ABSTRACT
The known facts of the composition of 'Christabel', which are more speculative than certain, suggest how deeply collaborative an enterprise the poem was. Edith Coleridge's omission to finish 'Christabel', which survives as a bulky torso of 677 lines, has often been held to mark his ultimate failure as a poet. Coleridge's intense fascination with the metres of classical and modern poetry was continuous from his earliest experiments as a poet, and 'Christabel' represents the most daring experiment of all. The 'praeternatural' or supernatural aspects of 'Christabel' are, in its unfinished state, more difficult to determine. The essential purpose of 'Christabel', then, does not seem mysterious at all: it is a poem of Gothic terror. The Gothic poem as such can hardly have seemed an oddity, the young William Blake had written 'Fair Elenor', a blank-verse narrative Coleridge was unlikely to have known, where a wife hears the name of her husband's murderer from the lips of his severed head.
