Saturday 9 April 2016

'To Delia' (Oct-Nov 1799?)



So, there has been a hiatus, when other duties took me away from this blog; but now I return to Coleridge, at least for a while. Unfortunately this post, and the next few, will be concerned with some pretty dry matters of attribution; but in a little while I hope to get back into more substantial blogging here.

Not today though: today I'm looking at 'To Delia', included by J.C.C Mays in his edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works as poem 251 (2:602-3). As you can see at the head of this post, there, Mays is far from certain about the attribution: 'the identification of the hand is uncertain' and so on. Nor is it a very good poem.


Mays was right to be cautious, and wrong to include it in his edition. It's not by Coleridge; it's by 'Peter Pindar', which is to say, by John Wolcot (1738-1819), and can be found in his Collected Poems. The only wrinkle is that Wolcot published it as 'To Cynthia' rather than 'To Delia', although these sorts of poetic stylised lady-monikers are fairly interchangeable. Here it is in an 1802 edition:




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