Jasmine Jagger

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Healing Powers of the Imagination

Abstract: This article discusses a medical link between Wordsworth and Coleridge during and around the composition of The Prelude. Looking closely at popular medical treatises on the imagination and its specific powers over the human mind and body in the late 1700s and early 1800s, it identifies a medical ‘strand’ within the The Prelude, particularly in relation to its address to an ailing Coleridge. Through biographical tracking and close attention to certain poetic emphases and motifs, it identifies a special motive for Wordsworth’s writing of his poem, as well as an emergent dynamic between the two poets at this time: namely, that of benign physician (Wordsworth) and wandering patient (Coleridge). Keywords: Wordsworth, Coleridge, poetry, medicine, imagination, mesmerism I wished to draw attention to the truth, that the power of the human imagination is sufficient to produce such changes even in our physical nature as might almost appear miraculous. William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802).1

Like Keats, Shelley and other Romantic poets, both Coleridge and Wordsworth took an interest in contemporary medicine.

Romanticism 22.1 (2016): 33–47 DOI: 10.3366/rom.2016.0255

© Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/loi/rom

Acknowledging this, and the important distinctions between the medicine of the Romantics and the medicine of our own time, Jennifer Ford in Coleridge on Dreaming (1998) has called for a reappraisal of the Romantic text, arguing that ‘popular organic reading and the more recent critical readings of the imagination fail to acknowledge the physical and medical characteristics of the so-called Romantic imagination’.2 Partly in response to Ford’s plea, this essay seeks to re-examine the ‘imagination’ as something that, for Wordsworth and Coleridge, was deeply immersed in medical thinking as well as poetic thinking, and considered a viable tool with which to treat mental, and even physical, illness. In so doing, it reconsiders Wordsworth’s statement about the human imagination’s apparently ‘miraculous’ powers over mind and body, and the bearing this may have on The Prelude as the poet’s great ‘prescriptive’ gift to a Coleridge riddled with illness, both mentally and physically. For the Romantics, the ‘imagination’ was the faculty which could mediate between body and soul, nature and mind, subjective and objective experience. As common ground between spirit and body, it was therefore considered to be able to have profound and apparently miraculous effects upon the human anatomy, as well as the mind. Neil Vickers has already extensively explored Coleridge’s attentive study of medical

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theory and how this bled into both his creative works and running self-diagnoses.3 Coleridge was also a test subject and protégé of Thomas Beddoes, whose self-help book Hygëia (1802) sat by his desk at all times. Wordsworth, meanwhile, had personal links to medical men like John Thelwall (who lectured to the Physical Society at Guy’s Hospital) and James Tobin (who was Humphry Davy’s assistant at Thomas Beddoes’ clinic), as well as to Coleridge himself. Though Coleridge later wrote against Joseph Priestley’s materialism in Biographia Literaria (1817),4 both poets were familiar early on with Priestley’s Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777) which affirmed that the ‘body and brain’ designate ‘no other than one and the same thing’ (xiii. 27–28). They had read Jerome Gaub’s 1763 theories on the ‘mutual relations of mind and body in health and disease’ (Ford, 188). In addition, they would have certainly known about Franz Mesmer’s animal magnetism theories, which spread throughout London during the late 1780s, popularising the notion that ‘there is a plenum, or universal fluid, which occupies all space, and that all bodies moving therein, abound with pores or points of introduction [. . . ] to receive and return it’.5 This quotation comes from one of many popular (and often anonymous) medical pamphlets on animal magnetism published in London in the late eighteenth century: Wonders and Mysteries of Animal Magnetism Displayed; or the History, Art, Practice, and Progress of That Useful Science, from Its First Rise in the City of Paris, to the Present Time (London, 1791). According to Mesmer, when the fluid was circulating in the human body, the subject was healthy; when it was blocked, they experienced sickness. As a cure for such blockages, ‘mesmerism’ could be used to transmit fluid mental energy from one person to another through deep and concentrated thought ‘as if you would have your thoughts or ideas enter into and pass through’ the patient (Wonders

and Mysteries, 27–28). This became common practice as a method to heal the sick and to give the sleepless rest in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries. Indeed, it was understood that these ‘miraculous powers of healing’ (36) could cure ‘almost all disorders of the human frame’, and could be practiced by ‘any person’ on their family and friends (28). At the turn of the century, reams of medical tracts were printed discussing the power of the imagination as both an instigator of, and cure for, disease. Two of the most popular medical publications of the time were William Falconer’s A Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions Upon Disorders of the Body (London, 1788) and John Haygarth’s Of the Imagination, as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body (Bath, 1800). Falconer, like many physicians, warned against the ‘danger of the passions’ (Falconer, 16), while others praised the miraculous powers of the human mind in ‘revived method[s] of healing’ (Wonders and Mysteries, 37). As both of these texts demonstrate, the imagination became a common medical tool used by the period’s most eminent physicians to treat disease. Through case studies and reflection, its ‘marvellous’ and ‘wonderful’ powers were persuasively proved and vaunted, as a faculty of the mind that could exercise seemingly miraculous dominion over the body. Before reappraising the significance of my opening quotation from Wordsworth about the seemingly ‘miraculous’ powers of the imagination, I will consider the significance of Coleridge’s attachment to medical theory in his tussle for a deeper understanding of the nature of his own ‘imagination’ in and around the year 1800. Coleridge was convinced at this early time that his ‘unhealthy’ passions were causing his ailments, and he began taking opium to tranquilise these powers in the hope that the drug would cure his gout, seizures, scrofula and epilepsy. It was only later that he realised the drug was actually contributing to his nervous

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Imagination and bodily breakdown. In his further comments on the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Biographia, xviii), Coleridge denotes the origin of rhythm as ‘the balance in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion’ and declares that ‘as every passion has its proper pulse, so will it likewise have its characteristic modes of expression’ (CW, 7. ii. 64 and 71). Bodily ‘pulse’ becomes analogous with poetic pulse, just as metre becomes analogous with passion in a well-known sentence he wrote to William Sotheby in 1802: But metre itself implies a passion, i.e. a state of excitement, both in the Poet’s mind, & is expected in that of the Reader – and tho’ I stated this to Wordsworth [. . . ] yet he has [not] done justice to it.6 Indeed, Wordsworth did not subscribe to the kind of ‘proper pulse’ sought out by Coleridge. Of course, the former poet’s own prescriptions for composition were concerned with the creation of a steady and efficacious rhythm that would ‘melt into’, and have a balancing effect on, the reader.7 Vickers tracks Coleridge’s feverish attempts to self-diagnose his sufferings by penning them as and when they occurred. This technique was prescribed by Beddoes in Hygëia, which instructed physicians to refer to the precise thoughts of a patient during their attacks. The notebook scrawls of the self-diagnosing Coleridge seem to deliberately re-enact his bodily struggle: words pace and stagger, verse spasms into fits, lines surge uncontrollably or experience chronic blockages, and a sense of never-ending pain is felt to permeate mind and body. Yet Coleridge’s attempts to become his own physician were a failure, and he could neither make sense of, nor find a cure for, his enduring ailments. Half a century later, Sara Coleridge’s extensively-annotated 1847 edition of Biographia Literaria contains numerous

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attempts to diagnose her late father’s condition. As Robin Schofield explores, Sara spends 180 introductory pages analysing Coleridge’s ‘nerveless languor’ which, she says, ‘became almost the habit of his body and bodily mind’, and ‘which to a great degree paralyzed his powers both of rest and action’ (68).8 Coleridge’s mental illness, in Sara’s diagnosis, directly engendered his physical ‘torpor’. In these painful states, his sole cure was the act of writing; indeed, the only remaining ‘lifeblood’ in him, she says, was that ‘of thought and imagination flowing onward freely and in self-made channels’ – ‘for those brought with them their own warm atmosphere to thaw the chains of frost that bound his spirit’. Describing her father’s imagination as his only cure, Sara notes how when he stopped composing, his mind and body underwent simultaneous congealment, causing ill-health: ‘[s]oon as that spontaneous impulse was suspended, his nervousness would again spread over him like a poison’ (68). Nervous energy ‘spread[s]’ through the body like a toxic fluid – the very opposite of the curative ‘vital juices’ of the mind described by Wordsworth in his ‘Essay on Morals’ (1798). According to Sara, when Coleridge’s imagination flowed, he was healthy; when it stalled, he became ill. The notion of the imagination governing the bodily condition is addressed directly by Coleridge in Dejection: An Ode. The poem is characterised by frustrated attempts to force a release of ink that keeps blotting. When Coleridge wrote it, he was suffering from boils, grotesquely swollen knees, swollen testicles, deranged bowels and frightful neuralgia pains.9 As the external gusts ‘[rake]’ and ‘[swell]’, the speaker craves sensory experiences that ‘[m]ight startle this dull pain, and make it move and live!’ (5–20). He describes how a burden ‘bows [him] down to earth’ and ‘[s]uspends [his] shaping spirit of Imagination’ (84–5).10 This creative blockage ‘infects’ the ‘whole’ body and, disease-like, grows over the ‘habit’ of the

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soul (92–3). Here, disease and the clotted imagination are inextricably linked, as though the ink is bodying forth a blocked and ailing soma. Of course, Coleridge frequently referred to his ‘diseased imagination’ and ‘disease in voluntary power’ (CL, ii. 953). His mind, he perceived, needed to be active to be healthy, its sickliness best cured through the flow of the imagination removing its obstructions. As he writes in his notebook in 1801: This Strange Self-power in the Imagination, when painful sensations have made it their Interpreter, or returning Gladsomeness from convalescence, gastric and visceral, have made its chilled and evanished Figures & Landscape bud, blossom, & live in scarlet, and green, & snowy white.11 Here, the imagination has a ‘fructifying virtue’ comparable to that employed by Wordsworth in The Prelude: ‘a storm,/ Which, breaking up a long-continued frost/ Brings with it vernal promises’ (I. 48–50; WW, 64). Coleridge’s attempts to prove this theory culminated in his writing lines of poetry using his own blood on a piece of his skin (that peeled off in the bathtub) as his manuscript paper.12 The curious blood-poem, dated October 1832, was discovered only recently by Jim Mays: ‘after a sulphated hot-air bath treatment for sciatic rheumatism, after his skin began to peel and he cut himself shaving’, reveals Mays in 1997, ‘Coleridge wrote (or pretended to have written) the following “Autograph on an Autopergamene” (autopergamene = self-parchment)’: Why, sure, such a wonder was never yet seen! An Autograph on an Autópergamene! A Poet’s own Name, and own Hand-writing both, And the Ink and the Parchment all of his own growth —

The Ink his own Blood and the Parchment his Skin — This from’s Leg, and the other from’s razor-snipt Chin —13 Through this perverse act, Coleridge the poet attempts not only to self-diagnose, but to self-treat using the imagination and its ‘growth’. By turning the physical text into a substitute for his body, and transforming its imaginative substance into that body’s unobstructed blood-flow, the poet constructs a ‘healthy’ circulatory surrogate for himself. Wordsworth, it seems, perceived the medical imagination in a similar, albeit far less extreme, way. His ‘Essay on Morals’ (1798) demonstrates an understanding of the imagination as almost corporeal when he describes powerful written words as substances that ‘melt’ into our ‘affections’ — a word which pertains to both mind and body (cf. OED, ‘affection’, n. 1. ii, 1398) — mingle with the biological fluids of our minds, and thus ‘form’ our attitudes and opinions: I know no book or system of moral philosophy written with sufficient power to melt into our affections [?], to incorporate itself with the blood and vital juices of our minds, and thence to have any influence worth notice in forming those habits of which I am speaking (PWW, i. 125. My emphases). ‘Habit’ was, at the time, commonly used in medicine to describe the ‘bodily condition or constitution’.14 Here, Wordsworth depicts the manipulative power of the writer’s imagination actually forming the fibres of the ‘mind’. The poet again likens composition to a body in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads when he says that ‘the same human blood circulates through the veins of’ both good poetry and good prose. Within this textual body, metre acts like an efficacious spirit, whose ‘efficacy’ lies in its being ‘the co-presence of something regular

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Imagination [. . . ] to which the mind has been accustomed [. . . ] in a less excited state’. This regular pulse of metre has the effect of ‘tempering and restraining the passion’ that otherwise might be ‘carried beyond its proper bounds’, producing an ‘irregular state of mind’ (WW, 72). Wordsworth here suggests that powerful passion, embodied in and by poetry, can destabilise the reading mind. As though aware of his reader’s vulnerability, the poet advises that metre be employed like a system of valves along a vein to control the blood’s flux. The medical power of poetic metre was, at the same time, being promoted by Thelwall, who was using the rhythms of poetic metre to treat speech impediments.15 Given Wordsworth’s personal links to students of medicine; indeed, given the overlap between medical, literary and household texts at the time that he was writing, it is illuminating to draw comparisons between these theories and those expressed in popular medical essays that he is likely to have read. Falconer, for example, in A Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions upon Disorders of the Body (1788), describes the necessary ‘efficacy’ of tempering the passions to prevent and treat physical diseases, stressing the importance of a ‘firm resolution to resist the effects of frivolous incidents upon the mind’ (68). ‘Joy’, ‘love’ and ‘hope’, he says, powerfully rouse the vital functions into action, and [. . . ] give as it were new vigour to the heart and circulation. The perspiration is increased, the respiration easy and free, and the powers of the system that conduce to health are universally strengthened (8). An over-stimulation of these passions, however, produces an overexcitement of the ‘blood’ and ‘nervous juices’ which in turn leads to fever, palpitations, ‘a sense of burning diffused through the circulatory vessels’, and even death (8). In the minds of Wordsworth’s

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contemporaries, then, the passions could be both miraculous and deadly in their power over the body. If we imagine with Wordsworth that ‘poetry is passion’, as he asserts in his note to The Thorn (1800, PWW, ii. 513), this gives poetry an equally powerful potential: it, too, can rouse the body back to health, or indeed push it over the edge into disease and destruction. Mindful of Coleridge’s ‘abstruser musings’ in Frost at Midnight (6), Wordsworth enacts this healthy metrical composition in Tintern Abbey. For poetry to be ‘good’, he has told us, it must have a strong blood flow; but for it to be efficacious, this flow must be measured. Embodying this principle, the healthy iambic pentameter of Tintern Abbey is steered along by connectives pushing each impulse onto the next, and positive exclamations which act like propulsion pumps (‘O sylvan Wye!’, ‘yet, oh!’) to revive the tempo when it starts to linger upon more burdensome thoughts. Referring to its own passions, which are ‘Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart’ (29), the verse imitates a healthy pulse kept in check by the metre. In medical terms, the sense of a motion and spirit that ‘impels/ All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/ And rolls through all things’ (101–3) is comparable both to Mesmer’s vital universal fluid and Thelwall’s ‘electrical fluid’ in his lecture on Animal Vitality (1793).16 Given the popular understanding that disease was caused by ‘obstructions, and the want of a proper circulation of the blood and juices’ (Wonders and Mysteries of Animal Magnetism Displayed, 23), Tintern Abbey might be re-considered as a remedial exercise in driving the imagination on to prevent, or even treat, disease. Using strong corporeal imagery, Wordsworth’s speaker alludes to the power of his imagination over his body, imagining how his sensations are ‘passing even into my purer mind/ With tranquil restoration’ (30–1) like some medicinal fluid. This fluid then lightens

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and suspends ‘the breath of this corporeal frame’ and ‘the motion of our human blood’ as might a natural opiate (44–7). Finally, Wordsworth exhorts the recipient of his poem to remember him ‘with healing thoughts/ Of tender joy’ (145–6), thus clarifying his remedial intentions. Tintern Abbey therefore seems to display Wordsworth’s early experimentation with poetry as a medical tool with which to measure the imagination and thus affect the body to the good. Wordsworth witnessed Coleridge’s sufferings first-hand, particularly during the periods when the two poets were living together. His literary interaction with Coleridge’s illness, it appears, begins with light-hearted observation as expressed in the Stanzas written in my Pocket-Copy of Thomson’s Castle of Indolence (‘Within our Happy Castle there dwelt one’), composed in May 1802 when Coleridge was, in Wordsworth’s own notes to the poem, ‘living with us much’.17 Critical disagreement has arisen over which of the two poets is represented in Wordsworth’s portraits of the sick man and the caring friend, and I would argue against the majority here. Firstly, Wordsworth introduces his first figure as ‘one/ Whom without blame I may not overlook’ (1–2), which recalls a sentiment of heedful responsibility similar to that expressed in his dedicatory address to Coleridge at the end of The Prelude: ‘Coleridge! with this my argument, of thee/ Shall I be silent? [. . . ]/ Shall I be mute ere thou be spoken of?’ (XIII. 247–251). Secondly, the description of how the unhealthy figure would ‘roam’ ‘[o]ut of our Valley’s limits’ (12) in bad weather at night matches familiar descriptions of Coleridge actually doing so; and the family’s worry about Coleridge’s health is captured in the lines, ‘What ill was on him, what he had to do,/ A mighty wonder bred among our quiet crew’, with suggestive stress here on ‘ill’ (17–18).

Wordsworth then portrays a second man with a ‘profound’ forehead (44) who ‘[teaches]’ others how to use their imaginations: He lacked not implement, device or toy, To cheat away the hours that silent were He would have taught you how you might employ Yourself; and many did to him repair, And, certes, not in vain: — he had inventions rare. Instruments had he, playthings for the ear, [. . . ] (50–55) This second description mirrors Coleridge’s repeated references to Wordsworth as his own ‘teacher’ (see, for example, Hexameters (written in 1798): ‘William, my teacher, my friend!’).18 Both men are finally pictured lying on the grass side by side while the one with the ‘instruments’ (55) teaches the ‘withered’ (20) man how to enjoy the sounds (‘playthings for the ear’), sensations (‘Long blades of grass plucked round him’), and sights (‘Glasses [. . . ] with many colours gay’) surrounding him. Further sets of eyeglasses are shown to turn a beetle into a ‘mailed angel’ and the vegetation ‘gold’ (55–62). Here, the ‘instruments’ of the imagination are shown to produce miraculous effects: when we know how to use these devices, the poet implies, they change the way we perceive the world around us. We are presented with a unique and intimate scene in which Wordsworth entreats Coleridge to see the world differently, opening his eyes to beautiful, simple pleasures, and thus soothing his ‘tempest[uous]’ mind: He would entice that other man to hear His music, and to view his imagery: And sooth, these two did love each other dear As far as love in such a place could be!

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Imagination There did they lie from earthly labour free, Most happy livers as were ever seen! If but a bird, to keep them company, Or butterfly sate down, they were, I ween, As pleas’d as if the same had been a Maiden Queen. (64–72) The doubled senses of ‘sooth’ here strengthens the impression that Wordsworth is reading poetry to Coleridge in order to ‘soothe’ him. The description of the two ‘happy livers’ lying on the grass meanwhile has strong corporeal overtones, suggesting that the pair are made happy in both mind and body (the ‘liver’ was of course the bodily organ regarded as the seat of the passions, and was often used as a metaphor for the temperament). Wordsworth uses linguistic devices to demonstrate the imagination performing magical feats. In the above quotation, for example, the playful construction ‘butterfly sate down, they were’ evokes the fantastical image of a butterfly ‘sitting down’ beside the poets. The second clause quickly corrects this interpretation to a more realistic perception of the butterfly; however, in the following line, we become aware of a double bluff as the butterfly is then linked to the idea of a ‘Maiden Queen’. Wordsworth’s magical ‘instruments’ recall the famous ‘Fictitious Tractors’ used by John Haygarth and other physicians in Of the Imagination as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body (1800) to demonstrate the ‘wonderful force of the Imagination’ as something that could trick and deceive patients through distorted perception (or, the placebo effect) (4). Consisting of a pair of pointed rods made from brass or steel, tractors were believed to relieve rheumatic pains when rubbed over the skin. Haygarth decided to test the placebo effect by treating patients with tractors made from wood: the patients’ belief in the power of

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the tractors was so strong that they imagined themselves to be cured. Wordsworth’s methodology, however, depends less on the patient being tricked, and more on his being taught how to adjust his perspective to create his own happiness: the poet’s rare ‘inventions’ are his perceptual techniques in teaching man how to relate to his universe. Indeed – what we ‘perceive’, according to Wordsworth, we should ‘half create’ (Tintern Abbey, 107–8). According to Wordsworth’s diagnosis, the ‘piteous’ man in the third stanza that would ‘Look at the common grass from hour to hour’ (23) had an eye-view that was making him sick. But the ‘common’ sight is made fresh through the miraculously transformative power of the imaginative eye-view. Such a portrayal paints Wordsworth as a physician for, as well as a friend to, Coleridge. Not only does he depict the soothing and curative effects of his poetry on Coleridge; he illustrates his deliberate purpose to create those healing effects through poetry. At the same time, Wordsworth draws up a methodology by which to teach Coleridge how to ‘employ’ himself, for good, through the medical faculty of the imagination. That is to say the poet becomes the physician, administering his poetry, one might almost say the ‘prescription’, to Coleridge. Wordsworth was, at this early time, already distrustful of medical substances. As Coleridge wrote to Humphry Davy on 9 October 1800: I cannot speak favorably of W’s health — but indeed he has not done common justice to Beddoes’ kind Prescription. I saw his countenance darken, and all his Hopes vanish, when he saw the Prescriptions — his scepticism concerning medicines — nay, it is not enough scepticism! (CL, i. 632).19 The medical relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge is also suggested throughout The Prelude. Coleridge’s complete mental and physical breakdown at Town End in December

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1803 had a profound effect on the Wordsworths, who record him bedridden and tortured by ‘screamy nights’.20 Nursing Coleridge for the most part of three weeks, the family tried various treatments including reading to him by his bedside. Later, before his departure South, Coleridge begged to be sent a volume of Wordsworth’s manuscript poems to take with him: ‘Think what they will be to me in Sicily!’. The Wordsworths responded frantically, converting Town End into a poetry factory over the Spring of 1804 to get the book made in time.21 In the two years following Coleridge’s departure, Wordsworth wrote the remaining eight books of The Prelude, always with his friend in mind. As Jonathan Wordsworth argues, it is Coleridge ‘who validates the whole undertaking’ of this poem, ‘often providing the sustaining thought, and always providing the sustaining confidence that “the discipline/ And consummation of the poet’s mind is in truth heroic argument”’. His friend ‘is addressed again and again, and though we may at times forget his presence, Wordsworth never does’.22 What inspired this productivity in Wordsworth is worth questioning, especially given Coleridge’s desperation to have a copy of his works to take on his recovery trip. In the 1791 London publication Wonders and Mysteries of Animal Magnetism Displayed, the anonymous writer claims that ‘wonderful alterations’ have been perceived by absent parties whose friends have treated them through ‘sympathetic power’ from afar. The essay then takes the reader through a step-by-step guide on how to practice this treatment (32). The idea that intensive sympathetic thinking about Coleridge might actually help to treat his condition would not, therefore, have been implausible to Wordsworth in the early 1800s. Indeed, The Prelude is expressly concerned for the former’s ‘health’ and ‘healthful mind’ throughout (II. 510). Meanwhile, Wordsworth’s pressing and

dutiful attention to Coleridge’s condition is vocalised through his repeated use of ‘must’. Addressing Coleridge in Book 6, he writes: I needs must hope, Must feel, must trust, that my maturer age, And temperature less willing to be moved My calmer habits and more steady voice, Would with an influence benign have soothed Or chased away the airy wretchedness That battened on thy youth. (VI. 320–6) Medical connotations such as ‘temperature’ and ‘habits’, ‘soothed’ and ‘wretchedness’, recall Beddoes’ archetypal benign physician, calming his patient with a ‘steady voice’.23 Indeed, ‘steadiness of character and presence of mind are indispensible requisites to a physician’, writes Falconer (95) – a firmness that is often assumed by Wordsworth when addressing Coleridge. In Book 10, the poet declares: I feel for Thee, must utter what I feel: The sympathies, erewhile, in part discharged, Gather afresh, and will have vent again. (X. 986–8) Importance is placed on the act of ‘utter[ing]’ his feelings, as Wordsworth imagines his ‘sympathies’ to be gusts of wind which will ‘[move]’ Coleridge – and with them ‘[t]urn’ the ‘dull/ Sirocco air. . . /. . . into a healthful breeze/ To cherish and invigorate thy frame’ (X. 974–5). In language filled with medical nuance, he continues: Thine be those motions strong and sanative, A ladder for thy Spirit to reascend To health and joy and pure contentedness . . . (X. 976–9) Wordsworth’s use of medical vocabulary in describing his ‘discharg[ing]’ waves of sympathy recalls the ‘perspiratory discharge’

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Imagination that refreshes and cures the patient’s paralytic affections in Falconer’s dissertation (11). Given these overt medical implications, The Prelude can be viewed as a medical project as well as a philosophical project, or a combination of the two. Performing a continual process of self-reflection and diagnosis, the text steers its own self-understanding, which in turn strengthens its philosophical depth and resonance. The word ‘miracle’ is used in referring to the imagination in the next passage of Book 10 of The Prelude. Dreaming of ‘Sicily’, Wordsworth writes how ‘A pleasant promise, wafted from her shores/ Comes o’er my heart’, before narrating one of Theocritus’ reports of ‘miracles’ in which men have ‘[p]revailed among the Powers of heaven and earth/ By force of graces’ (X. 1016–17). The poet then immediately refers back to Coleridge while reflecting upon man’s miraculous powers: [. . . ] yea, not unmoved, When thinking of my own beloved Friend, I hear thee tell of how bees with honey fed Divine Comates, by his tyrant lord Within a chest imprisoned impiously, How with their honey from the fields they came And fed him there, alive, from month to month Because the Goatherd, blessed Man! had lips Wet with the Muses’ Nectar. Thus I soothe The pensive moments by this calm fire side, And find a thousand fancied images That chear the thoughts of those I love, and mine. (X. 1019–1030) Here, Wordsworth’s verse re-enacts the cure that it describes: repetition (‘month to month’) imitates the bees tracking back and forth, while

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enjambment (‘lips/ Wet with the Muses’ Nectar’) imitates the honey poured over the edge of the sufferer’s lips. Indeed, Comates, in the ‘chest imprisoned’, being kept alive by the bees’ remedial honey, is indirectly compared to Coleridge imprisoned within his sick corporeal frame, revived by Wordsworth’s poetry at the fireside. Wordsworth’s lines of verse are like the lines of bees; his imagination, the nectar that they carry, being fed to the sufferer. Evidence of the success of The Prelude in affecting Coleridge is found in the latter’s poem To William Wordsworth: Composed on the Night After His Recitation of a Poem on the Growth of an Individual Mind. Coleridge writes that as he absorbed the poetry, a ‘tumult rose and ceased’ (86) in his body, which eventually tranquilised him: In silence list’ning, like a devout child, My soul lay passive by thy various strain Driven as in surges now beneath the stars. (95–97) The poetry’s immediate effects are similar to those described by Coleridge as produced by opium.24 Here, however, Coleridge’s body becomes almost impregnated with the pulse of Wordsworth’s verse: as the syntax suggests, not only does his ‘strain’ ‘[Drive] as in surges’ to a higher plane, but Coleridge’s limp soul is ‘Driven’ along ‘by’ it. Coleridge’s description reads like a physical re-enactment of his intention, through poetry, ‘to elevate the imagination & set the affections in right tune by the beauty of the inanimate impregnated, as with a living soul, by the presence of Life’ (CL, i. 397).25 However, the language is suggestive of dependency, and Coleridge’s exclamations ‘oh friend, my comforter, my guide,/ Strong in thyself and powerful to give strength’ (102–3) hint that he has begun to rely upon Wordsworth and his poetry as a patient might reply upon a physician and his treatment. The ethereal quality of these strains meanwhile demonstrates how these cured states were

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fleeting, and that Wordsworth’s poetry in and of itself was not a long-term remedy for him. Referring back to Wordsworth’s words about the imagination in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, it is important to distinguish that he does not explicitly claim that the effects of the human imagination are miraculous, but that these effects ‘might almost appear’ miraculous (WW, 74). As is the case with many of John Haygarth’s medical patients, once the immediate deceptive effect of the ‘fictitious’ (placebo) tractors has worn off, the disease gradually returns to the dependent body. The same deceptive effect can be said to affect Coleridge in listening to Wordsworth’s poetry. Wordsworth illustrates his awareness of this truth in Book 13 of The Prelude, when he insists that no cure that is administered from ‘without’ the subject can change the composition of which he is made up ‘within’: For all that friendship, all that love can do, All that darling countenance can look Or dear voice utter, to complete the man, Perfect him, made imperfect in himself, All shall be his. . . (XIII. 200–4). Earlier, he exclaims: O Man! Strength to thyself; no Helper hast thou here Here keepest though thy individual state: No other can divide with thee this work No secondary hand can intervene To fashion this ability. ’Tis thine, The prime and vital principle is thine (XIII. 188–194) As Wordsworth dictates, man’s power to build up his strength of mind lies in his ‘ability’ wilfully to do so. The human mind is described as an ‘individual state’ which governs its own ‘work’, and cannot be built up by any other hand. A similar admonishment punctuates Wordsworth’s letter to Coleridge in early May

1809, in which the poet administers medical advice to his incapacitated friend: On the general question of your health one thing is obvious, namely, that health of mind — that is, resolution, self-denial, and well-regulated conditions of feeling — are what you must depend upon; [. . . ] and that Doctors’ stuff has been one of your greatest curses; and, of course, of ours through you. [. . . ] You must know better than Mr. Harrison, Mr. King, or any surgeon, what is to do you good, what you are to do, and what to leave undone. Do not look out of yourself for that stay which can only be found within.26 Prescribing ‘resolution’ and ‘well-regulated conditions of feeling’, Wordsworth warns against the ‘Doctors’ stuff’ that Coleridge was taking into his body in large and irresponsible doses, and had become dependent on. ‘Resolution’ was a medical term for ‘the subsiding or cessation of a pathological process, disease, symptom, etc.’ (OED, 2. Med. c.) with additional significance for Wordsworth because it was used in the title of Resolution and Independence, written in direct response to Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode. Independence, or the ‘stay’ which can only be found within, is the sole way to stave off the ‘disease of the mind’, Wordsworth argues. This is the very same firmness that is modelled by the old man who persists in his work, in spite of his ‘feeble chest’ (99), at gathering medicinal leeches. Indeed, a methodology is built up in which the mind can voluntarily affect its own experience of the world. It is no coincidence that one of Wordsworth’s purest demonstrations of this methodology occurs just after he has left a sick and bedridden Coleridge in London. Walking towards Fleet Street, the poet’s mind is downcast and filled with melancholy thoughts of his friend, when, looking up, he perceives a silent atmosphere, and ‘above it the huge and

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Imagination majestic form of St Paul’s solemnized by a thin veil of falling snow’. He then recollects: I cannot say how much I was affected at this unthought-of sight, in such a place and what a blessing I felt there is in habits of exalted Imagination. My sorrow was controlled, and my uneasiness of mind not quieted and relieved altogether, seemed at once to receive the gift of an anchor of security. (LWDW, ii. 209) Wordsworth’s self-taught ‘habits of exalted Imagination’ furnish him with the power to adjust, ‘control’ and ‘anchor’ his perspective: the mind’s eye zooms upwards and outwards to the silent falling snow and half-veiled majesty of St. Paul’s cathedral in the distance. By allowing him to extricate his mind from its ‘poring’ fixations (The Excursion, IV. 960) on the ‘immense heap of little things’ that make up the universe (as Coleridge described in 1797 in a letter to Thelwall; CL, i. 349), Wordsworth’s imagination goes some way towards ‘quiet[ing]’ the mind and ‘reliev[ing]’ it of its melancholy load. A less introspective viewpoint, Wordsworth implies, allows us to recollect our ‘whole’ being. Elsewhere in his works, the very same ability is modelled by the Pedlar – for his is the mind that creates its own perception: Though poor in outward shew, he was most rich; He had a world about him – ‘twas his own, He made it – (The Ruined Cottage, 86–88) As such, Wordsworth describes, the Pedlar is able to ‘[observe] the progress and decay/ Of many minds, of minds and bodies too;’ (I. 404–5) without being subject to the same decay himself. As the poet explains in Book 1 of The Excursion, ‘He could afford to suffer/ With those whom he saw suffer’ (I. 399–400). Later in his life, Wordsworth used this same quote to describe Coleridge’s sickness: ‘It was dear Coleridge’s constant infelicity that prevented him from being the poet that Nature

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had given him the power to be. He had always too much personal and domestic discontent to paint the sorrows of mankind. He could not “afford to suffer/ With those whom he saw suffer. . . ”’.27 For Wordsworth, then, Coleridge represented the failure of this methodology. And Coleridge in To William Wordsworth also guiltily portrays himself as a perversion of the Pedlar: ‘A wanderer with a worn-out heart’ who continued ‘To wander back on such unhealthful road/ Plucking the poisons of self-harm!’ (79–80). The happy roads travelled by the Pedlar are roads that he travels by choice. By contrast, Coleridge is portrayed as deliberately and harmfully choosing the ‘unhealthful road’ and thus hastening his own ruin. Keeping in mind both poets’ comparison of Coleridge to an ‘unhealthful’ and ‘self-harm[ing]’ wanderer, it is worth considering Wordsworth’s poem Ode to Duty as perhaps the earliest indicator of his waning sympathy for Coleridge’s afflictions. This poem was included in the 1804 manuscript that went with Coleridge to Sicily: ‘empty terrors’ and ‘vain temptations’, the speaker says, can be avoided if one behaves with a self-controlled ‘secondary Will’ under the discipline and ‘restraint’ of duty and reason. The accusatory undertones of this poem perhaps provide insight into the two poets’ eventual estrangement. Coleridge, as the ‘sport of every random gust’ (26) is by 1809 no longer tolerable to Wordsworth, who complains to Poole that he ‘has no voluntary power of mind whatsoever, nor is he capable of acting under constraint of duty or moral obligation’ (LWDW, ii. 352). It becomes clear that the reality of Coleridge’s condition, realised here, is evidently a bitter disappointment to Wordsworth’s prescribed treatment for the mind and body. Indeed, the ‘gift/ Which I for thee design’ in The Prelude (XIII. 411–12) is Wordsworth’s model of the strong and healthy mental architecture that enables the self ‘to bear/ More firmly’

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(II. 417–8). Within this model, the ‘renovating virtue’ of the imagination is portrayed as something that restores, repairs and builds up the mind, thus following Beddoes’ advice that the ‘frail edifice’ must be ‘reared’ healthily ‘from within’ lest it buckle under the pressure ‘without’, causing ‘destruction’ and, in turn, ‘disease’ (Hygëia, 25). In contrast to Wordsworth’s resilient design, Alethea Hayter notes in Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1988) that Coleridge, like De Quincey, found the closest visual representation of his opium visions in an engraving by Giovan Piranesi (Imaginary Prisons, see fig. 1).28 Piranesi’s monstrous vault consists of ascending arches crossed by thick staircases like large constricting veins that are cut off or dissolve into mid-air. A climber appears at various points of ascent, peering over dissolving edges or clutching onto disappearing banisters. Groping its way upwards with him, the eye-view is encroached upon by blackened walls as the claustrophobic imagination scuttles down the routes that crumble or lead nowhere. A breathing-place at the top is in full view, but the journey is impossible. With the curved edge of the right frame, the eye feels a sense of its own physicality – a ball encased within the dark skull – and the tortured architecture becomes a mirror of the dark and disorientated pathways of the mind that perceives it. If this is indeed a true reflection of Coleridge’s imagination, it is little wonder that he found Wordsworth’s mental architecture impossible to build: lost in the diseased channels of his mind, Coleridge might seek merely to be tolerated, if no longer helpfully treated, by Wordsworth. Having built up sufficient evidence to demonstrate the medical relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge, I wish to draw one final comparison from Sara Coleridge’s essay Nervousness (1834), which may dramatise the estrangement between the two poets. The essay consists of a dialogue between two figures: the Good Genius (a physician) and the Invalid

(a sick man), who represent two sides of the human self that cannot see eye to eye. As the Good Genius grows frustrated, the Invalid quotes from Coleridge’s poem Forbearance, omitting a critical line which I underline below: If a foe have kenn’d, [Or worse than foe, an alienated friend,] A rib of dry rot in thy ship’s stout side, Think it God’s message, and in humble pride, With heart of oak replace it; – thine the gains – Give him the rotten timber for his pains.29 Having dedicated the Biographia edition to Wordsworth and expressed her desire to preserve the friendship between the two poets, there seems little other explanation for Sara to miss out this line other than to protect her living father-figure from this bitter charge, potentially aimed at him. For the elderly Wordsworth, one might reasonably assume, the implication would have borne painful reminders. Over the course of their early friendship, then, Wordsworth and Coleridge developed a medical relationship in which a ‘healthy’ Wordsworth attempted to ‘treat’ Coleridge the invalid. Owing to the belief that the imagination was both corporeally connected and all-powerful, both men assumed that poetry could feasibly have a physical effect on the body; and this is shown in their earlier writings. Indeed, Wordsworth experiments with this notion in various ways. His medical use of metre in Tintern Abbey resembles an attempt to control the passions and thaw the physical obstructions that caused suffering, creatively and physically. Meanwhile, in Stanzas, he establishes himself as Coleridge’s loving physician, teaching his patient how to use his imagination to perceive the world through healthier eyes. In The Prelude, Wordsworth takes this methodology further: here, the imagination not only soothes, but

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Imagination

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Figure 1. Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons (1750) recognised by Coleridge as the likeness of his opium visions. Image: Giovan Battista Piranesi, Le Carceri, intr. Mario Praz (Milano: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1975), plate vii.

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builds up healthy channels in the mind that absorb external phenomena in a way that nourishes and revitalises it. This practice, Wordsworth makes clear, creates a sound structure that allows the mind to bear suffering without being subject to decay: a structure not only vital for creative health but, by association, physical health. Coleridge’s opium intake, however, seemingly dissolved his imaginative powers, leaving him with a weak and flimsy mental architecture that crumbled under the weight of ‘all this unintelligible world’ (Tintern Abbey, 41). Wordsworth’s diminishing forbearance for Coleridge’s condition was later pivotal in the two friends’ estrangement. So, the congealment of a medical relationship played a direct role in the congealment of a literary bond that, thenceforth, would never truly recover. Jesus College, Cambridge [email protected]

Notes I am very grateful to Professor Stephen Gill at Lincoln College, Oxford, who provided encouragement and advice at an early stage of this article. My thanks also to Elizabeth Gourd, for her excellent typing skills, friendship, and support. 1. William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill, 21st -Century Oxford Authors Series (Oxford, 2012), 74; hereafter WW. 2. Jennifer Ford, Coleridge on Dreaming (Cambridge, 1998), 185. 3. Neil Vickers, Coleridge and the Doctors: 1795–1806 (Oxford, 2004), 161. 4. For Coleridge’s anti-materialist argument, see Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. J. Bate, Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 7 (2 vols, London and Princeton NJ, 1983), i. 135–6; hereafter CW. 5. Anonymous, Wonders and Mysteries of Animal Magnetism Displayed; or the History, Art, Practice, and Progress of That Useful Science, from Its First Rise in the City of Paris, to the Present Time (London, 1791), 8; hereafter Wonders and Mysteries.

6. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (6 vols, Oxford, 1956–71), i. 374; hereafter CL. 7. See William Wordsworth, ‘Essay on Morals’ (1798) in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (3 vols, Oxford, 1974), i. 124–126; hereafter PWW. 8. Robin Schofield, ’Sara Coleridge, Poet’s Daughter and Poet’, The Coleridge Bulletin, ns 33 (2009), 65–73. 9. Cf. Thomas Owens’ recent discussion of STC’s sufferings of this kind in ‘Coleridge, Nitric Acid and the Spectre of Syphilis’, Romanticism, 20.3 (2014), 282–293. 10. S.T. Coleridge, Poems, ed. John Beer (London, 1993); hereafter P. 11. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn et al (5 double vols, London, 1957–2002), iii. 3547; hereafter CN. 12. Donelle Ruwe, ‘Opium Addictions and Meta-Physicians’, in Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections of Romanticism, ed. Joel Faflak and Julia Wright (Albany, 2004), 239. 13. This version of Coleridge’s ‘Autograph on an Autopergamene’ is from a letter to James Gillman dated 13 October 1832, now at Princeton University Library (Robert H. Taylor Collection; CL, vi. 927). According to Mays, ‘Coleridge copied out another version in a manuscript now at Victoria College Library (S MS F2.15)’. See J. C. C. Mays, ‘Coleridge’s New Poetry’, Warton Lecture on English Poetry, Proceedings of the British Academy, 94 (1997), 127–156, 151–2. 14. For the corporeal sense of ‘habit’ see, for example, OED, ‘“habit”, n. ii.5.a, 1782: J. Priestley Hist. Corruptions Christianity I. ii. 211: “A being of a delicate tender habit”’. 15. See Richard Gravil on Thelwall’s lecture notes in ‘Somerset Sound; or, the Darling Child of Speech’ in The Coleridge Bulletin, ns 26 (2005), 1–21. 16. See John Thelwall, Essay, Towards a Definition of Animal Vitality: Read at the Theatre, Guy’s Hospital, January 26, 1793; in which Several of the Opinions of the Celebrated John Hunter are Examined and Controverted (London, 1793), 40. 17. See Isabella Fenwick’s Manuscript Notes as cited by Stephen Gill in The Major Works (Oxford, 2000), n.706. All further refs. to this poem are to the line number of this edition (text from MS, 265–267).

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Imagination 18. ‘Hexameters’ was written by STC to WW in a letter of 10 December 1798. See CL, i. 451–2. 19. STC to Davy, as quoted by Thomas Owens in his article as cited above, 288. 20. See STC’s description of his night terrors, quoted by Stephen Parrish in Coleridge’s Dejection (New York, 1988), 20. 21. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford, 1989), 223–232. 22. Jonathan Wordsworth, ‘The Image of a Mighty Mind (1805, Book 13)’, in William Wordsworth’s The Prelude: A Casebook, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford, 2006), 252–253. 23. Thomas Beddoes, Hygëia: or Essays Moral and Medical on the Causes Affecting the Personal State of our Middling and Affluent Classes (2 vols, Bristol, 1802), i. 20. 24. See descriptions quoted in Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (London, 1988), for example on 214: ‘Coleridge’s opium reveries, enjoyed when he first began to experiment with the drug, were states of relaxed mental enjoyment in which the imagination floated freely from image to image in streamy meanders’. Hereafter ORI. 25. At the beginning of this famous letter to his brother George, Coleridge describes the effects of

26.

27.

28.

29.

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taking laudanum during a particularly severe bout of illness: ‘[. . . ] how divine that repose is — what a spot of enchantment, a green spot of fountains, & flowers & trees, in the very heart of a waste of Sands — God be praised, the matter has been absorbed; [. . . ]’. CL, i. 394. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest De Selincourt, rev. Alan G. Hill, Mary Moorman and Chester L. Shaver (7 vols, Oxford, 1967–1988), ii. 332; hereafter LWDW. WW’s later remark on STC is recorded by Barron Field in his MS. Barron Field’s Memoirs of Wordsworth between 1836 and 1840, and are repr. in The Later Wordsworth, ed. Edith C. Batho (Cambridge, 1933), 371. See ORI, 96: ‘Whether or not Piranesi had shared the opium experience of Coleridge and De Quincey, he provided the instantly recognizable illustration of their visions’. De Quincey describes Coleridge’s oral account of Piranesi’s image in Confessions of an Opium Eater (1822) an extract repr. in ORI, 93–4. Sara Coleridge, ‘Nervousness’, in the appendix to Bradford, K. Mudge, Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays (London, 1989), 215.