UK’s Prof. Richard Holmes on Coleridge, the Ancient Mariner, & Poetry

The Learning Curve with Richard Holmes

[00:00:00] Albert Cheng: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever time of day it is. Welcome to another episode of the Learning Curve podcast. I’m one of your co hosts this week, Albert Chang from the University of Arkansas. And this week I have the pleasure of being joined by Jocelyn Chadwick. Jocelyn. Jocelyn. It’s great to see you again. Been a bit.

[00:00:40] Jocelyn Chadwick: It’s always a joy to participate with this program and I’m glad to be back.

[00:00:46] Albert Cheng: Well, I’m especially excited for today’s show. I mean, we’re going to have Professor Holmes talk to us about Samuel Taylor Cooleridge, who’s got to be up there in terms of one of my favorite poets. And certainly I think a lot of our listeners, and if you’re an educator, you’re probably familiar with the rhyme in the Ancient Mariner. I know that’s typical reading in some of our literature classes, if I’m not mistaken.

[00:01:06] Jocelyn Chadwick: I’m familiar with Coleridge and familiar with his work and familiar with the professor’s work as well. So this is more than a treat. Okay.

[00:01:15] Albert Cheng: All right. Well, let’s move through the show then so we can get to Professor Holmes. But, so let’s talk news first. Speaking of poetry, Jocelyn, you have an article about reading fiction. Am I mistaken there?

[00:01:28] Jocelyn Chadwick: I do, I do. I have an article, The Importance of Reading Fiction and Other Thoughts at the Start of School by Betty Casey. She pinned it in August 27th, 2024. And the Nuggets, I pulled from it.

[00:01:41] I thought it was a very interesting piece. I agree with her about the importance of reading. Reading and putting literature back in the classroom. I am concerned that she didn’t put nonfiction as well because it’s just as important, such as letters and notes and news articles. And I think we sometimes don’t think of prose as being literary, but it is.

[00:02:04] So I wish it said fiction and nonfiction, but. That notwithstanding, she makes a point about the importance of reading and about creating safe spaces, which I certainly support for children to inquire and experience and challenge. And she makes a point about how students can make connections by reading different texts and exploring different people.

[00:02:27] And so my one caution would be that it’s not an either or it’s not. The Humanities Against Science, or Science Against Humanities. We should have both, because in most fiction, there is going to be some non fiction, there’s going to be some science, there’s going to be some math, there’s going to be some history.

[00:02:44] So, we all function together. But I liked it. I liked the piece. And I see what she’s saying. And she starts out with how the classics, such as, The play’s Medea and Antigone speak to the present, and she made me think about Toni Morrison’s redaction of Shakespeare’s Othello, focusing on Desdemona. So, yeah, I like the piece.

[00:03:06] Albert Cheng: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, look, just as you’re discussing all of these Things to like about the article and, and references to literature, you’re kind of wet my appetite to, to get into some reading too. You know, , in my line of work, there’s a tendency to read too much nonfiction and so I know personally for me, I’ve gotta make sure I round out my diet and read some fiction and, and other kinds of literary genres.

[00:03:29] So thanks for sharing that article. Well, you know, I’ve got an article, it’s more on the data side, it’s actually an article about a recent Gallup poll. The title of the article is Americans View of K 12 Education Improves from a 2023 Low. You know, I’ve actually seen other polls, similar to the one that’s referenced here in the article.

[00:03:49] I think listeners are probably familiar with lots of headlines about how dissatisfaction and, and distrust of schools was at an all time low. Well there’s a little bit of good news in the more recent polling that satisfaction rates have actually improved of late. Now it’s still low. I mean, I, you know, I wish I could say, you know, 80, 90, a hundred percent of parents are satisfied with their child’s education.

[00:04:13] You know, we’re sitting just under half. So I think there’s some work to do, but certainly it seems like there’s an uptick in it. And I hope this uptick continues. So anyway, I want to just point listeners to check out that article. There’s other data there, you know, data about parents, you know, what percentage of parents fear for their child’s safety. I think that’s something that’s kind of salient these days. And then, so that number is pretty high still. So anyway, plenty of data there to think through and reflect upon. That sounds so interesting.

[00:04:41] Jocelyn Chadwick: And I’m glad, like you, I’m glad it’s going up a little bit. Wish it were more, but at least it’s going up.

[00:04:45] Albert Cheng: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, anyway, we all got our work cut out for us, but let’s see where it goes next when someone else administers this question in another poll. That’s the news for this week. Like we were saying earlier, we’ve got a wonderful guest, Professor Richard Holmes, so he’s going to be coming up on the other side of this break, so please stick around.

[00:05:17] Richard Holmes is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the British Academy and was Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia. Professor Holmes is the author of The Age of Wonder, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction, won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, and and the National Books Critics Circle Award, and was one of the New York Times Book Review’s Best Books of the Year in 2009.

[00:05:46] Holmes other books include The Long Pursuit, Footsteps, Sidetracks, Shelley, The Pursuit, which is the winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, Cooleridge, Early Visions, winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award, Cooleridge, Darker Reflections, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, winner of the James Tate Black Prize. He has honorary doctorates from the University of East London, University of Kingston, the Tavistock Institute, and was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1992. Professor Holmes, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show.

[00:06:24] Richard Holmes: It’s great to be here too.

[00:06:26] Albert Cheng: I’m really looking forward to this interview because I love the poetry of Cooleridge. So, let’s start with the first question, which is simply to give an overview of his life. As I read in your bio, you’re a world renowned author on the Romantic era and biographer of Samuel Taylor Cooleridge, who wrote Enduring poems, I think many are familiar with the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, kubla khan, his autobiography, Biographia Literaria. So, please give us an overview of Cooleridge’s life and why his literary works are timelessly important and have been for more than two centuries.

[00:07:01] Richard Holmes: Well, an overview of such an extraordinary life and such an extraordinary man, it’s quite hard. I remember one of the things he wrote in a long, long letter.

[00:07:09] He apologized for saying, I haven’t got enough time to make it shorter. That’s rather, so extraordinary life, born, um, 1772, grew up in the West Country, Artery, St. Mary, and then went to Cambridge, virtually thrown out of there. Then went down to Bristol, where he met Southey, and he gave a series of lectures, including lectures on the slave trade.

[00:07:35] And then he had a plan to go to America, but that didn’t work out. And then he met Southey. William Wordsworth. And that, probably that meeting with William Wordsworth and Dorothy is one of the reasons why we remember him. That great friendship, which of course produced the combined small but revolutionary volume, The Lyrical Ballads, 1798.

[00:07:55] That’s one of the reasons I think we remember him so well. And then after that, I mean, he’s a restless spirit. He goes over to Germany. He studies at Göttingen University. He studies science, incidentally, Blumenbach and so on, so he’s a multicultural figure from that, not just merely literary. Then he comes back, and he goes to live with Dorothy and William Wordsworth in the Lake District, and there a lot of further great poems are written there.

[00:08:23] including Dejection and Ode. I followed him, I suppose, for ten years, and all the places he went. His house in the Lake District, in Keswick, you can climb up onto the roof, so you go onto the flats, and you look at the amazing, anybody who’s visited Lake District will know, remember the extraordinary, beautiful landscape, with the great hills and the stretching mirrors and so on, and he wrote a letter to his scientific friend, Humphry Davy, and he signed it.

[00:08:52] Yours, Gentleman Poet and Philosopher in a Mist. And then he added, he said, if only, Deb, you could see the landscape, I would put it in a single pill of opium and send it to you in the post. It’s a wonderful idea, and I think his, his Coleridge’s magic poems are rather like, sort of, they’re pills of poetry containing extraordinary visions of nature and powerful, almost as powerful as an opium drug.

[00:09:21] Anyway, that’s a little image I have of him. Then, he’s restless, his marriage is unhappy, he goes on a wartime convoy to Malta. This is the Napoleonic Wars, not so well known. And he’s two years out there, he’s first secretary to the Governor, Sir Alexander Ball, and I went down there and I found that he’d written, it was in his hand, many of the last letters to Horatio Nelson, just before the Battle of Trafalgar, written in Corriger’s hand.

[00:09:53] Then he comes back. And he tries to stay again with Wordsworth, he has a terrible quarrel, and then he comes to London, he starts giving his lectures, and they are remarkable, and still really worth reading, particularly, say, a lecture on Hamlet. Really brilliant. And then he finally goes back to Bristol. And where he writes, he struggles with opium, and he writes the book you mentioned, the Biographia Literaria, which is partly autobiography, and partly about his own and Wordsworth’s poetry.

[00:10:25] And then he comes back to London, you see it’s a moving likeness. He meets Byron, who encourages Victor Richard published Kublai Khan, and then he goes up to Highgate, where there’s still a house, with his blue, the blue plaque, recording that he stayed there for the last 20 years of his life, really, looked after partly by a great friend, Gilman, a doctor, and then writing the book called Meditations, Meditations.

[00:10:51] Which became the favorite prose work of the, uh, your Boston Transcendentalists, uh, including Emerson, who goes to see him up there. And the wonderful picture in a book that Emerson later wrote called Traits, English Traits, of the old Coleridge there, still unstoppably talking, and with eyes very, very blue and bright. Like the mariner.

[00:11:17] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Well, let’s get into a bit more detail. I want to ask you the second question about his education. In Biographica Literaria, he writes, quote, I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time a very severe master. At the same time that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us read Shakespeare at Milton. So, talk about Coolridge’s education and how classical learning influenced his worldview and writings as well as the other romantics.

[00:11:50] Richard Holmes: Yes, and they did. They, of course, Shakespeare was tremendously important to them, and subsequently Courage wrote a series of wonderful lectures on Shakespeare. Also Milton. But what they wanted to, they were inspired by these Latin characters. Classics, to write a different kind of poetry from the rather formal stuff that had been written in the early 18th century by Pope and Dryden. And they wanted to change that and write something much more direct. And I think that comes out partly at his education at Christ Hospital and then later at Cambridge.

[00:12:27] And it’s worth noting that he He won prizes for two odes. The first one was written in Greek, which was an ode against the slave trade on the miseries of the West Indian slavery population, and that won a prize. And then the following year, he wrote a Latin ode on astronomy. Which gives us the kind of sweep drawing on Lucretius and so on, which he didn’t win, but it shows that his classical education was very much alive. But in a way, they would, when he met Wordsworth, they were trying to break away from that, and it’s much more direct speech.

[00:13:05] Albert Cheng: Let’s get into some of his other contributions. I mean, you’ve mentioned his lecture against, the many lectures, I guess, against the slave trade. Particularly, I guess, there’s one in 1795 that he gave in Bristol, England.

[00:13:18] Richard Holmes: That’s right. In June, 1795 at the Assembly Coffee House, Uhhuh on the key, on the key side in Bristol, and he was shouted at . He kept going, he kept going. And then just while we’re on that subject, yeah, yeah. Very important. He made great friend. I mean the, um, famous English Antis, slaver was William Wilberforce.

[00:13:39] Mm-Hmm. . Less known is a man called Thomas Clarkson, who’s a Quaker, who was passionately involved with the abolition of the slave trade, and wrote a history of it, which was published in 1808, just at the time the trade was abolished. And it was a great noble work, and Coleridge, Deliberately asked to review it, and he did a really good review, and he calls that slave trade, in one phrase, one long continuous crime.

[00:14:07] So that was something he was very interested in, but also he was lecturing about the French Revolution and the Jacobins, and he was very divided. about them. And indeed, English society at that point was very divided itself. We are aware of divided societies at the moment, and this is between pro French revolutionary radicals and much more traditional. And to begin with, both Wozzeck and Coleridge were very much on the radical side.

[00:14:36] Albert Cheng: Well, you know, you’re alluding to quite the turbulent political landscape of his time. You know, I want to get into the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner here. Is there a connection to the political times and that historical context with that poem, that epic?

[00:14:50] Richard Holmes: Yes, I’m very happy to get into it, and in a sense, we’ll never get out of it. Extraordinary poem, really extraordinary. While I remember, it might be useful for listeners, there is a brilliant program, which you can get on Google, called The Ancient Mariner’s The Big Read. And I do recommend that, because to hear the poem, that’s the first point I want to make, you need this poem read aloud, or read it aloud to yourself, to get the imagery and the rhythm.

[00:15:19] And this program has 40 different writers and actors reading, including wildly different Jeremy Irons, for example. William Dafoe, or the pop singer Marianne Faithfull, or the novelist Hilary Mantel, a wonderful selection who read section by section. So I recommend that, and particularly because this is a poem to be listened to, or to be read out loud.

[00:15:46] The immediate connections, yes, it’s written When he’d been in Bristol, which was actually the center of the English slave trade, which was one of the reasons why they were battling to abolish it, Bristol was one of their centers, and there is a kind of idea that in the story, which you remember is that 200 sailors go out on the ship and they go south, they go through the icy regions, and then they’re becalmed, and they, all of them, Dive, Drought, Except for One, who is the ancient mariner.

[00:16:17] And the poem recounts all the sort of visions and hallucinations he has, one of which is a spectre ship, which draws alongside. And there is an idea that this spectre ship represents the slave trade ships. It’s one of the interpretations of it. But there are many other. And I think I’ve written before that it’s quite interesting.

[00:16:41] Useful to just regard this poem as a kind of disaster movie. It’s so vivid like that, and it, you can be compared with other disasters where something appears out of the sea, like Moby Dick, or even the film Jaws. It’s not bad to hold those, you know, in your head when you read this poem. It’s partly a survivor’s narrative.

[00:17:05] I have a view that the narrator sort of suffers from what we’d now call post traumatic stress disorder, and he needs to repeat his story again and again, and that’s one way of understanding it. It’s also perhaps some kind of account of someone with A kind of addiction who suffers from these terrible hallucinations.

[00:17:26] And also, I think most important for us now, it’s what I’ve called a kind of green parable. An ecological poem, which says what the terrible things that happen if we damage nature by shooting the albatross. And I think that symbolic stress and caution runs right through the poem. So that’s just a first take on it, and maybe just add, besides the big read people could listen to, it’s worth looking up the wonderful illustrations, because it’s a poem that’s been illustrated time after time.

[00:18:00] Right. And the Christophe Doré, which you can find online, they are wonderful black and white illustrations and they give you a vision of what this poem is, so rather hurry, but just to explain, there’s so many possible ways of looking at it, but it is a haunting piece of work.

[00:18:17] Albert Cheng: Well, it lives up to the way Cooleridge defined poetry. The best words in the best order, he’s known to say. So let’s keep going with the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Let’s set the stage for the listeners who are less familiar. Just, could you just give a brief summary of the entire story so that listeners are up to speed in that sense?

[00:18:35] Richard Holmes: Yes, okay, it’s a long, um, seven parts and it starts with an ancient mariner outside a wedding feast and he stops one of the wedding guests and tells him, I have this tale that I have to tell, that I have to tell you.

[00:18:52] And he recounts how they set forth out of probably one of those little West Country places. Ports of Watched, and they sail south over the equator and down into the icy regions. And wonderful descriptions of that, of the icebergs. And a lot of this is inspired by his own dreams, but also by a travel book called Shellvox Voyages, which is worth looking up.

[00:19:19] And he draws some of the imagery from that. And then, as I said, on the return, they’re becalmed. And the whole crew, except for the mariner Dive Trout. And then the ship is controlled by a mysterious polar spirit who draws it right back to its home port. And while that’s happening, the mariner has these series of hallucinations, including the spectre ship.

[00:19:45] And I should Point out, of course, that the key center of the poem is the fact that when they’re sailing south, the mariner shoots the albatross. And this is the action, which is never explained why he does it, but releases the whole forces of nature against the ship. And the albatross is hung around the mariner’s neck.

[00:20:08] And there’s a wonderful passage where all the, The rest of the crew are dead, and he’s gazing at the sea, and he sees the very beautiful sea creatures in the moonlight, and he’s, it, from one moment, it takes him out of himself, and he blesses the creatures, and the albatross falls from around his neck, so that’s the kind of center, very mysterious center of the poem.

[00:20:32] And then the ship is sent back to its home port, and the mariner seems to be a madman by then, and the hermit rows out to the boat and takes him inland, and he begins telling his story. So that, very crudely, is the outline of the poem, and it’s Written in these wonderful rhyming stanzas, which have a sort of hypnotic effect, and he uses very vivid images, particularly of the sun and the moon, which control both the mariner. And a ship. So that’s just a quick take on it.

[00:21:06] Albert Cheng: Well, we’re going to give you a chance to unpack it much more here. So let me ask one question and then I’ll turn it over to Jocelyn to ask you some more questions about the poem. So there’s a passage in there. It goes like this. The ice was here, the ice was there, the ice was all around. It cracked and growled and roared and howled like noises in a sound. And you’ve been talking about the allusions to nature. And so talk about the image in particular here of the ice and the ocean, and more generally how Cooleridge and the Romantics really use the power and ferocity of nature to show people kind of this idealized, mysterious, supernatural understanding of the worlds.

[00:21:46] Richard Holmes: That’s right. I mean, even that iceberg, the noises it makes, it cracks and growls and roars and howls. Like noises in a swan, I said that even the iceberg seems to have a kind of identity and a force, and in this case, a hostility against the sailors. And I think this reflects generally on Coleridge and Werther’s philosophy of nature, that there were lessons to be taught.

[00:22:11] taught by nature and it needed to be observed very, very carefully. So, I mean, in this poem, it’s the iceberg, but there are many other moments describing the sea and the creatures in it. When you get these very exact. Lyrical descriptions of nature, and I think paying attention to nature became a sort of complete absolute discipline.

[00:22:34] It might be worth, at this point, you quoted that definition by Corey’s of the great poet, best words in best order, and so on, but I think it’s something in his wonderful letters, and incidentally, not only his poetry, but his letters are quite extraordinary, and they’re collected and published. And he often writes about the nature of poetry, and the nature of people. Poet. I just, this is from a letter a little bit after he’d written The Mariner. He describes what he thinks a great poet should be. A great poet. Must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent desert. The eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an enemy upon the leaves that strew the forest.

[00:23:19] And the touch of a blind man feeling the face of a darling child. Extraordinary image. And there are many poems, of course, about his own babies, notably Hartley. Anyway, yes, so the importance of nature, what Coleridge called the one life, we’re all part of the one life, and it’s something I think that speaks to us now, very, very much, and the idea that we’ve been damaging nature, and that we must change our ways, and the whole poem is about that, really.

[00:23:51] Jocelyn Chadwick: That’s just brilliant. Professor Holmes, first, let me just thank you for your two volume biography. I’ve relied on it for a long, long time, and the fact that you focus on his writing style helps teachers to teach writing. I mean, your idea of Explaining how he rewrites, improves, and represents his work throughout his lifetime. I think that would be so helpful for teachers to really understand as we all try to teach writing. So, I just wanted to give you a big thank you for that.

[00:24:23] Richard Holmes: Great. And he is wonderful to learn from, isn’t he, for young minds? Yes.

[00:24:28] Jocelyn Chadwick: Yes. I have highlighted that part in your book, and I just wanted to say thank you, to have an opportunity to tell you that I’ve used it over and over again in my own teaching. So, the next question starts with another quote, which, at length, did cross my mind. An albatross through the fog it came, as if it had been a Christian soul. We held it in God’s name. Unquote. From the Mariner. In Coleridge’s time, sailors often considered albatrosses to be bad omens or signs of death, but here it’s good luck. Could you tell us about Coleridge’s use of symbolism, the literary origins he drew upon, as well as how we should understand his albatross.

[00:25:13] Richard Holmes: We’re always going to be asked about that albatross, but you’re right. It was originally thought as a, with its wings spread out, a kind of Christian, almost a crucifixion symbol.

[00:25:23] And he turns it, and the sailors think it may be shooting it. It’s therefore a fatal act that’s going to produce various kinds of punishment, which do in fact happen. But of course that’s, it’s difficult to take it as a symbolic event, and just like the sun and the moon have their symbolism, and indeed that there’s a polar spirit beneath the boat.

[00:25:48] These are all worked gradually through the poem, and I think a kind of Christian parable reading of it is possible, but I’m not sure that it really covers All the elements of the poem. I think particularly I’ve mentioned again what I call the green parable, so that there the albatross represents the whole of nature in some way, wildlife.

[00:26:11] It kind of the equivalent now would be how we get very impassioned about what’s happening to the whales and are we killing them. And so they become symbolic in the same way, they symbolize something much larger. And Coleridge understood how he could use this in the poetry. Very simple. Stressed that those short rhyming standards are very simple and very vivid, and yet they carry this symbolic weight, so you’re left thinking, and I think he wants you to do this, to think, what could that mean? So there’s a question. After the meaning and the symbolism, which I think Corey’s deliberately exploits in the poem.

[00:26:51] Jocelyn Chadwick: I love the way you’ve been expanding the whole meaning and purpose of this wonderful poem that has been with us for so long, The Green Parable. I really, really like that. I’m going to have to think about that one.

[00:27:03] The next question with the quote, Quote, Specter Bark, unquote, or ghost ship appears after the mariner shoots the albatross and the wind fails. The crew initially believes that the ship will rescue them, but as you mentioned earlier, as it draws nearer, they see it carries death. You’ve written and spoken about this ghost ship.

[00:27:22] Would you tell us even more about it? You’ve referenced it here, but just tell us a bit more about it, what you think it symbolizes and how Coleridge uses it to punish the mariner for killing the albatross.

[00:27:32] Richard Holmes: And it’s a wonderful image. It comes over the horizon with the sun shining through it, the setting shining, and he realizes that in a sense it’s a skeleton ship, and that image of it, it’s right from the beginning, it’s a kind of surreal ship, and it’s crewed by two people, one of them is playing dice, and he’s playing dice for the souls of the mariner and the crew, and so there’s suddenly the idea that the fate of the ship.

[00:28:01] It’s handled in a completely chance way, that it’s outside a kind of Christian system. He’s in a much more pagan world when this ship arrives. And I think for people doing the illustrations, this spectre ship, precisely because it’s very difficult, Exactly, to imagine it has become a great source for illustration.

[00:28:24] There are wonderful series of different ones. Dory is, of course, very good on it. So I think the key idea is that it introduces a rather terrifying pagan kind of symbolism and the dicing means that there’s no exact moral universe represented by that ship.

[00:28:43] Jocelyn Chadwick: Wow. Okay. I am just, this is great. My next question, following up on all of this, is in a 2015 lecture in Bristol, England, you noted that Coleridge’s 1804 Journal helps explain the possible motive behind the sailors shooting another Elegant seabird.

[00:29:02] The quote is, Poor hawk, O strange lust of murder in man, unquote. It’s not cruelty, I’m quoting, It is not cruelty, It is mere non feeling from non thinking, unquote. Would you talk about Coleridge’s meaning of hospitality and how he used his poetry to highlight human nature’s indifference and destructiveness towards another and the natural world.

[00:29:26] Richard Holmes: Yes, I’m so glad you picked that out. That was written for the notebooks and let me stress that quite apart from the poetry in the letters, things to find are Coleridge’s notebooks which are all about the work behind the poems and this is a note that he made at sea while sailing to Malta. And indeed, the sailors there were, in fact, shooting at the birds.

[00:29:49] And the key word is not necessarily cruelty, but it’s unthinkingness. And I think that hits us very hard, that idea, are we being thoughtless? Are we being unthinking about our attitude to nature? And that comes through very strongly. Let me just expand a little bit on the way the imagery, Let me quote this wonderful, it’s not really, it’s just a single stanza, to which Coleridge adds, not in the notebooks, but actually on the poem, a prose gloss, and this is the stanza, The moving moon went up the sky, and nowhere did abide, softly she was going up.

[00:30:32] And a star or two beside. And then he adds this wonderful prose gloss, In his loneliness and fixedness, The mariner yearneth towards the journeying moon, And the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward, And everywhere the blue sky belongs to them. And is their appointed rest, and their native country, and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected.

[00:31:06] And yet there is a silent joy at their arrival. A wonderful, just as mysterious prose passage tacked onto the bottom of that verse in the poem. And so again, we’re coming back to, we need to think about this more closely, and that is what the mariner is doing as he looks up at the moon.

[00:31:28] Jocelyn Chadwick: Oh, absolutely. And I want to thank you, too, for insisting that, that we all look at the letters and the notebooks. I tell that to teachers and students all the time. The letters and the notes are always such a good resource to help students understand better where the author’s coming from, and what his perspectives are, or where he gathers his resources, his or her resources.

[00:31:49] Richard Holmes: That’s right, and the notebooks are extraordinary. They’re available in various editions, but they offer tremendous range. Let me just mention, it’s wonderful notebooks about his young baby, Hartley. There’s a whole entry called, Why the Baby First Smiles. You know, that’s, that’s courage. It’s completely different. And then there’s a wonderful note on the Evening Star, and how one of his first poems written coming home from school and looking up at the Evening Star.

[00:32:15] Wonderful description of that. There’s more of the moon in Malta, not only the birds he, he sees shooting, but he goes on, in fact, let me, if I have a moment, so we’re talking about the moon in the Mariner, but the moon runs right through his poetry. One of the latest poems is called Limbo, which is about someone, a blind, wait for this, a blind man looking up at the moon.

[00:32:39] That’s the subject of the poem, so immediately you’re, you’re into a sort of strange, mysterious area, and this is an entry that is in the notebooks, that he wrote, in fact, he was staying at a house, which I found overlooking the harbor, Valletta, looking down at the ships, and he was often desperately lonely there, although he had that post as the first secretary, and one of the things he wrote was this, about the moon.

[00:33:05] It’s not a poem, it’s a prose entry in the notebooks. In looking at the objects of nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon, dim gleaming through the dewy windowpane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking for, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists than observing anything new.

[00:33:33] And if that new phenomena were a dim awakening of a forgotten or hidden truth, of my inner nature. It’s just a single entry where he looks at the moon, which represents a kind of symbolism for something inside him, not merely outside, the moon inside him. There’s just an example of the sort of things that are in the notebook, but as I say, there’s even a recipe. For getting good wax for walking boots when he’s working over the Lake District Hills. So, tremendous range of material.

[00:34:10] Jocelyn Chadwick: Yes, yes. This is just great. My next question starts with a quote, Alone, alone, all, all, alone, alone on a wide, wide sea, and never a saint to pity on my soul in agony. From the Mariner. As is well known, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an opium addict who used laudanum for his pain. Would you talk about this feature of his biography and the influence opium had on his life, overall health? and his literary works?

[00:34:43] Richard Holmes: Yes, good, good question. It begins, really, when he’s first at Stoie. When he’s struggling, rather, he begins to take opium as a painkiller. It was almost like aspirin is now. But gradually, particularly when marriage becomes unhappy, and when he’s up in the Lake District, he does become an opium addict.

[00:35:02] And out, when he’s out in Malta, this takes quite a control of him. He struggles throughout his life, and I think that’s one of, strangely, the heroic And the other aspects of his biography is that he never gives up struggling, right to the days when he gets to Highgate in his 60s, when he has a doctor who helps him at least control the amount of opium he takes.

[00:35:28] Yes, indeed, it gives him a kind of loneliness throughout, there’s a very moving letters where he says that this loneliness besieges him, and also that he can’t tell the truth about it. Extraordinary letters written from Bristol. And it’s worth remembering that the great Kublai Khan poem, which is rightly interpreted as a kind of opium dream poem, but it’s also about the nature of grief.

[00:35:55] What creativity is about, and I think for writers this is always absolutely fascinating the way he handles that. But attached to it, it was published, as I mentioned before, because Lord Byron recommended it be published. He published it together with another poem called The Pains of Sleep. And that is much less well known, but is really worth finding and reading alongside, because it looks at the dreams in a completely different way as nightmares.

[00:36:24] Extraordinarily powerful poem. And he links them. As they’re connected, he says they’re two sides of the same phenomena, and that is his opium addiction. So, although it is, in one way, tied up to his creative, visionary powers, in another way, it’s a terrible prison. And the nightmares run right through his life when you’re writing the biography so often.

[00:36:47] He says another terrible night, and he describes in the notebooks what these nightmares are. I remember this, when he’s at Keswick, and then staying with the Wordsworths at Grasmere, he has one of these terrible nightmares, and he shouts out, and nobody comes to wake him up. And he puts it in a notebook.

[00:37:08] Wordsworth might have woken me up out of my nightmare, but he didn’t. Again, a little tiny touching detail. So that certainly goes right through his biography. But I would stress the point that throughout his life, he fights against it. And in fact, the Biographia Literaria, which is written in Bristol, it’s really written while he’s really on a kind of detox attempt to wean himself from the drug, and he somehow manages to write this formidable book. He drives his publishers mad because he keeps adding more and more to it. But in a way, it’s a record of a recovering addict, which is worth remembering.

[00:37:50] Jocelyn Chadwick: That’s brilliant. I’m going to look for the pain of sleep. The final question is, finally, British Romantic Poetry is a wellspring of our mutual English language, profoundly influencing the flowering of early 19th century American Renaissance, including the New England writers, Emerson, Longfellow, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Melville, and I would add as well as 20th century James Baldwin. So could you please close by sharing with us Coleridge’s wide enduring literary legacy that we hope schools and teachers and students alike will also learn to cherish. And that’s one of the reasons I put James Baldwin in there because Baldwin was so influenced by Coleridge and very few people know that.

[00:38:32] Richard Holmes: Yes, well done. That’s absolutely right. And it is, yes, it’s interesting because he had such publishing difficulties. In fact, his publisher, Borgorodits Publishers, went bankrupt at one point when he was at Highgate. And he always felt the American influence was good. He wanted, when he was in Italy and Malta, he had a plan that he was going to sail to America.

[00:38:56] And, of course, the original pan socratic scheme. In the 1790s, with Robert Sully, was to go to America and set up an ideal commune. Very interesting writing about that, and also why the idea goes wrong. But there’s a sense that the American audience, he always has an American audience. And I think it’s symbolized by when Ralph Waldo Emerson comes to Highgate to visit him.

[00:39:23] And it’s an interesting meeting because Emerson describes Corridge talking absolutely non stop, but in a kind of visionary way. And he hardly has time to ask a single question. And he sees Corridge almost like his own mariner. who’s kind of survived a terrible disaster, but is still telling his story.

[00:39:46] And I think that image of courage is brought back to America, particularly to Boston, I think, at that time, and his readership begins to expand there. I’m just trying to remember whether, when the notebooks are reached out there, but his prose work of Meditation, which is published in 1825, is also published in America, and that, I think, has a powerful influence, but it goes right on, I think. You mentioned James Baldwin, yes, who actually, yes, writes about Coleridge a lot, I think.

[00:40:18] Jocelyn Chadwick: Yes.

[00:40:19] Richard Holmes: And I think the kind of theme of the outcast is there, I think, which he feels a fellow spirit, I think, in Coleridge and his writing.

[00:40:28] Jocelyn Chadwick: I agree with that. Yes, you’re spot on, yes.

[00:40:31] Richard Holmes: Yes, so that influence is extraordinary, and it goes, and it might be worth mentioning that over here in England, his house at Stowe is now a museum, you can visit it, and there’s a wonderful statue of the mariner with his albatross around his neck on the quayside at Watchit, which you can visit, and just recently, there’s been a brilliant exhibition new statue of him, which is being placed in the churchyard at Ottery St. Mary, where he was born, and by Nicholas Thimbleby. Again, find it online. It’s astonishingly good. It’s actually there. It’s sort of life size in the churchyard. His influence lives on in that kind of way, and it is remarkable. I think if you think of, I mean, Kublai Khan is, you only have to say that title. And it’s like a Coleridge signature, kind of almost universally recognized wherever reading is done, I think.

[00:41:31] Jocelyn Chadwick: Brilliant. Just brilliant. Thank you so much.

[00:41:35] Richard Holmes: Well, I’m sure that so much we didn’t cover. Somebody mentioned a hospitality question, and I was going to read you wonderful passages, just as a little footnote.

[00:41:45] Jocelyn Chadwick: Oh, yes.

[00:41:46] Richard Holmes: Yes. Remember, when I visited the cottage, it struck me very much. So, this is where, we’ve been jumping around, but this is now, he’s a young man in his twenties, and he’s at that first cottage, which is in Netherstowy. And with his young wife and his baby Hartley. So here he is in the cottage. There were problems.

[00:42:08] First there was damp. And then there were the mice. Coleridge, with his fraternal attitude to animals, found himself in a ludicrous quandary, which curiously bears on the symbolism he would later apply to the shooting of the albatross. To kill the mice would be to betray them. A domestic joke here contains the seed of a metaphysical drama.

[00:42:35] And here’s what he puts in his letter. The mice play the very devil with us. It irks me to set a trap. By all the whiskers of all the kittens that have mewed plaintively or amorously since the days of Dick Whittington, it is not fair. This is what he informed his publisher, Gotthold. ‘Tis telling a lie.

[00:42:56] ‘Tis as if you said, ‘Here is a bit of toasted cheese. ‘Come, little mice, I invite you. ‘When, O foul breach of the rights of hospitality, ‘I mean to assassinate my two credulous guests, ‘a roar of laughter, much working of the dark eyebrows, ‘and a sudden rolling up of the large eyes evidently accompanied, Yet at the same time, in some quieter place, an idea clicked home among his studies of ethics and psychology.

[00:43:27] He would write in his preface to the great and mysterious Sea Ballad that the story showed, quote, how the ancient mariner, cruelly and in contempt of the laws of hospitality, killed the sea bird. That’s just a sort of moment. It fascinates me as a biographer because something as sort of trivial and as having mice is then carried through by a great poet to a major symbolism and a theme in the ancient mariner, the idea of hospitality, a key idea that we are all guests on the planet Earth and we owe respect albatross. So just a tiny moment there from the biography.

[00:44:12] Jocelyn Chadwick: Brilliant. Brilliant. Thank you so much.

[00:44:15] Albert Cheng: Yes, Professor Holmes, it’s been such a pleasure to hear you expound really on Cooleridge and the environment of the ancient mariners. So thank you again for your time.

[00:44:22] Richard Holmes: Well, thank you for asking lovely questions. And of course, we could have gone on and on, but they couldn’t stop Cooleridge talking.

[00:44:30] Albert Cheng: That’s right.

[00:44:34] Jocelyn Chadwick: This has been a treat. Thank you so much.

[00:44:52] Albert Cheng: Well, that was a real treat to have Professor Holmes on. I really enjoyed hearing him and his knowledge and expertise on Cooleridge and the rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.

[00:45:01] Jocelyn Chadwick: I think that teachers and students will benefit greatly, and I am so glad that he was able to come and just to express himself. It was just brilliant.

[00:45:09] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Well, then that’s going to take us to the end of our show. But before we close out, of course, we have the Tweet of the Week, and this week’s Tweet of the Week comes from Education Next. It’s a reference to an article by Paul Peterson. The tweet reads, quote, Scientists have known for decades that nutrition is Feeds the brain just as it does the rest of the body, but only now has a major news outlet provided details about the connection between nutrition and IQ levels.

[00:45:36] I was fascinated about the read. I, you know, there’s all this, I mean, we’ve been debating whether IQ is nature or nurture for a long time, but I enjoyed reading this article because it discusses some of the evidence specifically as nutrition has improved, how IQ levels have also improved, evidence that there’s a lot of nurture.

[00:45:54] To IQ. And so it’s not just destiny, which I think is reassuring for all of us involved in education. I don’t know what you think about that, Jocelyn. I totally agree with you, Albert. I totally agree. Well, Jocelyn, thanks for being a co host on this week’s episode. It’s always a pleasure to run the show with you.

[00:46:12] Jocelyn Chadwick: I was about to say the very same thing to you, Albert. Always a pleasure.

[00:46:16] Albert Cheng: Yeah. And speaking of our show, I don’t want to leave without plugging next week’s guest. We’re going to have a treat. Nisha Merriweather, wonderful person who’s a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children. We’ll see you then.

[00:46:28] Bye bye. and founder of Black Minds Matter. So come back next week to hear our interview with her. You don’t want to miss that one. Other than that, I hope everyone has a great day and perhaps you’ll spend some of this day reading some Cooleridge or some other poetry.

[00:46:41] Jocelyn Chadwick: Sounds like a plan. Thanks, Albert.