BIB_ID
415074
Accession number
MA 1848.11
Creator
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834.
Display Date
Place not identified, 1794 December 11.
Credit line
Purchased from Joanna Langlais, 1957.
Description
1 item (4 pages, with address) ; 37.8 x 23.5 cm
Notes
Coleridge does not give a date of writing, but the letter has a postmark of December 11, 1794. See the published edition of the correspondence, cited below, for additional information.
This collection, MA 1848, is comprised of 100 letters from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Robert Southey, written between 1794 and 1819. See the collection-level record for more information (MA 1848.1-100).
This letter is from the Joanna Langlais Collection, a large collection of letters written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to various recipients. The collection has been divided into subsets, based primarily on Coleridge's addressees, and these sub-collections have been cataloged as MA 1848-1857.
Address panel with postmarks: "Robert Southey / No 8 / Westgate Buildings / Bath / Single."
This collection, MA 1848, is comprised of 100 letters from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Robert Southey, written between 1794 and 1819. See the collection-level record for more information (MA 1848.1-100).
This letter is from the Joanna Langlais Collection, a large collection of letters written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to various recipients. The collection has been divided into subsets, based primarily on Coleridge's addressees, and these sub-collections have been cataloged as MA 1848-1857.
Address panel with postmarks: "Robert Southey / No 8 / Westgate Buildings / Bath / Single."
Provenance
Purchased from Joanna Langlais in 1957 as a gift of the Fellows, with the special assistance of Mrs. W. Murray Crane, Mr. Homer D. Crotty, Mr. and Mrs. Donald F. Hyde, Mr. Robert H. Taylor and Mrs. Landon K. Thorne. Formerly in the possession of Ernest Hartley Coleridge and Thomas Burdett Money-Coutts, Baron Latymer.
Summary
Telling Southey that he is writing not because he has anything in particular to say, but because "it is a relief, and forms a very respectable part in my Theory of Escapes from the Folly of Melancholy"; describing his critical distance from his own sadness: "I appear to myself like a sick Physician, feeling the pang acutely, yet deriving a wonted pleasure from examining it's progress and developing it's causes"; responding in detail to numerous poems by Southey and quoting from them; comparing some sonnets to the work of William Lisle Bowles; commenting "Of the pauper's funeral that part in which you have done me the honor to imitate me is by far the worst -- the thought has been so much better expressed by Gray -- On the whole (like many of yours) it wants compactness and totality -- the same thought is repeated too frequently in different words"; offering an edited version of Southey's poem "The Pauper's Funeral"; mentioning poems of his own; commenting on Robert Lovell's poetry: "Lovell has no taste -- or simplicity of feeling"; making a joke about Lovell and Southey's poetic pseudonyms; arguing that Southey should use his real name: "Southey is a name much more proper & handsome -- and I venture to prophesy, will be more famous"; suggesting various changes to Southey's poem "The Chapel Bell"; adapting some lines from King Lear for the start of a "wild Ode" and adding "I shall set about one, when I am in a Humour to abandon myself to all the Diableries, that ever met the eye of Fuseli!"; mentioning that Samuel Le Grice has "jumbled together all the quaint stupidity, he ever wrote" and published a small book with an enigmatic title; including several lines of verse about a "Tiny Man of Tiny Wit" publishing a "Tiny book"; following this with a sonnet titled "To Bowles"; saying that the last four lines were written by Charles Lamb, "a man of uncommon Genius," and recommending a sonnet by Lamb; including another sonnet that begins "O gentle Look, that didst my Soul beguile"; discussing his own poetic style: "I cannot write without a body of thought -- hence my Poetry is crowded and sweats beneath a heavy burthen of Ideas and Imagery! It has seldom Ease -- The little Song ending with 'I heav'd the -- sigh for thee'! is an exception -- and accordingly I like it the best of all, I ever wrote"; adding that he thinks the sonnets he has written to "eminent Contemporaries" are among his better poems; including a "little Song" beginning "If, while my Passion I impart"; describing himself as a "compleat Necessitarian" and saying that he goes further than David Hartley and believes in the "corporeality of thought"; saying that "Boyer thrashed Favell most cruelly the day before yesterday" (probably referring to Reverend James Boyer and Robert Favell) and he sent the latter a consoling note; including the text of the note, which is written in mock-scientific language ("I condole with you on the unpleasant motions, to which a certain Uncouth Automaton has been mechanized"); concluding the letter "God love you, Southey!" and sending his love to Southey's mother.
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