Coleridgean Kink: Christabel, Metrical Masochism, and Poetic Dissonance

This article provides a reading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel based on a psychoanalytic approach to its prosody. I argue that Coleridge both practiced and theorized meter as introducing dissonance into poetic language via hostile interactions between form and content. I begin by revisiting Coleridge’s statements about meter in Biographia Literaria and proceed to analyze Christabel’s metrical experiments in detail. To suggest why, for Coleridge, form-content friction pleases, I conclude by turning to the question of masochism, as theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Leo Bersani. I also briefly situate my argument about Coleridge’s prosody in relation to recent developments in historical poetics.