2 Green Masochism

Coleridge's literary self-criticism was often tinged with a ruthlessness that betrayed a deeper psychological anxiety. “I do nothing,” he complained in a letter, “but almost instantly it's defects & sillinesses come upon my mind, and haunt me, till I am completely disgusted with my performance.” ¹ This compulsive, almost masochistic discontent drove him to annotate, revise and reject his writings throughout his life. It explains in part why he is such a frustratingly inconsistent thinker, whose enthusiasm easily wore thin and sank into indifference or even resentment. Although this inconsistent nature of his thought, together with the complexity of his philosophical vernacular and the intimidating breadth of his oeuvre, challenges any scholarly study of his work, it also creates a certain interpretive elbowroom which allows us to tailor an image of Coleridge in accordance with our own critical agenda: Coleridge as a free-thinking feminist or Coleridge as a Burkean misogynist; Coleridge as an armchair anarchist or Coleridge as a sulky “Tory pensioner.” ² It requires little effort, similarly, to present him as a green poet: reference some lines from his schmaltzy and shamelessly unironic “To a Young Ass” to illustrate his moral outrage at the abuse of work animals, add the didactic finale from “The Ancient Mariner” (“He prayeth well, who loveth well / Both man and bird and beast”), and cast his fuzzy “One Life” philosophy in such a light that it comes to prefigure a contemporary understanding of nature as a precariously balanced and tightly interconnected system. It is just as easy, however, to profile Coleridge as a militant humanist pushing Kant's anthropocentric idealism to its phallocentric and solipsistic extremes. “I am not the creature of nature merely, nor a subject of nature,” he claimed in a lecture spurning mechanistic philosophy, “but I detach myself from her. I oppose myself as man to nature, and my destination is to conquer and subdue her.” ³ It is hard not to be reminded here of Francis Bacon's equally sexually loaded scientific project to unravel and dominate nature completely.