ABSTRACT
Coleridge published his ‘Sonnets attempted in the manner of contemporary writers’ in the Monthly Magazine for November 1797. In the same month, he tells Joseph Cottle: ‘I sent three mock Sonnets on ridicule of my own, & Charles Lloyd’s & Lamb’s, &c, See, in ridicule of that affectation of unaffectedness, of jumping & misplaced accent on common-place epithets, flat lines forced into poetry by Italics (signifying how well and mouthis[hl]y the Author would read them) puny pathos &c &c –’. 2 The ‘instances’, he continues, were ‘almost all taken from mine & Lloyd’s poems – I signed them Nehemiah Higginbottom’. 3 Coleridge goes on to say that ‘I think they may do good to our young Bards’. The word ‘young’ is significant; the Higginbottom poems show Coleridge, probably prompted by his increasing intimacy with Wordsworth, demonstrating a desire to put away childish things, or at least manifesting an anxiety about his poetic style. Coleridge also seems troubled by the implications of his recent enthusiasm for sonnet-writing and it is significant that he rarely worked in the form after the Higginbottom sonnets. In July 1797, he had lamented the overindulgence in ornate poetic diction evident in his youthful manner, and the ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’ in particular, deriding ‘such shadowy nobodies, as cherub-winged Death, Trees of Hope, bare-bosom’d Affection, & simpering Peace’. 4
