Coleridge's Notebooks: A Selection

"I think in a way the Notebooks are his masterpiece. Partly because they’re an opportunity for him to exercise or to demonstrate his genius without any of the obligation to finish things that he found so impossible. Somewhere the great Coleridge scholar John Beer observes that it wasn’t that he lacked the industry to finish things. The problem with finishing things for Coleridge was typically that he saw two positions, or two totally different and contradictory truths. That made finishing things quite hard, because you have to choose either one or the other, or somehow try and synthesise them. That’s the uphill struggle in the kinds of abstract, esoteric philosophy Coleridge spends a lot of time thinking about. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The notebooks free him from that. There’s something about the improvisatory, moment-to-moment, spontaneous business of a notebook—and especially that the notebooks aren’t going to be published. Of course, there’s some evidence that as time went on, he realised they might be, and they get more formal. But at least for the first several years, these are going to be read by no one, really, apart from perhaps a loved one or yourself in ten years’ time. I think that freedom from the sense of a scrutinizing public eye was very enabling for Coleridge. He’s quite a lonely man for a lot of his life. His notebooks become a kind of confidante. He wrote things in his notebook because he had nobody else to talk to. He was also a brilliant observer of nature: natural scenes, trees, landscapes and sunsets. Some of that gets into the poetry. I think the place where he’s at his greatest is what we would now think of as nature writing. He writes beautifully about his young children, and satirically about the things that he finds: wonderful passages about what aspens look like when they first come out, what larch buds look like, and fantastic bits of self-portraiture as well. Here he’s talking about the way in which he’s a talkative fellow: “my illustrations swallow up my thesis”. These wonderful bits of self-analysis are whimsical, not always torturous (though sometimes torturous as well.) Yes. He must’ve been extremely good company when he was on form. I think he got a bit more pompous as he got older, but as a young man I think he was brilliantly witty."