Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) is the English Romantic figure par excellence. Despite living almost two centuries ago, his poetry, his letters, copious notebooks and treatises on literature and philosophy, despite their often idiosyncratic spelling and grammar, have a very contemporary feel. He brought his most intimate life into all of his work, not just his poetry; he wrestled with issues of addiction (to opium), and would probably have met the criterion for diagnosis as bipolar were he alive today. His journey from political radical to a highly intellectual form of conservatism is also one many have taken since. Most fascinating of all however are the darker areas of his practice – the very compelling case for his consistent practice of plagiarism despite his magnificent intellect (see Norman Fruman, `The Damaged Archangel’, New York, George Brazillier, 1971, for the most relentless statement of this case – one that it is extraordinary that Coleridge’s reputation could, and did, emerge from), and the fact that for much of the latter part of his life his poetic abilities left him, as did his ability to write at any length, meaning some of his most interesting and penetrating ideas are scattered in marginalia through the many books he read.
Fragmented, imperfect, and often frustrating, Coleridge is also compelling through his heroism and his final ability to surmount the numerous crises he faced in his life. As Jan Swafford said of Beethoven in his 2014 biography of Coleridge’s German contemporary, perhaps his greatest achievement was to just survive being himself. The same could be said of the English poet.
A note by Allan Clayson in the Coleridge Bulletin 2000 (Coleridge Bulletin, New Series 16, Winter 2000, pp 15-23 – www.friendsofcoleridge.com/MembersOnly/Clayson_Ramsgate.html) sets out clearly and authoritatively the connections that Coleridge had with Ramsgate. It is, as Clayson writes, a real enigma what while Broadstairs on the back of less than 12 months collective stay by Charles Dickens there spread over a number of years gets huge profile from this connection, the longer series of stays by Coleridge in what was then the increasingly fashionable seaside resort nearby receive only a blue plaque, placed on the exterior front wall of Number 3, Wellington Crescent, looking out over the English Chanel (which also mentions his stays in a number of other places nearby, which are unmarked). Even this did not get put in place till the 21st century. And yet, from 1819, till the year before his death, Coleridge was a frequent visitor, and wrote over 50 of his letters, and many of his notebooks, while in the town. He even had his own Latin term for the place – Porta Arietiná. His stays were not a matter of briefly passing through. They usually lasted for a month or more. A letter he wrote to James Gillman from 8 Plains of Waterloo on 9 October 1825, just off the sea front (and the same street where, at number 62, Karl Marx was to stay in 1879 – something also now commemorated with a blue plaque) is typical of his experiences in the area:
`Why verily, my dear friend, the thought forced itself on me, as I was beginning to put down the first sentence of this letter, how impossible it would have been 15 or even ten years ago for me to have travelled & voyaged by Land, River and Sea a hundred and twenty miles, with fire and water blending their souls for my propulsion, as if I had been riding on a Centaur with a Sopha for a Saddle – & yet to have nothing more to tell of it that that we had a very fine day, and ran beside the steps in Ramsgate Pier at half past 4 exactly, all having been well except poor Harriet, who during the middle Third of the Voyage fell into a reflecting melancholy, in the contemplation of successive specimens of her inner woman in a Wash-hand Basis. She looked pathetic; but I cannot affirm, that I observed anything sympathetic in the countenances of her Fellow-passengers – which drew forth a sigh from me & a sage remark, how many of our virtues originate in the fear of Death.’(S T Coleridge, `Selected Letters’, Edited H K Jackson, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988, 246)
Coleridge was inclined to be prompted to think of death often. His decade from 1810 had been a tough one with the impossibly idealistic relationship with Sara Hutchinson (his `Asra’) ending, despite its corrosive effect on his marriage to Sara Fricker. His most recent biographer, Richard Holmes (somewhat more sympathetic in tone than the earlier Fruman study referred to above) records how Ramsgate was emerging as `an expanding new resort’ from its former existence as a fishing village around the time of Coleridge’s first visits. (Richard Holmes, `Coleridge: Darker Reflections’, Harper Collins, London, 1998, 505) Wellington Terrace and the Plains of Waterloo, the two major haunts of Coleridge during his stay, had been built around 1818 in patriotic commemoration of the recent victories by Britain on the seas and the Mainland of Europe. George IV was a visitor, as was, in the mid-1830s before her accession of the throne, the Princess Victoria. Coleridge either arrived at the place via a new steamer service from St Katherine’s Dock, near the Tower of London, or the mail coach via Rochester.
Holmes claims that in this place `a new intimacy and confidence great between Coleridge and Ann Gillman’, wife of the friend who had accompanied him initially. `The Garden of Boccaccio’, dedicated to her, contains the lines:
`Wild strain of Scalds, that in the sea-worn caves
Rehearsed their war-spell to the winds and waves’ (`Coleridge Poems’, ed John Beer, Dent and Sons, London, 1974, 350)
Holmes writes that `At Ramsgate, Coleridge found that he could himself revert to the condition of a child on the beach. Each morning he set out alone to a secret cave he had found a mile and a quarter away along the East Cliff. This was at Dumpton Gap…Here he stripped off and had “a glorious tumble in the waves’”’ (Holmes, ibid, 506). Coleridge’s early period of intense poetic creativity, when he had worked closely with Wordsworth, famously dried up, leaving him without a voice for many years. But in the period of his Indian summer from the mid-1820s, he produced poems like `Work Without Hope’ of beautiful concision and melancholy power. `Youth and Age’, written in Ramsgate around 1825, belongs to this series – testament to the time he could stare out to the sea and the skyline from the lodgings by the water front.
Coming here today is particularly powerful, not only because of the almost half remembered nature of this tremendous figure’s visits (they exist in the present almost like a sort of dream that one half doubts after experiencing it and has to reaffirm by looking for evidence) but also because of the somewhat departed air of the place today. Ramsgate’s heyday as a tourist destination ended long ago. Now, even as a point of departure for the continent, the vast bulk of traffic goes either by the Channel Tunnel or the ferries at Dover. The town seems as quiet and reflective as Coleridge must have been in his older age there, with Wellington Terrace largely converted into flats, and a long series of `To Let’ and `Sold’ signs outside:
`When I was young? – Ah, woful When!
Ah! For the change ‘twixt Now and Then!
This breathing house not built with hands,
This body that does me grievous wrong,
O’er aery cliffs and glittering sands,
How lightly then it flashed along:-
Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore,
On winding lakes and rivers wide,
That ask no aid of sail or oar,
That fear no spite of wind or tide!
Nought cared this body for wind or weather
When Youth and I lived in’t together.’ (Beer, ed, Ibid, 329).