Dance 'the Albatross!'

On a lighter note, it seems that no one really understood The Ancient Mariner when it came out.

Most of the people who bought the first edition were sailors, thinking it was a naval song book.

The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she

Coleridge recounted in Table Talk 1830-1832:


"Mrs Barbauld told me that the only faults she found with the Ancient Mariner were — that it was improbable and had no moral. As for the probability — to be sure that might admit some question — but I told her that in my judgment the poem had moral, and that too openly obtruded on the reader, It ought to have no more moral than the story of the merchant sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well and throwing the shells aside, and the Genii starting up and saying he must kill the merchant, because a date shell had put out the eye of the Genii's son."

This gains a very significant moral when one realizes that though are many nasty side-effects to European imperialism, one of the most unpleasant for Tahiti certainly was venereal disease. When Captain Cook arrived in Tahiti, he was aware that island sexual mores were very different from British ones and wrote about the previous British expedition to the South Seas in his journals. When the Dolphin left Polynesian waters, so many nails had been taken out of the timbers and traded for sexual favors, the ship almost split apart during a storm. This time the Tahitians got the much worse end of the deal with "the English disease."

Cook did not like to admit that his precautions to make sure the ship's crew were free from VDs were at fault and at first tried blaming the French of the Spanish. 'However,' he wrote in his journals, 'this is little satisfaction to them who must suffer by it in a very great degree and may in time spread itself over all the Islands of the South Seas, to the eternal reproach of those who first brought it among them'.

Coleridge turned the consequences back on the British in The Ancient Mariner. A two hundred man crew all dies (save for the Mariner, who shot the albatross that was later hung around his neck) after a run-in with Death and a lady named 'Life-in-Death.' What gift the lady gave the crew is therefore given is perhaps easy to guess.

In the words of Pangloss, it is a thing unavoidable.

Bad Romanc...ticism

The Amateur Historian has often thought that Lady Gaga's music videos were best understood under the influence of something and would like to suggest that opium is as good as any- which this delightful music video on Samuel Taylor Coleridge shows perfectly:

Charles Ain't a Lamb After All

Coleridge was very fond of sentimental friendships, and, in fact, wrote several poems to those who were on the recieving end of his effusions of Romantic feeling. This, however, backfired when it came to Charles Lamb. In This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Coleridge describes all the wonderful things his friends (William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb) were out seeing on their walk while Coleridge had to sit alone in the garden with a burnt foot.

They, being alive to the wonders of nature, appreciated the countryside, but Coleridge was sure that the one who appreciated it the most was, his "gentle-hearted Charles!"

Charles may have appreciated nature, but he did not appreciate the epithet. He later wrote to Coleridge, "For God's sake (I never was more serious), don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses."

A Not-So-Romantic Friendship

The prominant literary critic Charles Lamb had an increasingly bad relationship with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge was fond of sentimental friendships, all grand, sweeping emotions, declarations of love and tearful embraces. Charles Lamb grew disenchanted and ultimately rather annoyed with them. Coleridge was also fond of the Romantic, metaphysical monologues about nothing in particular.

During one particularly rambling monologue about the life, the universe and everything, Coleridge, who had once been a Unitarian minister planning on founding a utopian commune on the banks of the Susquehanna interrupted himself to ask, "Charles, have you ever heard me preach?"

Replied the weary Lamb: "I have never heard you do anything else."

How to Be a Romantic Poet, Part Five

Tip #5: Cultivate a Deep Love of Nature.

Part of being a Romantic Poet is being constantly moved to the point of epic poetry studied by generations of surly English students to come at the sight of a daffodil. Nature can be the language through which God speaks to you, God itself, the reflection of your own perfections, or merely a great place to escape from your numerous critics and creditors.

Compare your loves to flowers, or at least have the decency to compare them to rocks and mountains. Constantly reflect on the glories of nature, and travel everywhere you can to experience them. Italy is very popular, as it is also a great place to die of a wasting disease. Invoke Nature as your muse and your teacher and be sure to reject classical authors as the promoters of worthless knowledge while still making allusions to the most obscure of Greek tragedies whenever you can. This plays into another aspect of being a Romantic Poet. If you cannot love yourself beyond reason, call yourself the Poet of the Age and see yourself as inherently better than all your contemporaries, it is a good idea to have (or to fake) low self-esteem and constantly despise your verses, your education and your inadequacies. This will endear you to all the ladies of your acquantaince, as long as you really do have the poetic skills and popularity to prove this poor opinion of yourself false. Otherwise you will feel really terrible about yourself, move in with your publisher and accidentally die of heart failure from your opium addiction.

How to Be a Romantic Poet, Part Four

Tip #4: Have many youthful exploits! These exploits must, however, fall into the categories of dissipation, athletics or expulsion.

For dissipation, try to seduce as many people as you possibly can, from Cambridge choirboys to your Calvanist Bible teacher. Pass your time drinking and flirting with anyone who so much as catches your eye. If you are lucky, they will scorn you later on and thus allow you to develop professionally useful angst and dejection. Attend a good number of rowdy parties so as to later regret your mis-spent youth, to discover your superiority to the rest of the world, or merely to look dashing and melancholy and so cement your place in society.

For athletics, nothing is better than climbing mountains, swimming against the current, or walking a notable distance. Once you have spent a good deal of time in nature, you can reflect on its glories, or your glory in conquering it and wow the ladies by telling them you climbed the Alps (or just a hill, provided you make the hill full of faries or the like). If you are lucky, your midnight wanderings could lead to (you guessed it!) a wasting disease. If not, you could develop arthritis in all your joints and end up addicted to laudenum, which is not a bad booby prize.

For expulsion, try writing something extremely controversial and send it to all your class deans in an attempt to start up a campus-wide conversation about a difficult subject. Not only can you establish yourself as a writer, you can also get to show the unjustness of society and get out of taking your final exams.

How to Be a Romantic Poet, Part Three

If Tip #2 did not work for you, try following tip #3: Cultivate a good working relationship with Death.

It is somewhat difficult to do this, since Death is not said to be a terribly communicative fellow, but this will help you in the long run: the Grim Reaper can’t say much, but you can! Wax poetic about your own demise as much as possible. Again, a wasting disease is an invaluable tool, since it gives you plenty of time to compose. If you can, drink out of the skull of a medieval monk, just to prove you're that hard core. Or, if you like kill off a couple of characters in your poems in horrible and agonizing ways. If you are loath to do so, kill off an albatross instead and see what happens (tip 3a: if you do shoot an albatross and your enraged shipmates tie it around your neck, don't be alarmed if your shipmates' relationship with death is much different than your own, to whit, They Become Zombies. This is perfectly normal thing to happen to a Romantic visionary.)

The sight of a graveyard at midnight, or any kind of ruin should send you into a tizzy of poetic feeling. If it doesn’t, fake it and talk about how very inspiring it is to you to be so constantly reminded of your own impermanence and the immortality of your poetry before lapsing into a dreamy melancholy. Remember, suicide must always be an option, even if you are not very serious about following through.

“I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out,” reflected Byron, “but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law.”

How to Be a Romantic Poet, Part One

Gentle Reader, who among us has not looked at a ruin and been sent into spastic fits of glee that could only be contained in blank verse, been tempted to imitate the ancients, attack the government in rhyming couplets about the wind, reflect constantly on one's impermanence, engage in highly complicated love affairs that would puzzle any future scholar of your life, immortalize your friends as Gentle-Hearted So-and-So, spite the lovers who spurned you by dying of a wasting disease while composing your own epitaph, or found a utopian commune on the banks of the Susquehanna?

If your answer to all these questions is no, then, alas! You are not a Romantic Poet.

What a sad state of affairs, Gentle Reader. The Amateur Historian quite feels your pain and thus introduces yet another series to this blog: "How To Be A Romantic Poet." (There is a fantastic article that does a much better and much more concise job of listing this than the Amateur Historian and, in fact, inspired this series. It was published in a museum magazine once and it was also once passed out in the Amateur Historian's English class and she can no longer recall who wrote it or where it was published. However, credit for this idea goes to whoever wrote it first. The Amateur Historian apologizes for her crappy memory.

Tip 1: Look the part! You must have curls in wild disarray, to prove that your mind is on higher things and that you yourself have been touched by the zeitgeist, the spirit of the era. It cannot be too messy, however, or people will just think you are a hobo. The Amateur Historian suggests folowing Byron's model of sleeping with his hair in curlers. Abandon your cravat as a sign of an oppressive society who would seek to muzzle your voice with its restrictive neckwear and defy it by wearing an open-necked shirt in all weather. This not only makes you look cool, it can make you downright chilly and let you catch a wasting disease. Everyone always takes you more seriously if you are likely to die young after producing your own epitaph.

If you cannot catch a wasting disease despite your best efforts to do so, attempt to look the part by keeping a suitably ethereal figure by, as was Byron's wont, playing cricket while wearing seven waistcoats and a greatcoat. If cricket is not to your liking, try to be relentlessly bullied as a small child, so as to stunt your growth by being kept from your food, writing at all hours of the night and never sleeping, or hiking up mountains to feed your soul on the beauties of rural England and not on, say, the hard-boiled egg your slave, er, that is sister, made for you.

Check back every day this week for new tips on how to prove to all those detractors who claim you have no soul or sentiment that you can, as Wordsworth put it, be:

"A man speaking to men... endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than one supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually compelled to create them where he does not find them."

Sentimental Friendships, Take One

In the late 18th century, sentimental friendships were all the rage. These were and are extremely close, very emotional friendships in which the two people do not hesitate to declare their undying love to one another, spill out their innermost secrets, hang around each others' necks whilst weeping, and kiss each other. The Amateur Historian theorizies that this was particularly popular amongst the upper classes in the late 18th century, where most marriages were not based on love, and there was no divorce if love-matches sadly went sour.

Your average bourgoisie or aristocrat would therefore have to find the emotional fulfillment necessary to a happy existance outside of marriage. This resulted either in affairs (which were generally accepted if the couple in question were discreet) or in sentimental friendships.

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a disappointing marriage (in The Eolian Harp, he begins to wax poetic about his wife, who promptly tells him to shut up) and developed a sentimental friendship not only with William Wordsworth, but with Thomas Poole. Unfortunately for the increasingly dependent Wordsworth, during their trip to Germany, Coleridge realized that Poole was more necessary for his emotional well-being.

Coleridge's letters to Poole include: "The Ocean is between us & I feel how much I love you!", "Of many friends, whom I love and esteem, my head & heart have ever chosen you as the Friend--as the one being, in whom is involved the full & whole sacred title....", and "My spirit is more feminine than your's--I cannot write to you without tears/ and I know that when you read my letters, and when you talk of me, you must often 'compound with misty eyes'...."

The Amateur Historian's personal favorite?

"O my God! how I long to be at home--My whole Being so yearns after you, that when I think of the moment of our meeting, I catch the fasion of German joy, rush into your arms, and embrace you.... Now the Spring comes, the vital sap of my affections rises, as in a tree!"