circle for whom they were originally written, there are also poems that speak with a razor-edged clarity of matters both universal and touchingly personal. In her short poems particularly, "She could," as Ifor Evans noted, "more perhaps than any poet of the [nineteenth ] century, concentrate her meaning with epigrammatic precision ."2 Indeed, it is her gift for unadorned clarity of language, for condensation of expression, and her ability to catch the essence—and admit the ambiguity—of her subject with sometimes dazzling deftness that should allow her a place, if not among the great poets, then certainly among those lyric poets of England whose lesser music still sings out with resonance and truth. Born in 1861, Mary Coleridge was the great-great-niece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose connection with the family led to a certain 41 ELT 39 :1 1996 diffidence on her part about publishing her own poetry, but gave continued pleasure to her gregarious, Victorian father. A Clerk of the Assize on the Midland Circuit, Arthur Duke Coleridge was an amateur musician, a friend of painters, poets, actors, lawyers, clergymen and many others, and an indefatigable host. To their South Kensington house when Mary was a child came figures such as Jenny Lind, Charles Stanford, Millais, Holman Hunt, Ruskin, Landseer, Trollope, the actress Fanny Kemble, and the two current gods of poetry, Tennyson and Browning. Mary "came to view the drawing-room in the light of a theatre,"3 an exciting, if not always entirely comfortable place for the shy and troubled child that she was, so that she wrote later: I should like to think of another child—merrier—not so much afraid of the dark on the stairs outside.... I should like to think of another girl—as gay, as full of bold ambition and not so shy. ... I hope she will see the greatest man in the world come in, as I saw Robert Browning come through the door one evening, his hat under his arm.4 She enjoyed Tennyson's poetry, but Browning's fired and exhilarated her, reflecting and shaping many of her own beliefs on death, love, faith, doubt and the "conviction that to miss good was worse than to do evil."5 Mary grew up an unashamed hero-worshipper, a trait that was fostered by the drawing-room "stage," by her early reading of Scott, by Rossetti's paintings, Browning's poems, by any tales of chivalry, and very particularly by General Gordon, "the knightliest of modern men"6 and her own favourite hero.7 If one side of Mary Coleridge's poetry was always to reflect a world of imagination and fantasy, then another side would also reveal her intellect and her education, for predictably conservative as her life was in many ways, it was also unexpectedly rich with academic opportunities . At about the age of twelve, she became fascinated by the shape of Hebrew letters, and so began to learn the language from her father, becoming proficient not only in that, but also in French, German and Italian, and later in Greek. She read widely and carefully, often studying quite by herself history, philosophy, the classics, or English literature. She was also fortunate in the teachers that she did have, in...

pdf

Share