ABSTRACT
Coleridge’s own estimate of his poetic genius seems to have wavered, according to mood, from the highest to the lowest, from exuberance to blank despair. But then the temper of much of his existence was probably mercurial. There is a story told by his daughter how, on his deathbed in July 1834, in the midst of melancholy complaints about the neglect shown him by his relatives, Coleridge suddenly remarked that he was aware of little decay in his faculties, in spite of approaching death, and suddenly added, ‘I could even be witty.’ 1 The notebooks, which he kept for forty years, leave an equivalent impression of gaiety and gloom in dazzling alternation. At moments he thought himself the worthy collaborator of Wordsworth, whom he always held to be the greatest of all living poets; at others, a facile poetaster who had lost even his facility:
All my poetic genius (if ever I really possessed any genius, and it was not rather a mere general aptitude of talent, and quickness in imitation) is gone, and I have been fool enough to suffer deeply in my mind, regretting the loss, which I attribute to my long and exceedingly severe metaphysical investigations, and these partly to ill-health, and partly to private afflictions …
(CL ii 831).