Before Depression: Coleridge’s Melancholia

I

Biographically, the case of Coleridge is one of the most instructive we have if we want to know what depression was like before it was called depression. Coleridge used the word “depression” in connection with himself but not in the same way that we use it. When we talk about depression we refer first and foremost to a mood. A depressed person, we think, is subject to low moods. By contrast, Coleridge used the word consistently with its seventeenth-century meaning to signify a melancholy state resulting from a more general “lowering” of his physiological functioning (“Depression”). This way of looking at it, which was very common in the eighteenth century, overlaps with, but is distinct from, the view of depression that many people hold today: that it is a physiological matter. A melancholy state unaccompanied by bodily disorder would not have counted as depression for Coleridge. It would be depression only if there were concurrent physical complaints such as major aches and pains, swellings, or convulsions.

If we survey his poems, voluminous correspondence, and intimate diaries in light of twenty-first-century ideas, we can be in no doubt that Coleridge suffered grievously from what we call depression.¹ He was chronically miserable throughout his adult life. Even as a young man, he could write sentences such as these to his friend Thomas Poole:

With a gloomy wantonness of Imagination I have been coquetting with the hideous Possibles of Disappointment—I drank fears like wormwood; yea, made myself drunken with bitterness! for my ever-shaping and mistrustful mind still mingled gall-drops, till out of the cup of Hope I almost poisoned myself with Despair!

(Collected Letters I: 249–50)

Seven years later he complained to Wordsworth of

a haunting sense, that I was an herbaceous Plant, as large as a large Tree, with a Trunk of the same Girth, & Branches as large & shadowing—but with pith within the Trunk, not heart of Wood / —that I had power, not strength—an involuntary impostor.… The whole History of this Feeling would form a curious page in the Nosologia Spiritualis.

(Collected Letters II: 958)

The thing we must never lose sight of as we try to approach the reality of his experience is that he was depressed in a context of great physical and—because of his opium addiction—psychic disturbance.

I have called this essay “Coleridge’s Melancholia” despite the fact that Coleridge avoided describing himself as “melancholic.” Perhaps the associations linking melancholy with femininity, on the one hand, and insanity, on the other, made it unappealing. “Depression,” like the “speculative gloom” to which he also confessed, was a much more manly condition (see for example Letters II: 1036). It was also less chronic. You could get over depression once your physical ills abated. I would nevertheless like to stick with the term “melancholy” here for two reasons. First, because I want to give the lion’s share of my attention to how Coleridge related to the mental aspect of his infirmities—what he famously termed on another occasion his “dejection.” And second, because I want to highlight a certain classicism in Coleridge’s thinking about these matters. In the medicine of antiquity, melancholy or melancholia was an ambiguous category straddling the boundary between the low spirits that most experience at some time or other and outright madness. That boundary became a major preoccupation for Coleridge in the first decade of the 1800s. According to the classical scholar and medical historian, Jackie Pigeaud, the reason melancholy is still going strong as a nosological category after almost two and a half millennia is that Western society remains committed to the essentially classical idea that low spirits and madness form a continuum. Depression or melancholy thus becomes a type of miniature or low-grade madness in which we still have sufficient self-possession to recognize ourselves. Coleridge was as committed to this idea as any of his predecessors. But he also ventured his own speculations about its nature as a continuum. His account of the relation between melancholy, sanity, and insanity was a complex synthesis of German psychology, Kantian philosophy...