Tragic Coleridge by Chris Murray (review)

In identifying Coleridge’s ‘tragic philosophy’ as an ‘elected position’, Chris Murray offers a re-evaluation of Coleridge’s career. Murray assesses Coleridge’s literary works in the light of a ‘deeply personal’ understanding of the tragic, and suggests that evidence of this concept is to be found throughout Coleridge’s career and biography. Murray argues that ‘Tragic Romanticism’ should be recognised beyond the stage plays of the period, and proceeds to demonstrate how Coleridge’s invention of a unique tragic poise was based upon materials from diverse literary, philosophical and sociological sources. At the same time, Murray underpins his explorations of Coleridge’s tragedy with readings of the major Ancient Greek playwrights, and finds Aeschylus and Sophocles to be particularly relevant to a Coleridgean tragic Romanticism.

Murray identifies three main iterations of the tragic figure in Coleridge’s works, each of which represents a different aspect of Coleridge’s attitude towards his career. He begins by outlining the ways in which Coleridge identified with the Cumaean Sibyl who, Murray suggests, ‘appeals to Coleridge as a kind of tragic artist’. This ‘divinely inspired, and possibly […] insane’ figure corresponds to Coleridge’s construction of himself as a visionary poet. The culmination of this tradition in Coleridge’s writing is the publication of Sibylline Leaves (1817). For Murray, the title of this collection ‘transforms the disorganized state of Coleridge’s texts into a sort of success’, one which encourages the reader to become the active, interpretative ‘ideal reader’ of Coleridge’s Sibylline fantasy. Murray demonstrates how Coleridge’s construction of himself as a Romantic Sibyl depended upon his methods of presentation; the form of Coleridge’s works becomes important to Coleridge’s self-representation. Murray finds a subversive productivity in Coleridge’s incomplete works, whereby the fragmentary nature of his works form the ‘Leaves’ of his poetic prophecy. In spite of the reader’s encouraged interaction with these fragments, this is nevertheless a prophecy over which Coleridge maintains control.

Murray suggests that Coleridge’s identification with the prophetess lasted throughout his career, and co-existed alongside two main tragic models in Coleridge’s thought. These two models operated in a broadly chronological fashion, and indicated the ways in which Coleridge’s tragic vision altered throughout his lifetime. Murray finds in Coleridge’s works a self-comparison with Cassandra, a figure who both justifies and complicates Coleridge’s visionary poetics. For Murray, this self-identification with the Trojan prophetess ‘indicates that the tragic sage experiences moments of mystical possession and lucid vision’. In other words, this is the inspired poet of ‘Kubla Khan’. Simultaneously, however, the association with Cassandra suggests that this form of vision is a ‘type of madness’. The poet who identifies with Cassandra must wait for retrospective validation of his ‘revelations’; his defining feature is anxiety.

Murray locates a shift in Coleridge’s tragic vision around the time that Coleridge moved to Highgate. He suggests that a metamorphosis becomes apparent in Coleridge’s publications after the appearance of The Statesman’s Manual in 1816. Coleridge’s ‘self-comparison’ shifts from Cassandra to Tiresias. Tiresias is a ‘model for the Mariner, whose insight is recognised’. In conventional critical terms, this Tiresian Coleridge is the Sage of Highgate who is confirmed in print by the ‘Tiresian Triad’ of Sibylline Leaves, Biographia Literaria and The Statesman’s Manual. Each of these publications implies a new-found self-confidence in Coleridge’s works. This change in focus of Coleridge’s self-dramatisation is made possible, as Murray demonstrates, by Coleridge’s changing reputation in literary circles, especially those based in London.

This alteration is explored particularly fruitfully in Murray’s examination of Remorse. Murray’s approach to this play echoes several recent re-evaluations of Romantic drama, including Jacqueline Mulhallen’s The Theatre of Shelley (2010) and Reeve Parker’s Romantic Tragedies: The Dark Employments of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley (2011). Like Parker, Murray contends that the relegation of Coleridge’s play to the closet is an unjust assessment of a piece which was...