BIB_ID
415365
Accession number
MA 1851.2
Creator
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834.
Display Date
Littlehampton, England, 1817 November 6.
Credit line
Purchased from Joanna Langlais, 1957.
Description
1 item (2 pages, with address) ; 22.3 x 17.9 cm
Notes
This collection, MA 1851, is comprised of 12 autograph letters signed from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Henry Francis Cary, written from October 1817 through September 1829 and 4 copies of autograph letters from Coleridge to H.F. Cary, in the hand of Ernest Hartley Coleridge, and dated May 25 or 26, 1827, June 2, 1827, November 29, 1830 and April 22,1832.
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 individually as MA 1848- MA 1857.
Docketed.
Address panel with postmark to "Rev. Mr. Cary / Little hampton."
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 individually as MA 1848- MA 1857.
Docketed.
Address panel with postmark to "Rev. Mr. Cary / Little hampton."
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
Praising Cary's translation of Dante and commenting on Wordsworth; saying "What I expressed concerning your translation, I did not say lightly or without examination : and I know enough of myself to be confident, that any feeling of personal partiality would rather lead me to doubts and dissatisfactions respecting a particular work in proportion as it might possibly occasion me to over rate the man. Ex. gr. - If indeed I do estimate too highly what I deem the characteristic excellencies of Wordsworth's Poems, it results from a congeniality of Taste without a congeniality in the productive power - but to the faults and defects I have been far more alive than his detractors, even from the first publication of the Lyrical Ballads - tho' for a long course of years my opinions were sacred to his own ear;" saying he has compared his translation to the work of Cowper, Armstrong, Southey, Wordsworth, Landor and his own poetry; saying "I still affirm, that to my ear and to my judgement both your Metre and your Rhythm have in a far greater degree, than I know any other instance of, the variety of Milton without any mere Miltonism...that...the Verse has this variety without any loss of continuity - and that this is the excellence of the Work, considered as a translation of Dante - that it gives the reader a similar feeling of wandering & wandering onward and onward. - Of the diction, I can only say that [it] is Dantesque, even in that in which the Florentine must be preferred to our English Giant - namely, that it is not only pure Language but pure English - the language differs from that of a Mother or a well-bred Lady who had read little but her Bible and a few good books - only as far as the Thoughts and Things to be expressed require learned words from a learned Poet;" asking if he would bring any other manuscripts he has written and read them to him; saying that Mrs. Gillman hopes he will visit them at Highgate and meet her husband; adding, in a postscript, that he is returning books he loaned him.
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