What we think of as modern poetry is Wordsworthianism […] [But] Coleridge actually invented what was to be the Wordsworthian mode in such early poems as “The Eolian Harp” (1795) and “Frost at Midnight” (1798)[.] (Harold Bloom)
Yet, ‘Although he first became known to his contemporaries as a poet […] by the end of his life it was rather as a talker and thinker that he was famous’ (H. J. Jackson).
However it’s told, Coleridge’s story contains a preponderance of sadness. Like Byron, Dryden, and Herrick, he lost his father when still a child. Later, he loved a woman called Sara and married a woman called Sara, but not the same Sara. He became addicted to opium and never quit. De Quincey said, ‘He wanted better bread than can be made with wheat’; Carlos Baker that, ‘He moved restlessly across the English landscape, pursued by demons that he could not escape because they were inside him.’ But his most perceptive critic was probably himself: ‘From my earliest recollection I have had a consciousness of Power without Strength.’1
He might have done his most notable writing as critic and philosopher, but this series is on the Parkleys Poets. Bloom says ‘The Eolian Harp’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’ belong to the ‘conversational’ group of poems, but I will quote from the much loved example of the ‘daemonic’ group, ‘Kubla Khan’, written in 1797 but not published until 1816 (at Byron’s behest). Think of Ham, Eric Lyons, and Coleridge Court:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. (1–11)
I wonder if ‘Power without Strength’ could be thought of, in psychometric terms, as ‘intelligence without conscientiousness’.