S. T. Coleridge, Founder of the Weird

[Extollager]

I've mentioned STC as a literary forbear of Arthur Machen --

https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/547803/

It seems to me that Coleridge doesn't receive the attention he deserves from readers who concern themselves with weird fantasy, since one could argue that he founded the genre, in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel, as well as being the founder of Dunsanian fantasy in Kubla Khan. I'm tempted to overstate and say: No Coleridge, no Poe; no George MacDonald (Lilith, Phantastes, Photogen and Nycteris, etc.); no Dunsany; no Lovecraft, no Clark Ashton Smith, hence not their heirs. The latter authors all come out of Coleridge in some degree. You tell me where they'd all have come from if Coleridge had not been....

But possibly tendentious assertions about influence aside -- Coleridge is very much worth reading for his own sake, and I hope we will read him and discuss him here.

PS The picture at the very top is for something by Kipling, but I put it here because I liked it and because it seemed a bit Coleridgean too.

 

[J-Sun]

With plenty of overlap between the volumes, I've got The Portable Coleridge (poetry, letters, non-fiction, etc.), Biographia Literaria (non-fiction/criticism/philosophy/etc.), and a reprint of his and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. (Oddly, of all of the Big Two-Plus-Three Romantics, I could never really get into Wordsworth though many would count him the greatest by far - I respectfully cannot agree.) Anyway - The Encyclopedia of Fantasy gives Coleridge his due. His output was small but highly influential in a variety of streams and rightly so. However, I'm not in a poetry zone at the moment so I can't read along - just wanted to mention the FE article.

 

[hitmouse]

Coleridge is terrific. I agree with Extollager's comments, and I think it is reasonable to suppose that psychedelia also owes a large debt.

 

[wam]

Some points are valid, others not. MacDonald and Dunsany belong more to the fairy tale school. Blake (contemporary of Coleridge) was a much better designer of whole mythos.

 

[Extollager]

Blake (contemporary of Coleridge) was a much better designer of whole mythos.

If you're responding to my initial posting -- I was referring to influence. Coleridge was well-known. You have Poe and MacDonald referring to him by name and, of course, STC's poetry showing up in anthologies, etc. Blake was almost unknown in his own lifetime, and my impression (maybe someone can correct me) is that for many years the Blake poetry best known was the songs, wherein you get only a very little glimpse (Lyca) of the mythography. Surely very few people were aware of the Four Zoas etc. till the 20th century, when Blake became much better known thanks to things like the Everyman's Library edition of Gilchrist's biography and S. Foster Damon's studies, etc. Where would people have been able to read from Blake's most mythographic writings, during the 19th century?

Also: I'd say, just look at "Christabel." Put into prose, that narrative is remarkably like the modern fantastic kind of tale with a serpentine sorceress, etc. It is easy to imagine various modern artists of the fantastic taking it on. Again, "Kubla Khan," with its Oriental setting, its exotic landscape, its sense of imminent doom, is very Dunsanian. Coleridge's influence is pervasive.

I do think that Blake may have been an influence on the late fantasy of George MacDonald, notably Lilith (1895), and said so in my study guide.

http://www.george-macdonald.com/resources/lilith_study_guide.html

But I'm doubtful that, even here, the Blake of the "prophetic books" etc. is a strong influence.

If one wants to contend that there's an affinity between Blake's mythographizing and the work of some of the familiar fantasy authors, that's another thing.

However -- again, there may be evidence of an influence of Blake's mythographic writing that I'm not aware of. But I wonder: even today, when this area of his creativity is well known, is it exactly influential?

 

[hitmouse]

I dunno if it is worth having a bun fight about Blake Vs Coleridge. Both are important. Blake was obscure during his lifetime, but he is arguably more pervasive today, in Britain at least. It is his mystical and gnomic lyrics which figure in Jerusalem, aguably the alternative National anthem:

A large statue based on Blake's drawing of Isaac Newton stands at the entrance to the British Library:

There is a very good discussion on Blake in this old South Bank Show:

 

[Extollager]

I'm just questioning the idea that Blake contributed to the development of the modern genre of fantastic literature. Coleridge, directly and indirectly, did. It seems to me that "modern fantasy" would be a very different thing if not for Coleridge.

My favorite artist -- I don't think he is the world's greatest artist -- is Samuel Palmer, one of the "Ancients" who knew Blake when they were young and he was elderly. In four pages of small print in Gilchrist's life of Blake, Palmer contributed some of the most impressive words one man ever wrote about another man. I will quote just a little: "He was a man without a mask; his aim single, his path straightforwards, and his wants few; so he was free, noble, and happy."

Btw, I've always thought that Palmer's friend Edward Calvert designed a picture that looked like it might have been one of the wraparound covers for the Ballantine Fantasy series, perhaps one of the William Morris volumes: