Coleridge's Early Poetry, 1790–1796 (2024)

David Fairer

As a body of work, Coleridge's early poetry is not easy to characterize and evaluate, and he had difficulty doing so himself. When he looked back from the vantage-point of Biographia Literaria it seemed that his first published collection, Poems on Various Subjects (April 1796), had been mere ‘juvenilia’, of value chiefly for offering ‘buds of hope’, a hint of ‘better works to come’.1 This is factually misleading but interpretationally helpful: misleading because the great majority of his 1796 Poems were written after the age of twenty-one (and therefore can hardly be said to represent his juvenilia), but also helpful in highlighting an image of uncertain hope that runs erratically through the volume. Coleridge appears to be projecting himself not as a young poet growing confidently towards his full powers, but as a precariously talented genius that needs careful nurturing if he is not to relapse into the juvenile. The distinction is significant. In preparing his first published volume Coleridge chose in effect to veil his own chronological development as a poet, as if to remind himself of his unsteadiness and lack of direction. A reader of the 1796 Poems can detect a disingenuousness in which naivety is being performed alongside self-assurance. The volume is organized so that maturity and adolescence alternate, and youthful love-verses sit alongside a politically committed public voice.2Coleridge does not ‘mature’ as a poet in any consistent way, although he comes to have a critical awareness of where maturity might lie. But the confident poetic voice he finally projects in April 1796 through ‘Religious Musings’ (the final item in the collection) is not the one that will represent him to posterity. It is elsewhere in the volume that we can trace the disparate strands that will come together in the great poems of his maturity.

The 1796 volume has to accommodate a range of voices, and it does so with a degree of uneasiness. The preface appears to be offering the reader a work of late eighteenth-century Sensibility, personal poems whose expressions of suffering have worked a kind of catharsis on the poet himself:

With a stress on the poet's sufferings, this passage evokes the sentimental mechanism that Charlotte Smith acknowledged in the preface to her popular Elegiac Sonnets (1784): ‘Some very melancholy moments have been beguiled, by expressing in verse the sensations those moments brought’. And just as Smith hesitantly directed her book at a small band of sympathetic readers (‘I can hope for readers only among the few, who to sensibility of heart, join simplicity of taste’)4 Coleridge wants to think of his own debut collection as speaking not to a ‘public’ but to individual readers who have shared his feelings:

It seems that in putting his early verse together Coleridge was happier thinking of an individual friendly reader rather than a more judgemental ‘public'; but in casting his poems in this personal way as ‘sorrows’ he not only underplays the elements of delight and joy they express, but also compromises those poems that are directed toward the public world.

Nevertheless, this sentimental, confessional vein does indeed run through Coleridge's early verse, and there are several poems which consciously act out the mechanisms of eighteenth-century Sensibility in this way. The concept of the ‘sympathetic imagination’, which had been formulated by the 1720s, involved the individual placing him/herself into the situation of another so as to feel their emotions.5 Reinforcing this, Locke's theories of association and mental reflection encouraged a dynamic concept of the mind in which a self was not only projected into, but also reflected from, experience.6 Human identity thus became located in more subjective areas of individual experience and memory. In Sensibility, reflective memory is a crucial medium for self-expression. Many of Smith's sonnets consciously move from observation to reflection of this kind, and throughout the 1796 volume we can see Coleridge handling the same idea. In ‘Lines to a Beautiful Spring in a Village’ (pp. 28–30), for example, he sets up a busy scene of village life (the children sailing their paper boats, etc.), only to see it dissolve the moment the speaker turns to his own memories. The turn comes when observation is replaced by memory, and the spring (no longer the focus for the villagers’ activities) becomes an object of reflection, literally so in this case:

The tone of the poem changes when memory distracts him from the immediate scene: he makes a ‘turn’ to a more intimate and personal voice, as if to draw closer to his ideal sympathetic reader. The poet offers himself as a man of romantic sensibility whose consciousness is imprinted (‘imprest’) by the sorrows of a friend; but at the same time it seems that what is imprest on his ‘soul’ might be as temporary as those passing clouds reflected in the water. Such impressions, as philosophers like David Hume showed, might be entirely fleeting and evanescent.7

By placing emphasis on the dynamics of subjectivity, Sensibility could catch the most fleeting and fluid of experiences. But the role of rational judgement, the conscious structuring of meaning, might be lacking. There are moments in Coleridge's 1796 Poems when the poet recognizes this and the verse conveys a sense of experience slipping away before it can be held and shaped. Towards the close of ‘Lines on a Friend who Died of a Frenzy Fever’ (pp. 32–5) he adopts what had long been the characteristic pose of any sentimental elegist:

The moment of sympathetic identification is confirmed by the dramatic catch of breath signalled by the dash. The lines are conventional and knowingly naïve: the phrase ‘with introverted eye’ nicely expresses the conscious way in which he is conducting his meditation and is now ready to make the turn to the self. But at this very moment there rises a kind of resistance in him, a tone of frustration, a sense of weary incapacity. The dead man is forgotten and the poet turns elegist on himself:

Here the first two couplets (reminiscent of the final passage of Gray's Elegy) deliver his own epitaph; but the poetry gains new strength with the sudden exclamation of self-disgust. It is more than a change of tone: the genre itself seems to shift from elegy to dramatic soliloquy.8

These powerful lines express a sense of frustration that seems to haunt the 1796 volume and challenge the character and role of poetry: how can we grasp things of value that are not physical? How can poetry in particular do justice to truth and reality when it lives in a world of images? Can poetry embody ideas and make them real, or does it merely reflect experience in intangible ways? In the above passage the concept is expressed almost literally as a failure to grasp, to hold onto things. An idea loses its form and slips away unless it can be embodied and made real (Coleridge will explore this idea again on a larger scale in ‘Kubla Khan'). Here the lines are contemptuous of the flaccid, the faint and the fluid. They challenge poetry to find a way of embodying experience so that it does not just exist within the imagination.

These questions are raised in an interesting form by the text of Coleridge's youthful signature-piece, ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’, the opening poem of the 1796 collection (pp. 1–11). This text is thoroughly re-written and extended from the original 90-line version which was composed at Christ's Hospital (and proudly included by the Headmaster in the school's Liber Aureusin 1790).9 In the original 1790 version the voice is confident, committed, and angry, and expresses the teenage Coleridge's response to the poverty and neglect that brought about the poet Chatterton's suicide at the age of 17. ‘Is this the land of liberal Hearts!’ (13) he demands. The poem shows us a charity boy of his own age who had dreamed of becoming the champion of the oppressed, but whose hopes had been dashed as he himself became a victim. Coleridge enters into the drama of the allegorical scene, picturing Chatterton ready to drink the bowl of poison ('Already to thy lips was rais'd the bowl’, 58); The figure of Pity attempts to intervene by offering images of his home and family; but Despair and Indignation with ‘Neglect and grinning Scorn, and Want combin'd’ (77) finally triumph by recalling his hopeless situation. The youth takes the drink: ‘Recoiling back thou sent'st the friend of Pain / To roll a tide of Death through every freezing vein’ (78–9). At the end Coleridge pictures the young poet in Heaven charming the angels with his melodies. The scene fills him with poetic ambition, but also with a determination that if similar ‘Waves of Woe’ (88) should come, he himself will ride out the storm. In this lively poem we are part of a scenario of Sensibility in which pity and despair, sorrow and indignation, engage within us, and like the speaker we are made to visualize (‘powerful Fancy evernigh / The hateful picture forces on my sight’, 45–6). The poem makes abstractions palpable. It is the work of a youth who has delighted in The Faerie Queene, in which Spenser's poetry bodies forth an imagined world where thoughts are actively realized and humanity's inner demons have to be encountered.

Coleridge's re-written version of the ‘Monody’ published in the 1796 Poems is quite different in approach, and its stylistic changes are marked.10 It suggests something of a crisis confronted the poet in his early twenties about the effective role of poetry in the world. Where the 1790 text opened on a note of youthful confidence (‘high my bosom beats with love of Praise’, 2) and brought Chatterton before us as a suffering physical presence, the 1796 version introduces another figure who scarcely registers in the physical world at all:

This new tentative opening gives us the image of a lost and wandering child. It is not, as we might think, the young Chatterton victimized by the harsh world, but an unspecific symbol of transience. It is the disembodied essence of poetry's imagined world, who fades to an appropriately melancholy tonal accompaniment. The Coleridge of 1790 had tried to look away from the scene but was forced by his imagination to confront it. In 1796 the reverse is the case: the imagination lets us luxuriate in Chatterton's spirit. He becomes a ‘Sweet tree of Hope! ‥/‥ Loading the west-winds with its soft perfume!’ (51–3). No longer a challenging presence, he is the emblem of a haunting absence, a magical dew-fall of imagination: ‘Fancy, elfin form of gorgeous wing, / On every blossom hung her fostering dews, / That, changeful, wanton'd to the orient day!’ (54–6). A sense of the poetic spirit is beautifully caught, but in the process Chatterton slips away. Once the fruit-tree image has been established it is difficult to develop it in other than awkward ways: here the tree goes on to suffer the ‘sickly mildew’ of ‘Penury’ and is finally struck by lightning.

It is clear that during 1794–7 Coleridge was struggling to find a poetic language that would not betray uncomfortable realities, and the ‘Monody’ became a test-case for him. In July 1797 he made it clear to Southey that he did not want the poem reprinted. He was now linking it in his mind with his early lyric poem, ‘Songs of the Pixies':

Coleridge's self-contempt is remarkably graphic. Indeed he is drawing on the eighteenth-century satiric powers of Hogarth, perhaps recalling the St Giles scene shown in ‘Gin Lane’ where the baby slips from the breast of its gin-sodden mother and tumbles down into the cellar. This lost child is closer to the world of Chatter-ton's garret than anything in Coleridge's poetry, and it conveys a horrified physical distaste. Coleridge's poetic ideals and his social indignation somehow could not be reconciled. In the same letter he acknowledges being trapped by ‘such a high idea, of what Poetry ought to be, that he cannot conceive that such things as his natural emotions may be allowed to find place in it’. There is a problem here, evident in Coleridge's early verse and his dissatisfaction with it, of how to work between the ideal and the real, and find a ‘natural’ mode of writing. It brings to a head Coleridge's loss of faith in what he sees as the mistaken Parnassian strain of his youth:

In order to understand Coleridge's early poetry we have to confront this sense of critical disgust. But it would be misleading to see it as a reaction against his early work as a whole. In fact, what Coleridge is here mocking are the dematerializing additions he added to the Chatterton monody in 1794, which had compromised the Hogarthian indignation of the earliest version.

To understand the force of Coleridge's self-criticism it is helpful to look briefly at ‘Songs of the Pixies’ (pp. 15–25).13 This miniature irregular ode (a suite of nine varied lyric stanzas) is one of several pieces in the 1796 collection that play knowingly with the juvenile notes of romance. It seems naive, but is a sophisticated exercise in the early eighteenth-century romantic mode, one feature of which was what Addison called ‘the Fairie way of Writing’, the style mastered by Pope in the descriptions of the sylphs in The Rape of the Lock.14 Coleridge enjoys returning imaginatively to the Pixies’ Parlour, a small cave overlooking the River Otter where he had hidden when a child and courted when an adolescent, and he uses it to create a poetry of the disembodied imagination: ‘For mid the quiv'ring light 'tis our's to play, / Aye-dancing to the cadence of the stream’ (89–90). In this place the poet becomes an enchanted youth granted special favours:

In the 1796 volume, ‘Songs of the Pixies’ becomes a continual reference-point for other poems that visit ‘the Bowers of old Romance’,15 a world where Pope's Ariel sleeps in the nosegay on Belinda's breast, where Shakespeare's Puck paints the eyelids of lovers, and the Renaissance figure of Cupid generally makes mischief.

In his early poetry Coleridge has clearly mastered this playful vein; and there is an adolescent seductive intent behind poems that toy with fanciful arousals, miniature violations, and those erotic moments when the senses are sharpened by the almost audible, the scarcely tangible, and the marginally visible. Some of Coleridge's characteristic love verses play coyly along this borderline of consciousness; and his language has a pouting, whispering quality that suggests the intimacies of lovers’ small-talk, the kind of insinuating technique that Satan used when he crouched (as a toad) up against Eve's ear.16 In what may at first seem flippant, adolescent writing we can detect the verbal mastery of Coleridge the enchanter, the man who knows how to weave a poetic spell:

Spoken by Geraldine to Christabel, these lines would haunt Coleridge criticism, and Charles Lamb fondly recalled Coleridge reading them aloud.17 There is something violent about the gentle intimacy. These devilishly spun lines are a clue to Coleridge's mature power as a poet. We notice his observant sense of how a pair of lips must unclose in order to disclose, a witty idea that is clinched by the word ‘op'ning’ in the next line. There is a dynamics of passivity here. She is unfolding naturally to him; her smile ‘dawns’, and merely her quiet breathing is an inhalation of love—though the ‘Triumphs’, he knows, are really his. Within the fine paradoxical thread of the poem, ‘no’ means ‘yes’, and ‘Falsehood’ is ‘sweet’ when it makes ‘Consent’ so endearingly reluctant. The poem clearly belongs to the libertine tradition of Rochester, but also to the ‘sweet reluctant amorous delay’ (Paradise Lost, IV, 311) of Milton's unfallen Eve. The quietness of the ‘No!’ was satirically picked up by Byron's rakish narrator in Don Juan to describe Donna Julia's seduction: ‘A little still she strove, and much repented, / And whispering “I will ne'er consent” —consented’ (Don Juan, I. cxvii, 8–9). In Coleridge's hands, however, a sense of the disembodied is never entirely lost, so that the emotional movements seem to prompt the physical ones. There is ease as well as coercion here.

In the 1796 Poems this item is entitled ‘Effusion 28’, but it is elsewhere called ‘The Kiss’. A significant and unique feature of the 1796 volume is Coleridge's decision to group together into a single section thirty-six poems of different character and form (stanzaic poems, blank verse, sonnets, album verses, elegiac and meditative poetry, poems on public themes) all under the title of ‘Effusion’. It was an odd thing to do, since none of the poems was composed with that title in mind, and they were never to be grouped in this way again. Young poets often like to show their mastery across different poetic forms, but Coleridge's tactic works in the opposite direction; it suggests that faced with collecting his poems together for the first time he felt some kind of loss of faith in poetic form and in his own abilities. In the preface he says that he chose the term ‘in defiance of Churchill's line, “Effusion on Effusion pour away”’.18 More than two-thirds of the poems in this volume are thus linked to the notion (from the Latin verb effundere-effusum) of ‘pouring out or forth’. Here we might be reminded of ‘Lines on a Friend’ where he despairs of being able to hold things together: ‘from my graspless hand / Drop Friendship's precious pearls, like hour glass sand’. ‘Effusion’ is not a containing form, and the effect of this title is especially uncomfortable for the volume's twenty-one sonnets, since a defining characteristic of the sonnet form is compression. But in his preface Coleridge maintains that ‘they do not posses that oneness of thought which I deem indis-pensible in a Sonnet’ (1796: x). This is a remarkable signal to his readers and suggests that at this time he was feeling his poetry lacked formal control and he was somehow wasting his talent, letting it slip away.

This idea is reinforced when the ‘Effusions’ section ends with what appears to be a deliberate ‘throw-away’ gesture of this kind, a point where Coleridge's poetic self-confidence is at its lowest ebb. The crisis comes with ‘Effusion 36’, deliberately placed last in the section and given the subtitle ‘Written in Early Youth’, which is untrue (it dates from 1793).19 At the climax of the section therefore Coleridge is pointedly offering the reader a ‘juvenile’ voice, one that returns us to the ‘faery’ atmosphere of the Pixies’ Parlour:

It is an exercise in disembodiment taken to an extreme, and here Coleridge prints an extraordinary note that only increases the reader's embarrassment: ‘I entreat the Public's pardon’, it reads, ‘for having carelessly suffered to be printed such intolerable stuff as this’ (1796: 183–4). It is not an apology to a sympathetic reader, we notice, but a public retraction, and it confirms a sense that this poet is a young man who has not yet found his right path. In this way it becomes part of a pattern in his first collection, in which he projects an image of youthful uncertainty.

Looking back over the ‘Effusions’ section we can see that it is ordered so as to avoid indicating a growing strength and maturity. It opens with a confident, public, political voice, and ends on a note of adolescent tetchiness. In doing so it tends to muffle the impact of Coleridge's ten Morning Chronicle ‘Sonnets on Eminent Characters’ (Effusions 1–10), in which he surveys the state of the nation and rouses it to action.20 The figures he has chosen are largely people whose voices move, persuade, or inspire, and the emphasis is as much on the aural as the visual. Even the quiet-toned William Lisle Bowles (the addressee of the opening ‘Effusion 1’) begins in the last couplet to swell into the sublime:

Bowles is not usually identified with the primal scene, but here this climactic image sets the bass-note for the sounding sonnets that follow. Edmund Burke's political contradictions are hinted at in the second sonnet through the voice of Freedom, who speaks as a loving mother to her estranged child, disturbed by the ‘alter'd voice’ which she cannot recognize. In the fifth, the radical lawyer Thomas Erskine speaks out at the crucial moment just in time to prevent ‘British Freedom’ from flying away:

In these sonnets, ‘hope’ ceases to be a precarious melancholy companion and becomes a mark of optimism: the tones of sublimity emphasize the universal sweep of these poems, which stage a series of inspirational pageants of which Liberty is the theme. ‘Effusion 6’ celebrates Sheridan the dramatist and opposition orator (‘Now patriot Rage and Indignation high / Swell the full tones!’, 9–10), and no. 7 also draws on the eloquence of the public stage by catching the power of Sarah Siddons, the great tragic actress: ‘Ev'n such the shiv'ring joys thy tones impart, / Ev'n so thou, SIDDONS! meltest my sad heart!’ (13–14). In these sonnets Coleridge taps the excitement of public speech and its immediacy of effect. Rather than describe scenes, the poems seem to create and embody them like heroic painting with added sound effects, as at the end of the sonnet to Stanhope (‘Effusion 10’):

The poems reach their climax, and as a group of ten under their original title they would have made an effective section in themselves. But this poem is immediately followed by ‘Effusion 11’, in which all the energy that has built up is dissipated in a moment:

It is disconcerting, and the contrast could hardly be greater. Not only does Coleridge introduce a sonnet of melancholy introspection and lost love, but he prints one by Charles Lamb. ‘I forlorn do wander, reckless where’, reads line 13, as if to dispel the dynamic, forward-looking impulse of the public sonnets.

Coleridge's acute critical capacity, as we have seen, could be turned against himself, and against a notion of the conventionally poetic. There are moments when he recoils from the role of youthful genius and adopts the more direct voice of the common man. One early poem that celebrates a stubborn refusal to be ‘poetry’ is ‘Effusion 33’, subtitled ‘To a Young Ass, it's mother being tethered near it’ (pp. 91–3). In the 1796 volume it follows a series of fanciful love lyrics, as if to disconcert the reader with an awkward revision of the traditional intimacies: ‘I love the languid Patience of thy face’, it remarks, ‘And oft with gentle hand I give thee bread, / And clap thy ragged Coat, and pat thy head’ (2–4). To befriend the ‘oppressed’ ass, he appears to insist, is much more than a scene from a sentimental novel. The reader soon realizes that liberty, equality, and fraternity are his themes:

Settled with the Pantisocrats on the banks of the Susquehanna, the ass will be no beast of burden, no servant to his human masters, but will take on a liberated life of its own: ‘How thou wouldst toss thy heels in gamesome play, / And frisk about, as Lamb or Kitten gay!’ (31–2). And what a relief its dissonant song would be:

The hint of assonance in ‘Bray of Joy’ belies the harsh idea and makes the paradoxical point beautifully. It is clear that the youthful Coleridge could value dissonance as well as harmony, and in this poem he offers his own antidote to the ‘warbled Melodies’ we have just been reading in the previous Effusions 23–32.

Readers of the 1796 Poems will be disappointed if they try to trace an emerging ‘mature voice’. As I have been arguing, the volume does not offer a story of poetic development but a disconcerting mixture of the juvenile, the mature, and the adolescent. Coleridge is aware of performing all three roles and has the critical intelligence to understand the difference, but there is no clear trajectory. I have drawn attention to his dissatisfactions with the self-consciously ‘poetic’ strain: it is clear that he was ambivalent about the disembodied world of imagination, which he knew he could create with a light skilful touch. He handles it, as Pope did in The Rape of the Lock, with playful indulgence and an awareness that poetic ‘maturity’ lay elsewhere. Pope's boast ‘That not in Fancy's maze he wander'd long, / But stoop'd to Truth, and moraliz'd his song’ seems to have lodged in Coleridge's mind.22 We can hear him echoing Pope's words in the sestet of ‘Effusion 12’:

But there is some uneasiness here. The poet wakes from the dream, but the antique vocabulary (Beseems, haply, meed) suggests that the language of old romance still lingers. The image slips into soft focus and we realize he is simultaneously dismissing and indulging the dream. There is added irony in the fact that ‘Effusion 12’, subscribed ‘C. L.’, is Coleridge's revision of a sonnet by Charles Lamb. Lamb felt awkward about Coleridge's changes: ‘I had rather have seen what I wrote myself’, he said, ‘tho’ they bear no comparison with your exquisite line, “On rose-leafd beds amid your faery bowers”’.23

Coleridge's early poetry can buy its exquisiteness too dearly. The reader often senses a tension between elements of disembodied dream and embodied thought (it is evident, as we saw, in the revised text of the Chatterton monody). Sometimes we feel the pull towards a pure lyric strain (verbal music and ‘exquisite’ imagery) and at other times a rousing call to thought and action. He can react in frustration against ‘shadowy nobodies’, or equally against overloaded thought, from which lyric ease seems like a relief:

By the Spring of 1796 Coleridge thought for a moment that he had found his true poetic voice. Returning from his Watchman tour on 13 February, perhaps with a new confidence in his far-reaching influence, he flung himself into the sublimities of ‘Religious Musings’. The printing of the 1796 volume was held up until he had finished the 446-line poem, and it was placed at the end with a fresh title-page and an epigraph announcing his new resolve:

It has Akenside's name attached, but the lines are Coleridge's.25 It is another version of Pope's boast at having left ‘Fancy’ for ‘Truth’. Coleridge could now claim the traditional pre-eminence of the ‘higher’ lyric vein, and the visionary poem would be the foundation on which he would construct his reputation as a poet: ‘I build all my poetic pretensions on the Religious Musings’, he told John Thelwall, and he repeated the idea to others.26

Ostensibly a Christmas poem about God becoming man, it shifts focus from the nativity story of Luke's gospel to the Book of Revelation and the apocalyptic moment when the human ‘elect’ will become godlike. In the prefatory ‘Argument’ its political trajectory looks clear enough: ‘… The present State of Society. French Revolution. Millenium. Universal Redemption. Conclusion’ (1796: 137). As poetry it sets its sights above the things of this world and addresses itself to the higher angelic spirits:

One wonders what the young ass would make of it all. Today, when we close the 1796 volume, this sound may be echoing in our ears (‘When fiery whirlwinds thunder his dread name / And Angels shout, DESTRUCTION!’, 417–18); but after a little while, another sound emerges to replace it. It is a wondering voice, and a confident (but also confiding) one. The blank verse here is not ‘on the stretch’,27 and this turns out to be the voice that will prove most fruitful of any in the 1796 volume:

It is as if the poetry of the Pixies’ Parlour has found an expressive medium through the music. We meet again here the ‘witchery’ of Spenserian enchantment, the coy seductiveness of the album verses, but also hints of the bolder sweep of an ode. The verse is all the richer for being able to draw on these layers of association and link them to the human pulse that the poem's opening sets going (‘My pensive SARA! thy soft cheek reclin'd / Thus on my arm …’). Here the ‘delicious surges’ connect the ‘sink and rise’ of the breeze through the casem*nt window to the wider world of the spirit that has found its way in. Suddenly the ‘organizing surge’ of Religious Musings looks abstract in comparison, and its very totality limiting. The lines of ‘The Eolian Harp’ (to use the poem's later title) are the truly organic ones because of the way the words come to life among themselves, drawing out meaning from each other, so that ‘clasping’, ‘sequacious’, and ‘Voyage’ (to choose just three) extend their reach, and the reach of the poem, outwards. In contrast, the idea of ‘Journeying my immortal course’ (RM, 436) becomes something dogged and predictable—we even have to be told about the universal ‘plastic’ (shaping) power rather than experience directly something genuinely creative. The language of ‘Effusion 35’ is in conversation with itself, and its blank verse has the sinuous turns and emphases that help to shape the thought and not merely reflect (or declare) it.

The reviewers of Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects (1796), however, ignored ‘Effusion 35’ completely, and preferred to praise the poet either for his elements of ‘sweetness’, ‘tenderness’, and ‘elegance’ (in ‘Songs of the Pixies’ and the later effusions) or for the ‘boldness’ and ‘sublimity’ of ‘Religious Musings’. The old aesthetic categories still had to serve.28 Not even John Aikin, whose review in the Monthly was the most perceptive, could find critical purchase on a poem that allowed itself to ‘tremble into thought’, and which combined familiar elements from Coleridge's youthful verse and made them into something new. It is ‘Effusion 35’ that locates the recognizable Coleridgean power of finding his way to sublime thoughts through human tenderness:

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