BIB_ID
415124
Accession number
MA 1848.19
Creator
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834.
Display Date
Bristol, England, 1796 December 27.
Credit line
Purchased from Joanna Langlais, 1957.
Description
1 item (3 pages, with address) ; 23.2 x 18.6 cm
Notes
Coleridge gives only "Tuesday Morning" for the date of writing. In the Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Griggs proposes that this letter was written on December 27, 1796. See the published edition of the correspondence, cited below, for additional information.
No place of writing is given, but Coleridge refers to his plans to leave Bristol in a few days in the last line of the letter.
This collection, MA 1848, is comprised of 92 letters from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Robert Southey, written between 1794 and 1819. See the collection-level record for more information (MA 1848.1-92).
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 postmark: "Robert Southey / No. 8 / West-gate Buildings / Bath."
No place of writing is given, but Coleridge refers to his plans to leave Bristol in a few days in the last line of the letter.
This collection, MA 1848, is comprised of 92 letters from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Robert Southey, written between 1794 and 1819. See the collection-level record for more information (MA 1848.1-92).
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 postmark: "Robert Southey / No. 8 / West-gate Buildings / Bath."
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
Beginning "I thank you, Robert Southey! for your poems; and by way of return present you with a collection of (what appear to me) the faults"; praising two odes; critiquing the last line of one of the odes as "one of James Jennings's new thoughts; and besides, who after having been whirled along by such a tide of enthusiasm can endure to be impaled at last on the needle-point of an Antithesis?"; saying "Of the Inscriptions I like the first and last the least: all the rest almost equally, and each very much"; making detailed suggestions about possible edits, word choice, meter and rhymes; turning to the 'Hymn to the Penates' and writing "if I were to abandon my judgment to the impulse of present Feelings, I should pronounce [it] the most interesting poem of it's length in our Language"; calling the first five lines of the poem "very, very beautiful" but asking whether they have any meaning; pointing out inconsistencies and logical gaps in the lines and writing "Is all this only my obtuseness & frigidity? or have you not faultily mixed spiritual with corporeal, allegorical meanings with meanings predicable only of catgut & rosin, bricks & mortar?"; making suggestions about the lines ("What if you left the harp in the fane of Vacuna?"); saying that these objections did not occur to him when Southey read the poem, and the sweetness of the lines predominates: "Tis a handsome & finely-sculptur'd Tomb -- & few will break it open with the sacrilegious spade & pick-ax of Criticism to discover, whether or no it be not a Cenotaph"; mentioning that he has been in bed for two days with "a dire cold & feverish complaint," but he is now better and will leave Bristol on Thursday.
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