The Influence of Wordsworth on Coleridge (1795–1800)
- The Influence of Wordsworth on Coleridge (1795–1800)
Associate Professor of English, Washington University.
Notes
1. The Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1935), 144; Nov. 20, 1795.
2. Ibid., 155.
3. Poems on Various Subjects (London, 1796), 185–6.
4. Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs (Oxford, 1956), I, 215–16 and n. 216.
5. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1940), I, 116.
6. Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Oxford, 1912), I, 116.
7. Herbert Read, Wordsworth (London, 1949), 100.
8. Letters, I, 216.
9. Ibid., I, 325.
10. Ibid., I, 334.
11. Emile Légouis, The Early Life of William Wordsworth (London, 1921), 340.
12. Letters, II, 881.
13. Ibid., I, 324, also headnote to Letter 189.
14. Ibid., I, 528.
15. Ibid., I,330.
16. Ibid., I, 391.
17. Ibid., I, 402.
18. Ibid., I, 403.
19. Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 266–7. Wordsworth asked Poole’s opinion of “Michael”: “… in writing it, I had your character often before my eyes, and sometimes thought I was delineating such a man as you yourself would have been under the same circumstance.”
20. Elisabeth Schneider, in her Coleridge, Opium and “Kubla Khan” (Chicago, 1953), offers a plausible argument for dating “Kubla Khan” after Coleridge’s return from Germany. She also brings together the evidence for an early dependence on opium, so that, if Coleridge’s own darings of the poem as composed in the summer or autumn of 1797 are mistaken, the statement about the drug remains true.
21. Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 201.
22. Letters, I, 275.
23. Ibid., I, 656.
24. Ibid., I, 658.
25. Ibid., I, 714.
26. Ibid., I, 356.
27. Ibid., I, 334.
28. Poetical Works of Wordsworth, II, 210, “Yew Trees in Borrowdale.”
29. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. K. Coburn (New York, 1957), I: v. notes 95, 136, 138, 152, 178, 188, 194, 198, 203, etc.
30. The Prelude (text of 1805), ed. E. de Selincourt (London, 1949), X, 374–81.
31. Hazlitt’s famous essay, “My First Acquaintance With Poets,” was written twenty-five years after the events in Shrewsbury and Stowey which it records, and, while the details are coloured in memory, an interesting item is the visit of Coleridge and Hazlitt to Alfoxdcn. Dorothy was alone, William being absent on a visit to Bristol. The visitors “… had free access to her brother’s poems, the Lyrical Ballads, which were still in manuscript,” and the poems read aloud were Wordsworth’s.
32. Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 226.
33. Letters, I, 631–2.
34. The Prelude, ed. E. de Selincourt, 179.
35. Letters, It, 849. The phrase, under heavy inking in a letter from Coleridge to Sarah Hutchinson, has been deciphered by the editor.
36. Ibid., I, 623.
37. Ibid., I, 648.
38. Ibid., II, 863.
39. Ibid., II, 1013.
40. Notebooks, I, note 1606.
