Dreaming, VoL 7, No.

2, 1997

Dreams and the Egotistical Sublime: Coleridge and

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Wordsworth
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Tim Fulford, Ph.D.1,2

This anicle explores the significance of dreaming in Coleridge's aesthetic, in the context
of his need to differentiate his work from that of Wordswonh. It argues that Coleridge
sought to vindicate his own writing, as well as to make generally valid statements, when
he compared poetry and dreaming on the basis that the imaginary objects of each are
symbolic of a subjective self that is not explicitly present. In opposition to Wordswonh's
"sublime egotism," Coleridge's aesthetic emphasized the loss, rather than the
(re)discovery of self, and allowed for fragmentation and repetition rather than growth.
It formed an alternative Romantic ideology-one capable of challenging the claims of
that with which we are more familiar-an "aesthetics of inachievement." The texts
examined in the anicle are "The Pains of Sleep," "Kubla Khan," and "Christabe~"
as well as numerous notebook entries, published and unpublished.
KEY WORDS: Coleridge; Wordsworth; aesthetics; dream poetry.

Like Keats, Coleridge both admired Wordsworth's "egotistical sublime" and

felt intimidated by it. 1 Mter 1800 he increasingly depicted the poet of The Prelude
in images which showed him dominating the landscape from which he drew his
subject-matter. In "To W. Wordsworth" (1807) he portrayed himself as the sea,
controlled by his friend's moon:
In silence list'ning, like a devout Child,
My soul lay passive; by thy various strain
Driven as in surges now, beneath the stars,
With momentary Stars of my own· Birth,
Fair constellated Foam still darting off
Into the darkness! now a tranquil Sea
Outspread and bright, yet swelling to the Moon! (lOl-7i

Here Coleridge placed himself in a position that is subordinate, his creativity a

responsive echo of Wordsworth's original power. The closeness of this scene to
those found in The Prelude further emphasises the point: the very language in which
INottingham Trent University, Nottingham, England.
2Correspondence should be directed to Tim Fulford, Ph.D., Department of English and Media Studies,
Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Lane, Nottingham, NGll 8NS, England.

85
1053-0797!97ftJ600-0085S12.50/1 © 1997 Association for the Study of Dreams
 86 Fulford

Coleridge pictures his dependence seems to stem from that of the "poem of the
growth of my own mind."
Identifying Wordsworth's supremacy as a "Poet of Nature," Coleridge acknow-
ledged his own inferiority in a discourse in which he had begun as the senior part-
ner. And this acknowledgement had more debilitating results than the phrase
"momentary Stars of my own Birth" suggests. In 1800, after Wordsworth caused
the unfinished "Christabel" to be excluded from the second edition of Lyrical Bal-
lads, Coleridge lost confidence in himself as a poet: "as to Poetry, I have altogether
abandoned it, being convinced that I never had the essentials of poetic Genius, &
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that I mistook a strong desire for original power" (Collected Letters 1: 656).
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Wordsworth was "a great true Poet-I am only a kind of a Metaphysician" (Col-
lected Letters 1: 658). In 1802 he lamented that he had "been fool enough to suffer
deeply in my mind, regretting the loss" of his poetic abilities (Collected Letters 2:
831), and he became anxious and depressed at his own impotence-an impotence
compounded by his inability to finish "Christabel." This anxiety was deepened by
observation of his and Wordsworth's contrasting domestic lives: his friend, he noted,
had a harem of devoted female attendants offering him "shepansympathy" whilst
he was both unhappily married and unable to win the love of Sara Hutchinson
(Notebooks 3: 4243).
After the great argument of 1810 Coleridge's anxiety turned to self-justifying
resentment of what he now accepted to have been unfair treatment: "I have loved
with enthusiastic self-oblivion those who have been so well pleased that I should,
year after year, flow with a hundred nameless Rills into their Main Stream, that
they could find nothing but cold praise and effective discouragement of every at-
tempt of mine to roll onward in a distinct current of my own-who admitted that
the Ancient Mariner, the Christabel, the Remorse, and some pages of the Friend
were not without merit, but were abundantly anxious to acquit their judgements of
any blindness to the numerous defects" (Collected Letters 4: 888).
Coleridge's sense of inadequacy centered upon what he perceived to be
Wordsworth's poetic and sexual power. It is discernible in the gendered terms he
applied to him: "Of all the men I ever knew, Wordsworth has the least femineity
in his mind. He is all man" (Table Talk 2: 391). He continued "he is a man of
whom it might have been said, -'It is good for him to be alone.''' Unable to com-
pete with Wordsworth's masculinity as a poet, Coleridge developed strategies
whereby he could retain for himself a certain authority by figuring and re-figuring
his inadequacy in language which he could claim to be unique to himself. It is one
such strategy-that in which poetry is made analogous to dream-that I shall ex-
amine in the body of this essay. I shall argue that Coleridge carved a space (albeit
an unstable one) for his verse whilst seeming to advertise its failings. He did so by
relating it to the inward or dream realm and by criticising Wordsworth for being
too attached to the ordinary prosaic world: "it is for the Biographer, not the Poet,
to give the accidents of individual Life" (Collected Letters 4: 572). Wordsworth had
"startled" him in 1802 by his "strict adherence to matter of fact, even to prolixity"
(Collected Letters 2: 830); by 1817 that shock had developed into public critiCism
of the "prosaisms" of Lyrical Ballads (Biographia Literaria 2: 79). My essay concen-
trates first on the poem "The Pains of Sleep" in its context when he wrote it in
 Dreams and the Egotistical Sublime 87

1803, then on its reappearance in published form as the final piece in a volume in
which "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan" were the other poems (1816). I shall link
the 1816 publication to a number of his theoretical discussions of the relationship
between dreams and poetic illusion, arguing that it should be viewed as a tacit
presentation of an alternative poetic to Wordsworth's (as defined and criticised by
Coleridge at this time in Biographia Literaria). The analogy between poetry and
dream served to absolve Coleridge from conscious responsibility for his work and
its failings, and, more positively, quietly to outline a poetic other than that pursued
in The Prelude or Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge, I shall conclude, arrived at a new Ro-
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mantic aesthetic in contradistinction from his friend's by a process of defining and

apologising for his inadequacy as a Wordsworthian poet.
The first public sign of this process appeared in the second edition of Lyrical
Ballads, where "The Ancient Mariner" was given the subtitle "a poet's Reverie"
and prefaced by Wordsworth's note drawing attention to its "great defects." At this
time it was left to Charles Lamb to regret Coleridge's tendency to accept that his
own poetry was inferior to Wordsworth's. Lamb thought the subtitle absurd, but
astutely realised that it was an attempt to bring to readers' attention a different
state of consciousness from that described in Wordsworth's own verse: "I am sorry
that Coleridge has christened his Ancient Marinere 'a poet's Reverie' -it is as bad
as Bottom the weaver's declaration that he is not a Lion but only the scenical rep-
resentation of a Lion. What new idea is gained by this Title, but one subversive of
all credit, which the Tale should force upon us, of its truth." Attacking
Wordsworth's criticisms of the mariner's lack of definite character, Lamb argued
that the sailor's mind was "like the state of a man in a Bad dream, one terrible
peculiarity of which is, that all consciousness of personality is gone."3 Here Lamb,
defending Coleridge in a letter to Wordsworth, was beginning to differentiate their
poetic strengths: Coleridge's poetry reproduced the state of mind experienced in
dreams and sought to recreate that state in its readers. For this to be achieved the
social and historical details that gave the narrator a realistic personality or character
had to be omitted. Deprived of his anchor in a carefully reproduced familiar world,
the reader, like the mariner himself, is rendered vulnerable to extremes of emotion
which he is unable to relate to ordinary experience. Wordsworth, on the other hand,
sought to explain the mental state he evoked by reference to a character-usually
the poet himself-whose social and historical circumstances are discussed in detail.
Thus poetry was identified with the mind of its poet in a way towards which Col-
eridge's apologetic subtitle "a poet's Reverie" gestures.
It took Coleridge a further fifteen years to develop in public the distinction
implicit in Lamb's letter of 1801. But he began in 1802 a series of speculations in
letters and notebooks that worked towards an aesthetic in which his poetry, and
the hold it sought over his readers, were defined by analogy with dreaming. "The
Pains of Sleep," a poem about dreaming, was important in this process both for
its analysis of mental states and as an example of a dreamlike poetry distinguishable
from Wordsworth's. By mid-July 1802 Coleridge was declaring in a letter that he
suspected "a radical Difference" between his and Wordsworth's opinions about po-
etry (Collected Letters 2: 812). On 6th August he reported a mountain-climbing trip
in phrases which have some bearing on his growing sense that his own interests
 88 Fulford

lay in exploring different areas of mental experience from those Wordsworth in-
vestigated. Faced with a terrifying drop as he descended Broad Stand, yet too ex-
hausted to retrace his steps, he
lay in a state of almost prophetic Trance & Delight-& blessed God aloud, for the powers
of Reason & the Will, which remaining no Danger can overpower us! 0 God, I exclaimed
aloud-how calm, how blessed I am now / I know not how to proceed, how to return / but
I am calm & fearless & confident / if this Reality were a Dream, if I were asleep, what
agonies had I suffered! what screams!-When the Reason and the Will are away, what
remain to us but Darkness & Dimness & a bewildering Shame, and Pain that is utterly
Lord over us, or fantastic Pleasure, that draws the Soul along swimming through the air
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in many shapes, even as a Flight of Starlings in a Wind. (Collected Letters 2: 842)

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Here Coleridge draws moral conclusions about the necessity of reason and will to
a self confident enough for courageous action. Yet he also uses the experience to
explore the self revealed in dreams, a self shown to be both passive and masochistic
in its vulnerability to emotion. To retain reason and will, it follows (although Col-
eridge does not argue this directly), is to lose the Gothic excitements of a mind
wholly open to the dominion of the emotions produced by experience. Wordsworth,
in the famous Prelude discussion of crossing the Alps, had shown the mind triumph-
ing, as it recognised its own strength, over a distress caused by the unreliability of
the external world. Here Coleridge, by contrast, seems as fascinated by the explo-
ration of mental distress and helplessness as he is by the discovery of the rational
power by which the mind regains self-control.
In October 1803 Coleridge wrote to his old friend Thomas Poole, detailing a
period of terrible nightmares in which "my Dreams became the Substances of my
Life." He noted that he had been suffering from gout, a possible cause, but also
recorded that "I went into Scotland with Wordsworth & his Sister; but I soon found
that I was a burthen on them / & Wordsworth, himself a brooder over his painful
hypochondriacal Sensations, was not my fittest companion / so I left him & the
Jaunting Car, & walked by myself far away into the Highlands-in the hopes of
forcing the Disease into my extremities" (Collected Letters 2: 1009-10). The trip to
Scotland had indeed led to tension between the poets, causing Coleridge to make
resentful entries in his notebook concerning Wordsworth's pride and the misinter-
pretation of his ideas which it brought: "my words & actions imaged on his mind,
distorted & snaky as the Boatman's Oar reflected in the Lake" (Notebooks 1: 1473).
Having left the Wordsworths and continued his tour alone, Coleridge reached Ed-
inburgh, whence he sent, on 11th September, a letter to Southey containing the
verse later entitled "The Pains of Sleep." Quoting that verse in the later letter to
Poole, Coleridge placed its dream imagery in the context of his vexed relationship
with Wordsworth. Here is the excerpt he made for Poole:
A lurid Light, a ghastly Throng- .~ ~.,A
Sense of insufferable wrong-
And whom I scorn'd, they only strong!-
Thirst of Revenge, the powerless will
Still baffled, & yet burning still-
Tempestuous pride, vain-glorious Vaunting,
Base Men my vices justly taunting-
Desire with Loathing strangely mixt,
On wild or hateful Objects fix'd-
Fantastic Passions, mad'ning Brawl,
 Dreams and the Egotistical Sublime 89
And Shame & Terror over all!-
Deeds to be hid, that were not hid,
Which, all confus'd I might not know,
Whether I suffer'd or I did:
For all was Guilt, & Shame, & Woe-
My own or others,' still the same,
Life-stifling Fear, soul-stifling Shame!-(Collected Letters 2: 1009-10)

The mixture of guilt, resentment, powerlessness, pride, and self-loathing expressed

here might be traced to the relationship with Wordsworth, in which Coleridge had
repressed his resentment and his intellectual differences for several years. The verse
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was written after the separation from Wordsworth, as if only by distancing himself
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from his friend and from his admiration of his friend's poetry could Coleridge again
compose, as he had in "The Ancient Mariner," a poetry exploratory of a mind in
a nightmare-like state. And in "The Pains of Sleep" the narrator displays the char-
acteristics which Wordsworth had singled out as defects in his note on "The Ancient
Mariner" (an inability to act, a lack of character) as his reason and will seem in-
adequate to end his vulnerability to emotional extremes. As the last lines of the
1803 poem suggest, the portrayal of the dream experience acts as an exploration
of the powerlessness of the will, whether sleeping or waking:
Such Punishment[s], I thought, were due
To Natures, deepliest stain'd with Sin,
Still to be stirring up anew
The self-created Hell within;
The Horror of their Crimes to view,
To know & loathe, yet wish & do!
With such let Fiends make mockery-
But 1-0 wherefore this on me?
Frail is my Soul, yea, strengthless wholly,
Unequal, restless, melancholy;
But free from Hate, & sensual Folly!
To live belov'd is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed (Collected Letters 2: 984)

The end is more frightening, and still less Wordsworthian, than the analysis he had
made the previous year when descending Broad Stand. Here "Reason and Will"
do not intervene to restore a confident and active self. The dreamer remains
"strengthless wholly," dependent on the love of others, and is even less able than
the mariner to act to save himself. The poem lacks the resolving conclusion in
which moral and poetic power might be regained for the poet, unlike the "Immor-
tality" ode, which Wordsworth wrote at this period in response to another of Col-
eridge's explorations of weakness-the "Dejection" letter to Sara. Without a
resolution of this kind, the poem is unconventional in terms of early nineteenth-
century literary values as well as dissimilar to Wordsworth's alternative to those
values: it is neither properly moral nor a poem on the growth of his own mind. It
is, however, an example of the kind of poetry Coleridge wanted when he told Mrs.
Barbauld that "The Ancient Mariner" "had too much moral, and that too openly
obtruded on the reader" (Table Talk 1: 273).
J. C. C. Mays has suggested that Coleridge's poetry often conforms to im "aes-
thetics of in achievement" and that in so doing it was in its time as radically opposed
to literary convention, with its demands for moral closure, as the work of Samuel
 90 Fulford

Beckett in the late twentieth century.4 If so, it was the exploration of dream states,
stimulated he later said by opium, that allowed him to internalise the dynamics of
the sublime so popular in Gothic novels. For Matthew Lewis's and William Beck-
ford's geographically located hells, Coleridge substituted the "self-created Hell
within," using the experience of dreams to delineate a perversity in which the self
is subjugated to imagined actions both loathed and desired: "the Horror of their
Crimes to view,/To know & loathe, yet wish & do!" (Collected Letters 2: 984).5 In
these lines Coleridge allows his depiction of his dream to internalise the perverse
psychology of sin which Milton had sketched allegorically in Paradise Lost (2: 648-
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849). Milton's Sin was Satan's daughter and lover; the fruit of their incest was
Death, the portrayal of whom Burke, in a seminal discussion, called "sublime to
the last degree."6 Coleridge alluded to this portrayal, in chapter thirteen of Biog-
raphia Literana: the letter from a friend (actually written by Coleridge himself) ad-
vised him to stop his philosophical deduction of the imagination lest "what I had
supposed substances were thinned away into shadows, while every where shadows
were deepened into substances" (Biographia Literana 1: 301). He then quoted the
relevant lines describing Death: "If substance may be call'd what shadow seem'd,
/ For each seem'd either" (2: 669-70).
The last five lines of "The Pains of Sleep" suggest a possible subtext for the
allusion in Biographia Literana-that if pursued too far, the quest to discover the
origins of the imagination will discover its source in an incestuous union of hellish
mental forces over which reason and will have no power, forces within the self
creative of a mental drama by which the self is enthralled: "The Horror of their
Crimes to view, / To know and loathe, yet wish and do." If so, then the "The Pains
of Sleep," published in the year in which it was intended that the Biographia should
be published, served both as an example of and an oblique commentary on the
dangers of imagination-a justification, therefore, for breaking off the discussion
in his literary life.
In the years between the writing and the publication of "The Pains of Sleep,"
Coleridge frequently made speculative notes concerning dreaming. He began to work
out a theory concerning the intellectual and emotional effects of dream imagery,
later summarised in 1818 in the phrase "a poem may in one sense be a dream, but
it must be a waking dream" (Lects 1808-19 2: 425). In May 1804 he noted
a Feeling of a Person quite distinct at all times, & at certain times perfectly separable from,
the Image of the Person? And that this Feeling forms a most important Link of
Associations-& may be combined with the whole Story of a long Dream just as well with
one particular Form no way resembling the true Image? (Notebooks 2: 2061)

In April 1805 he argued that "there is often a dim sense of the Presence of a
Person in our dreams, whose form does not appear" (Notebooks 2: 2546). Dream
images were symbolic, capable of evoking feelings of the presence of something
that was, in fact, absent from them. Coleridge began to think of poetry in a similar
way, as a note of November 1804 shows:
Poetry a rationalised dream dealing [about?] to manifold Forms our own Feelings, that
never perhaps were attached by us consciously to our own personal Selves.-What is the
Lear, the Othello, but a divine Dream / all Shakespere, & nothing Shakespere. (Notebooks
2: 2086)
 Dreams and the Egotistical Sublime 91

The apparently objective forms and images of the poem, like those of the dream
but rationally controlled, are imbued with the feelings of the poet himself, allowing
him to gain an emotional recognition of aspects of the self not otherwise possible.
Here Coleridge is very close to the theory advanced by Freud in "The Uncanny,"
in which objects appeared both strange and familiar because repressed emotions,
invested in them, were suddenly recognized. 7 Coleridge had, as I have suggested
elsewhere,s already investigated processes of this kind in his poetic accounts of "the
stranger" in "Frost at Midnight" and of deja vu in his sonnets on the birth of his
son (1796). Now, in 1804, he was developing similar investigations by bringing his
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analysis of dreaming to bear upon Shakespeare. In November he introduced the

concepts of the symbol and of imitation, two crucial terms in his literary criticism,
to the discussion:
Hard to express that sense of the analogy or likeness of a Thing which enables a Symbol
to represent it, so that we think of the Thing itself-& yet knowing that the Thing is not
present to us.-Surely, on this universal fact of words & images depends by more or less
mediations the imitation instead of copy which is iIlustrated in the very nature
slul~spearianized I-that Proteus Essence that could assume the very form, but yet known
& felt not to be the Thing by that difference of the Substance which made every atom of
the Form another thing I-that likeness not identity-an exact web, every line of direction
miraculously the same, but the one worsted, the other silk. (Notebooks 2: 2274)

A much later note crystallised his thinking in a highly pregnant pun: "Personae
Somnis = Dreamatis Personae, in which the subject is reorganised as an object"
(Unpublished Notebook 35, f.48v). The "rationalised" or "waking" dream that is
poetry creates an apparently objective drama tis personae of characters or images,
who are nevertheless resonant with a sense of a subjective self (usually, but not
always, the poet) who is not actually present.
Coleridge was arriving, via investigation of dreams, at a blueprint for a dis-
tinctly non-Wordsworthian poetry, one that was neither a prophetic revelation of
the poet's own greatness of mind nor a sanctification of the commonplace. In Bi-
ographia Literaria he attacked Wordsworth for too great a fondness for the details
of the ordinary: "that illusion contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith,
which simply permits the images presented to work by their own force, without
either denial or affIrmation of their real existence by the judgement, is rendered
impossible by their immediate neighbourhood to words and facts of known and
absolute truth" (Biographia Literaria 2: 134). Wordsworth undermined his own gen-
ius by seeking to return the evocations of imaginative states, the "meditative ob-
servation" (Biographia Literaria 2: 144-5) for which his poetry was notable, to
particularised, and often trivial, sets of social and historical causes. These causes
seemed, such was their ordinariness, comically inadequate occasions for the emotion
they were said to produce, and so the "illusion" upon which poetic faith depends
was broken.
Coleridge's criticism of Wordsworth was idealising in its tendency, but it was
also expressive of a different understanding of the way in which poetry communi-
cates. And this understanding, derived from his analyses of dreaming, made room
for Coleridge's own verse (and for that of Keats and Shelley after him) without
directly competing with Wordsworth's acknowledged mastery in singing of himself.
 92 Fulford

In a letter of May 1816 Coleridge made apparent the debt his theory of dramatic
illusion and poetic faith owed to his understanding of dreams:
The truth is, that Images and Thoughts possess a power in and of themselves, independent
of that act of the Judgement or Understanding by which we affirm or deny the existence .'
of a reality correspondent to them. Such is the ordinary state of the mind in Dreams. It
is not strictly accurate to say, that we believe our dreams to be actual while we are
dreaming. We neither believe or disbelieve it-with the will the comparing power is
suspended, and without the comparing power any act of Judgement, whether affirmation
or denial, is impossible. The Forms and Thoughts act merely by their own inherent power:
and the strong feelings at times apparently connected with them are in point of fact bodily
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sensations, which are the causes or occasions of the Images, not (as when we are awake)
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the effects of them. Add to this a voluntary Lending of the Will to this suspension of one
of it's own operations (i.e. that of comparison & consequent deciSion concerning the reality
of any sensuous Impression) and you have the true Theory of Stage Illusion. (Collected
Letters 4: 641-2)

As in his note of 1804, Shakespeare's Othello provided the best example of poetry
of this kind, poetry free from a poet's egotistical need to show how all its under-
standing of emotion arose from his own mind and from the particular social and
biographical circumstances in which that mind grew.
By 1816 Coleridge was prepared to make public his "radical difference" from
Wordsworth on the subject of poetry. He did so after the great argument of 1810
and the subsequent separation had left a lasting coolness between the two men.
Writing his literary life allowed him to justify himself to the public, both by asserting
the consistency of his own intellectual course and by criticising Wordsworth's poetic
theory and practice as epitomised by the text and Preface of Lyrical Ballads. Yet
Biographia Literaria did not include a vindication of Coleridge's major poems any
larger than the two famous paragraphs describing his intentions when writing "The
Ancient Mariner" for Lyrical Ballads. The second of these deserves quoting because
it continues the discussion of illusion and poetic faith which, in the letter of May
1816 and in earlier notes, he had made in the context of dream-analysis:
my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least
romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance
of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that suspension of disbelief
for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. .. . With this view I wrote the "Ancient
Mariner," and was preparing among other poems, the "Dark Ladie," and the "Christabel,"
in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal, than I had done in my first attempt.
(BiographiiJ Literaria 2: 6-7)

If the Biographia did not place Coleridge's poems in competition with

Wordsworth's, nor did it offer them as an alternative Romantic tradition in any
detailed way. Instead, Coleridge signaled his reservations about his friend's work
by comparing and contrasting it with Shakespeare's which, as in his note of 1804,
he characterised as that of a Proteus (Biographia Literaria 2: 27). Yet in 1816 Col-
eridge did place his most dream-like poetry before the public, in a volume com-
prising "Kubla Khan," "The Pains of Sleep," and "Christabel" -the poem which
Wordsworth had caused to be dropped from Lyrical Ballads at the last moment.
He was encouraged to do so by Lord Byron; praise from so eminent a poet in-
creased his confidence and helped him to liberate himself from the lingering effects
of Wordsworth's disapproval of his verse. Coleridge responded to Byron's encour-
agement with fulsome admiration (Collected Letters 4: 641); clearly his self-confessed
 Dreams and the Egotistical Sublime 93

tendency towards prostration before Wordsworth was briefly transferred to another

great poet. In this case, Coleridge was able to take the opportunity to publish old
poems which might, had they appeared in Lyrical Ballads when first written, have
established him as a great poet of a unique kind. Appearing in a single volume,
"Christabel," "Kubla Khan," and "The Pains of Sleep" demanded to be read in
relation to each other, to Lyrical Ballads, and to the Biographia discussion of poetry
in general and Wordsworth's in particular.
The volume saw the first appearance of the most famous preface in the lan-
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guage-"Of the Fragment of "Kubla Khan.''' Here Coleridge returned to the kind
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of apologetic and explanatory qualification that Lamb had so regretted when he

had termed "The Ancient Mariner" a "poet's reverie." He claimed that the poem
was published "rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any sup-
posed poetic merits." As with the word "reverie," however, the term "psychological"
quietly suggested that this was poetry of an unusual kind, perhaps poetry realising
"our inward nature" as the Biographia said he had been attempting to do. Later
in the preface Coleridge derived the poem from a dream experienced during an
opium-induced sleep:
The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external
senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have
composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called
composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production
of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On
awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and takin~
his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved.

By disclaiming conscious responsibility, Coleridge avoided a competition he was

reluctant to enter with the strong and egotistical poets to whom the volume was
related-Wordsworth and Byron. Yet he simultaneously offered an alternative po-
etic, in which imagination is liberated by the suspension of reason and will, which
prove incapable of directing it once reawoken.lO The person from Porlock inter-
rupted, the lines and images "passed away like the images on the surface of a
stream into which a stone has been cast," and the author found himself unable to
complete the fragment. And so the emotion articulated by the dream imagery was
not recollected at will: the rational self was dependent on, not in control of, the
dream self whose images overflow into it. In the poem itself a similar visionary
state is shown to be dependent on the "symphony and song" of the "damsel with
a dulcimer," as if poetic recitation induces a similar state to that produced, in the
preface account, by the opium-sleep. It is a sublime state, inspiring yet dreadful:
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread:
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drank the milk of Paradise. (p. 58)

The last lines also suggest that it is a dangerous state, as if the visionary has enjoyed
the innocent foods of Eden prohibited men after Adam and Eve's exclusion from
the garden.
 94 Fulford

Placed immediately after "Christabel" in the volume, "Kubla Khan" contextual-

ises the longer poem in unexpected ways. It highlights its fragmentary nature; it draws
attention to states of consciousness induced by drug-taking; it hints at the ambivalence
of such states; it advertises it as a different kind of poem, one of "psychological cu-
riosity" concerned with "our inward nature." Encountered immediately after "Chris-
tabel," "Kubla Khan" and its preface alter the reading experience. They reinforce the
claim to originality quietly made in the preface to "Christabel": "if even the first and
second part had been published in the year 1800, the impression of its originality
would have been much greater than I dare at present expect" (p. vi). Wordsworth's
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''The White Doe of Rylstone" and Sir Walter Scott's ''The Lay of the Last Minstrel"
had imitated aspects of "Christabel." By detailing his processes of composition Col-
eridge was tacitly claiming both prior ownership and deeper understanding of what
had become, via imitations of his unpublished verse, the most popular poetic genre
of the age (in the hands of Scott and Byron). At the same time, by showing that
poetic composition was beyond his conscious will, he avoided a self-assertive direct
challenge to these authors. Instead he mythologised himself as, in Lamb's words on
hearing him recite his verse in 1816, "an Archangel a little damaged."ll
The description of the dreaming poet in the preface to "Kubla Khan" applies
to the process of poetic composition terms similar to those used to explain the
spell which is "Lord" of ChristabeI's "utterance" (p. 18). She is no more able to
articulate her vision at will than the poet interrupted by the person from Porlock.
"Christabel" is, like "Kubla Khan," a fragment: its completion, Coleridge implies,
is no more achievable by conscious acts of will than were the interpretations which
its heroine hoped, but was unable, to make of her dreams. This is not to say that
the poem is really "about" dream interpretation, but that the context established
for it by the volume as a whole makes its poet repeat its heroine's struggle and
plight. Neither is able to control or renew at will the words which their dream
visions prompt them to utter. Christabel is both enslaved and enraptured by the
dreams and visions to which her encounter with Geraldine gives rise: 12
The touch, the sight, had pass'd away,
And in its stead that vision blest,
Which comforted her after-rest,
While in the lady's arms she lay,
Had put a rapture in her breast,
And on her lips and o'er her eyes
Spread smiles like light! (p. 35)

The spell that binds Christabel's lips is related to the presentation, in her
dreams and reveries, of images which induce guilt because they prompt desire for
what is forbidden as well as fear of it:
Her silken robe, and inner vest,
Dropt to her feet, and full in view,
Behold! her bosom and half her side-
A sight to dream of, not to tell! (p. 18)

Christabel is left in a waking dream, her rationality and will subjugated to the dream images:
With open eyes (ah woe is me!)
Asleep, and dreaming fearfully,
Fearfully dreaming, yet I wis,
 Dreams and the Egotistical Sublime 95
Dreaming that alone, which is-
o sorrow and shame! (p.21)

In "Christabel" Coleridge develops a poetry which Keats was to take up, in which
drugs and potions lead to dreams in which repressed and illicit forms of desire are
configured, forms by which the rational self remains enthralled. He exemplifies what
Hazlitt, in lectures which Keats attended, termed "gusto' and he himself, comparing
Shakespearean drama to dream imagery, called Protean. The images are not ex-
plicitly related to the poet's own mind yet are imbued with a vigour which symbol-
ises its creative power.
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"The Pains of Sleep," the last poem in the volume, further establishes the
relationship of dream to poetry as the volume's theme. And, like "Kubla Khan,"
it also, at least in part, attempts to replicate the imagery, grammar, aJ,ld syntax of
dreams:
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
A sense of intolerable wrong,
And whom I scorn'd, those only strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will,
Still baffled, and yet burning still!
Desire with loathing strangely mixed
On wild and hateful objects fJXed. (p. 62)

As in "Christabel,' it is the discovery in dreams of the inextricability of desire and

loathing that causes a paralysing "guilt, remorse or woe ... / Life-stifling fear, soul-
stifling shame!" And Coleridge the poet finds no more release in the effort to ar-
ticulate the experience in this verse than did Christabel in speaking to Sir Leoline.
Instead, as in the preface to "Kubla Khan," it is the inefficacy of the poet's reason
and will to control the dream imagery that is explored. Here, however, the poet
does subject that imagery to the order of words that is a completed poem, but this
ordering is unable to prevent its terrifying recurrence. Release from night-terrors
seems possible only by another route:
So two nights passed: the night's dismay
Sadden'd and stunn'd the coming day.
Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me
Distemper's worst calamity.
The third night, when my own loud scream
Had waked me from the fiendish dream,
O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild,
I wept as I had been a child (p. 63)

Weeping like a child, an action of innocence and tenderness in which the respon-
sibilities and authority of manhood are lost, proves Coleridge's best escape route,
allowing him to subdue "my anguish to a milder mood." Neither reason nor will,
but an admission of vulnerability and a request for love offers the only hope for a
free and stable self: "To be beloved is all I need" (p. 64).
Leaving the reader with an image of the poet as an isolated, terrified being
for whom representing his inward nature does not allow him control over it, the
Christabel collection offers a view of the poetic imagination opposed to that given
by Wordsworth. A note of 1818 is relevant to Coleridge's anti-Wordsworthian aes-
thetic: "The passions of the Day as often originate in the Dream, as the Images
 96 Fulford

of the Dream in the Day. Guilt, Fals~hood, traced to the Gastric Life. See my
'Pains of Sleep'" (Notebooks 3: 4409). Rather than subordinating the dream self
to the daytime self of reason and will, this note suggests that the waking self is
unconsciously shaped by the emotions experienced in sleep. The bou:ndaries be-
tween sleeping and waking, dreaming and reasoning are broken down, rendering
it doubtful whether self-control and self-knowledge can be achieved. The reference
to "The Pains of Sleep" brands it as a poem that analyses and communicates this
haunted and unstable self, a self affected by dream images themselves produced
by bodily experiences over which we have no power ("the Gastric Life"). Indeed,
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the note implies that the poem is an aesthetic expression of a view of humanity
that is in opposition to most Christian theology and European philosophy, as well
as to Wordsworthian egotism, in that it has doubts as to whether the mmd is sepa-
rate from, or capable of controlling the influences of, the body. .
Taken with Coleridge's comments in Biographia Literaria and subsuming his
notes and speculations of the previous fifteen years, the Christabel volume presents
an alternative poetic creed. It is a Romanticism in which the poet cannot say to
his soul "I recognise thy glory" as Wordsworth does (Prelude (1805) 4: 532). And
it also differs from Byron's species of egotistical sublime, for Coleridge claims pri-
ority over the supernatural tale of sin and guilt which Byron developed in more
self-assertive directions. Yet this creed is presented tacitly, in the form of apologies,
excuses, and subtexts established by editorial arrangement. Perhaps this is unsur-
prising; since Coleridge was asserting the originality and importance of a poetry
which demonstrates that the poet is dependent upon, rather than dominant over,
a turbulent inner drama, he could hardly advance himself as a stable and authori-
tative artist. He sought public reputation by differing from Wordsworth and Byron,
not by beating them at their own game, at which he upheld their mastery. But
there was another reason for the oblique nature of Coleridge's poetics. He was, in
personalising his poetry of "our inward nature," contradicting his belief that such
poetry should be impersonal-symbolic of a creative mind that is not confession ally
explored in the poem. Whilst "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan," as individual poems,
are symbolic in this dream-like way, fulfilling the criteria laid down in his notebook
analyses of dreaming, they are given a personalised context by the added prefaces
and by the confessional "The Pains of Sleep." They are made not just examples
of an aesthetic, but of the predicament which produced (and was in turn produced
by) that aesthetic. They illustrate Coleridge the genius enslaved to the dreams by
which he was inspired and which it was his unique ability to explore.
"The Pains of Sleep" is a lesser poem than its companions in the volume partly
because it reduces the symbolic resonance of its dream imagery to an individual's
particular, rather than a universal, predicament. In this respect it displays the faults
Coleridge had publicly pointed out in some of Wordsworth's lyrical ballads. But it
performs a strategic function in commenting upon its companions, in adumbrating
Coleridge's aesthetic and in revealing the costs of such an aesthetic for the writer.
A comment of 1814 shows that Coleridge had come to see the poem "as an .exact
and most faithful portraiture of the state of my mind under influences of incipient
bodily derangement from the use of Opium" (Collected Letters 3: 495). Thus "The
Pains of Sleep" undercut, for those aware of his addiction, the more alluring picture
 Dreams and the Egotistical Sublime 97

of drug induced reverie offered by the preface to "Kubla Khan." This poetry of
the inner self was written at the cost of a drug dependence seen to paralyse the
will and mire the self in shame: "a Slavery more dreadful, than any man, who has
not felt it's iron fetters eating into his very soul, can possibly imagine" (Collected
Letters 3: 495).
Thomas De Quincey, friend of Coleridge and opium addict himself, understood
the perverse logic of Coleridge's aesthetic better than anyone. He too made the
psychology of addiction and the recounting of dreams the basis of an exploration
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of the inability of will and reason to free the self. He showed in rationally organised
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accounts of dreams that the self-knowledge which stems from recreating mental
experience in literary form does not necessarily bring self-control. Recognising and
reproducing in words one's enslavement brought only a temporary access of power:
the controlling writer remained addicted to the dreams of enslavement he recol-
lected in tranquility, gaining not moral and mental authority, but foreknowledge of
his coming need to enthrall himself again to dreams and the opium that induces
them. 13 Writing brings neither liberation nor mental growth but knowledge of one's
continuing enclosure in a self in which bodily pains and desires, and the mental
images that arise from them, repeatedly dominate the will. De Quincey chose to
illustrate his understanding of his predicament as addict, dreamer, and writer by
an anecdote of Coleridge's:
Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi's Antiquities of Rome, Mr Coleridge,
who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams,
and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever. Some of
them, (I describe only from memory of Mr Coleridge's account) represented vast Gothic
halls: on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys,
levers, catapUlts, &c. &c. expressive of enormous power put forth, and resistance overcome.
Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; upon it, groping his way
upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come
to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to
him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below. Whatever is to become
of poor Piranesi, you suppose, at least, that his labours must in some way terminate here.
But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which again Piranesi
is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye,
and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld: and again is poor Piranesi busy on his
aspiring labours: and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the
upper gloom of the hall.- With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction
did my architecture proceed in dreams. 14

Coleridge, characteristically, tells the anecdote dramatically, leaving the images, as

he had in "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan," unresolved in relation either to himself
as Piranesi's fellow artist or to a recognisable social reality. The tale stands as an
enigmatic commentary on the frustrations of the Romantic artist trying in vain to
free himself from the prison of his imagination by depicting it. 1s It is De Quincey
who relates it directly to himself and indirectly to Coleridge. Coleridge himself
leaves the story as another example of the genre he was creating, a genre in which
narration attains the symbolic power of dream imagery precisely because its rela-
tionships to the "real" world and its "real" author are deliberately left unspecified.
It is both ironic and paradoxical that he could not advance this genre and his own
merit as its theorist and best practitioner without specifying those relationships. In
so doing he threatened its symbolic power through his anxiety to demonstrate to
 98 Fulford

the public, to Wordsworth, and to himself that he could create a sublime style that
was not egotistical but was clearly his own.

NOTES

1. Keats to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818. Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1987), p. 157.
2. This quotation, like all others from Coleridge's poems (unless othelWise specified), is taken from
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems, ed. John Beer (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), p. 398.
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

3. The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr. (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP,
1975), I, 266.
4. Coleridge's "Love: 'All he can manage, more than he could,'" in Tim Fulford and Morton D.
Paley (eds.), Coleridge's VISionary Languages (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), pp. 49-66 (p. 58).
5. He expressed a desire to place the supernatural on a more psychologically accurate basis in response
to reading Lewis's The Bravo of Venice. See Notebooks 3: 3449.
6. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James
T. Boulton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 59.
7. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works' of Sigmund Freud, tr. and ed. J. Stra-
chey, 24 vols (London, 1953-74), XVII, 225.
8. In my Coleridge's Figurative Language (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 40-2, 46-61.
9. S. T. Coleridge, Christabel (London: John Murray, 1816 [facsimile rpt Oxford and New York:
Woodstock Books, 1991]), p. 52. All subsequent quotations from "Christabel," "Kubla Khan" and
"The Pains of Sleep" are taken from this edition and are cited in brackets in the text.
10. For an interpretation of preface and poem as commentaries on the creative imagination see Kath-
leen M. Wheeler, "'Kubla Khan' and the Art of Thingifying," in Duncan Wu (ed.), Romanticism:
A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 123-50.
11. Lamb to Wordsworth, 26 August 1816, quoted in Norman Froman, Coleridge, the Damaged Arch-
angel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972), p. vii.
12. On language and the mark of shame in the poem see Richard A Rand, "Geraldine," Glyph, 3
(1978), 74-97. See also Karen Swann, "'Christabel': The Wandering Mother and the Enigma of
Form," SiR, 23 (1984), 533-53 (p. 541).
13. On the sublime in De Quincey see J. B. Beer, "De Quincey and the Dark Sublime," in Robert
Lance Snyder (ed.), Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies (Norman, Oklahoma, 1985), pp. 64-98.
V. A De Luca, in Thomas De Quincey: The Prose of VISion (Toronto, 1980), p. 43, also sees his
version of the sublime as a fantasy of undifferentiated Being and unfettered will, known only by
its loss.
14. Thomas De Quincey, ConfesSiOns of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop
(Oxford: World's Classics, 1985), pp. 70-1.
15. For a lengthier discussion of this see Arden Reed, "Abysmal Influence: Baudelaire, Coleridge, De
Quincey, Piranesi, Wordsworth," Glyph, 4 (1978), 191-206.

REFERENCES

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Ed. James Engell and W. J. Bate. Vol. 7 of The Collected
Works'.
_. Collected Letters. Ed. E. L Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956-71.
_. Lectures 1808-1819: On Literature. Ed. R. A Foakes. Vol. 5 of The Collected Works'.
_. Notebooks. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. 4 vols. in 8 to date. London: Routledge, 1957-.
_. Table Talk. Ed. Carl Woodring. 2 vols. Vol. 14 of The Collected Works.