ABSTRACT
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the greatest talkers of his generation. William Hazlitt commented caustically in 1825 that ‘he lays down his pen to make sure of an auditor, and mortgages the admiration of posterity for the stare of an idler’. It is not surprising that Coleridge’s one published recollection of Keats should occur in the transcript of his conversations, Table Talk. Coleridge’s and Keats’s memories of the meeting differ widely. Coleridge remembers a conversation of ‘only a minute or so’. In another version of his account of the conversation, recorded by John Frere in 1830, Coleridge reiterates his impression that the meeting involved solely the shaking of hands, a momentary introduction. Coleridge seems to have been able to talk regardless of his audience. Coleridge’s memory is significant in that it perpetuates the myth that Keats was associated with death.
