John Bayley was Warton Professor of English at Oxford from 1974 to 1992.
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RELATED CATEGORIES
Biography and memoirs, Biography, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Wordsworth, William, Romanticism, Literature and literary criticism, Poetry, 1700-1799, 1750-1799, 1780-1799, 1800-1899, 1800-1819, 1800-1899, 1820-1839
Vol. 11 No. 23 · 7 December 1989
pages 12-14 | 3085 words
The big drops start
John Bayley
- Coleridge: Early Visions by Richard Holmes
Hodder, 409 pp, £16.95, October 1989, ISBN 0 340 28335 1
- Wordsworth: Romantic Poetry and Revolution Politics by John Williams
Manchester, 203 pp, £29.95, November 1989, ISBN 0 7190 3168 0
- Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays by Bradford Keyes Mudge
Yale, 287 pp, £18.95, September 1989, ISBN 0 300 04443 7
‘Few moments in life so interesting,’ Coleridge noted, ‘as those of an affectionate reception from those who have heard of you yet are strangers to your person.’ The occasion was his meeting in the autumn of 1799 with the Hutchinson sisters – Mary, Sara and Joanna – at their brother Tom’s Yorkshire farm. Coleridge laid himself out to charm them and succeeded. The middle sister, Sara, whom he would call Asra, to set her apart from his own wife Sara, became his prime female figure of worship and consolation. Mary was to have a long and tranquil married life with Wordsworth. Joanna continued to live with her brother Tom.
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Letters
Vol. 11 No. 24 · 21 December 1989
From Michael Mason
What a preposterous piece by John Bayley on Wordsworth and Coleridge (LRB, 7 December)! This was meant to be a review of two books on Coleridge and one on Wordsworth. It hardly mentioned the last of these, but the discussion of Coleridge was filled with and disfigured by hostility towards Wordsworth. Sometimes this was frankly potty: as in the proposal that Wordsworth’s diction is in some way out of date because the Lake District road system has changed. But how misplaced the attempt to make Wordsworth a writer of ‘will’ and Coleridge a writer of spontaneity and openness. Of course this kind of contrast can be achieved (as it could be for most writers) by comparing Coleridge’s private journal entries with Wordsworth’s published work: but which is more ‘willed’ and ‘beside the point’, Wordsworth’s ‘sense sublime/ Of something far more deeply interfused’ or Coleridge’s ‘Spirits … of plastic power, that interfus’d/ Roll thro’ the grosser and material mass/ In organising surge’? Where is the ‘honesty’ in this bombast from ‘Religious Musings’? Which poet has recorded the ‘real discovery of romantic experience’ (attributed by Professor Bayley to Coleridge), ‘that it’s all in the mind’? And what a giant weight of prejudice against Wordsworth Professor Bayley must have to be able to suggest that Wordsworth cannot treat the moon as a thing of ‘immediacy and absurdity’. I am sure he has read ‘Strange fits of passion … ’ scores of times.
Some of the issues here have been raised by Norman Fruman recently in the TLS, but Professor Bayley is altogether a pre-Frumanian: Wordsworth’s possible (but by no means ‘almost certain’) indebtedness to Coleridge for the phrase ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ is slyly brought in – but not Coleridge’s equally possible borrowing of the notion from Schiller. What makes the anti-Wordsworthians so uptight? No other writer has attracted so many pages from critics elaborately explaining how he is ridiculous, obsolete, personally horrid etc. So why not leave him to die a deserved death? It really does seem like a back-handed compliment to his greatness.
Michael Mason
University College London
Vol. 12 No. 2 · 25 January 1990
From John Bayley
Touché by Michael Mason (Letters, 21 December 1989) about Wordsworth’s moon in ‘Strange fits of passion …’ But I am sad he thought my review ‘disfigured by hostility towards Wordsworth’. Coleridge said everyone is bom either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, and maybe we are all by nature either Coleridgeans or Wordsworthians. When Barbara Pym was asked in an interview why she was so hard on men in her novels she wanted to reply: ‘Oh but I love men.’ Mutatis mutandis, I am equally attached to Wordsworth and to Coleridge, but in different ways: no other two poets need to be – have to be – taken more subjectively. Incidentally, I was not reviewing two books on Coleridge and one on Wordsworth, but one on Wordsworth, one on Coleridge and one on his daughter.
John Bayley
St Catherine’s College, Oxford
