John Fuller, 'Coleridge in Stowey' (2006)

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I like John Fuller. I like the Audenesque, Robert-Gravesy, flavour of his poetry, its deft attentiveness to traditional forms, its poise and expressiveness. And I like his off-kilter novels too, or at any rate the two I've read (especially Flying to Nowhere which is one of the more interesting midrashes on Frankenstein. Sort-of). But I'm still trying to work out what I think about his 2006 dramatic monologue ‘Coleridge in Stowey’, and the volume (above) in which it takes its place alongside poetic engagements with Matthew Arnold, Brahms, Wallace Stevens and others. The truth is I'm not sure I quite get it.

The Space of Joy is really eight long poems, linked thematically into a loose whole. First is ‘The Solitary Life’, 35 well-turned sonnets describing a narrator-poet relaxing in a hammock in Vaucluse, thinking of past greats. Here's one:

I think of Petrarch at his lonely farm
Beside the rising of a sacred river,
Believing that an Avignon madame
Was cause enough for love to last for ever.
I think of Wagner's Sachs, to whom the Geist
Of song, its long tradition and survival,
Was something fine for which he sacrificed
All hope of love, and gave it to his rival;
I think of Pope beside the sparkling Thames,
His bed as empty as his heart was full;
Impetuous Coleridge, that guilty youth;
And Arnold's self-deceiving theorems
That proved a mutual trust impossible,
The solitary life a form of truth. [‘4. The Regrets’]

This sonnet strikes the keynote: the disconnections of love and desire, the intermittencies of mutual human affection, the truth in solitude set in implicit contrast to the fictions of romance. After this the volume goes on to 2 and 3 ‘Coleridge in Stowey’ and ‘Arnold in Thun’; two great nineteenth-century poets pondering their lovelorn solitude. 4 is ‘The Rivals’, about Sachs and Beckmesser from Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (the poem focuses mostly on poor self-denying Sachs). The fifth poem ‘Brahms in Thun’ evokes the composer's feelings for beautiful Hermine Spies, who went on to marry a lawyer. The brief sixth, ‘The Fifth Marquess’ is, I think, about the wastrel peer Henry, Lord Paget, and the volume closes with 7: ‘Wallace Stevens at the Clavier’ and 8: ‘Thun 1947’.

The spaces of these bittersweet joys are both the geographical locations in which these various lovelorn misfits find themselves, from Stowey to France, from Thun to Nuremberg—and also the spaces of poetry, the formal shapes and locations: within a sonnet; beneath a tree; inside a book (always inside a book); beside a lake: ‘leaving the lake undisturbed/Flowing on who knows where,/And the lake so beautiful’ muses Fuller's Matthew Arnold, ‘Just as it always was, there’. That there, that da, is the inevitable situatedness of love. We never love in the abstract, after all. We always love this, or that, concrete particular. Fuller is good on that.

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‘Coleridge in Stowey’ starts with an epigraph from Coleridge's 1803 Notebooks. Kathleen Coburn thinks it a reference to Sara Hutchinson:

Why we two made to be a Joy to each other, should for so many years constitute each other's melancholy — O! but the melancholy is Joy —

Fuller's own note explains ‘the poem purports to be a meditation in winter beginning beneath the lime tree of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’ (I wrote at some length on Coleridge's famous limey-arborial poem, here, by the way). Here's Fuller's poem:

Wrestling the challenge of Infinity
To Personality, I sometime heard
The Bride's voice, distant, from her bower,
Less often now. I argue with my self;
Certain, therefore, of half a certainty
Before the mists assert their mistiness
And leave me without a Way.
                                              And now at eve,
Where once beneath a sprawling tent
Of dappled leaves and aromatic keys and flowers
I set my creaking chair's unequal feet              [10]
Upon the bulging roots that sank down deep
Into green Somerset for sustenance,
It has become my wintry pleasure here
To find my self not in an obscure wood,
But somehow lost beneath a single tree
That like a cage lowers its naked branches
Towards the icy bareness of the soil.

Truly a prison that the season locks
As a mind is locked by thoughts that put it there!
Unfeeling, inward cogitations, blind                  [20]
To the light that still streams from a chilly West.
The satisfaction of the solitary
Is to think to be defined by others' thoughts
Concerning him, enjoying their concern,
Relishing misery so long as he
Is made its object, like a Pietà.
The heron has the patience to be patient,
Though there be never a fish in sight.
Would he may not starve! And furthermore
It were unnecessary that the worm                       [30]
Make friends; and therefore to its social sense
The convivial temper is unknown. I hail
These stoic fellow-creatures in my soul!
Heron, worm and poet share the doom
Of laboring for a scant reward!
                                              Inside
The coals burn thinly on their wretched altar.
The Shadow Folk on walls and ceilings, guardians
Of our quieter Selves that after kettle-quarrels
Settle to nodding by a flickering stove,
Make mocking Panoramas of such battle.              [40]
They are our little household gods, masters
Of a moment that undoes all painful knots,
Loosening shapes to fly like smoke and light
And makes our stillness move still, though still, in fancy.
For there is joy upon the cess of words
Spoken in heat, joy in admonishment,
Joy in the melancholy pilgrimage
Our staffs pace out in almost unison
Greater than joy itself.
                             And here is Hartley,
Little dear Heart, patient philosopher,                      [50]
His palms clasped to his lips as if to mock
Some grave proposal, not of his usual play
But of a Voyage back to his beginning,
A novel understanding of his place
In the unfixed perplexing scheme of things.
I offer him a piece of cheese, entire.
For the moment that its crumbliness allows,
And gladly he takes it as one who reconciles,
In gracious condescension, the Many with
The One.
               Our very first posterity                               [60]
Is but a small parcel of infinite Joy
Troubled only by the animal spirits
Which went into its making, and our wonder
At the hysteroplast is but a glimpse,
A memory of our own origins,
Grieving with a full heart that such fresh Joy
Will soon become a Melancholia
Like ours.
                The woman gives him a bowl of soup
As though he were not mine and certainly
Not hers, but as though my many faults had left him [70]
The better deserving of such charity.
I am to her merely a child, as he is,
Our occupations equal as separate play
In the one chamber.
                              His cheese falls in the soup,
And I talk with the Shadow Folk to tell them
The Mountains of the Moon are like the veins
In cheese, or embers of a fire, that make
Faces of our present disposition
Out of old satisfactions. And I think
Of him in his first slumbering stillness where           [80]
Feeding with ruddy cheek against the moon's
Blue vein-of-a-mountain, the new god's
Baby feet twitched in clouds of linen.

Enthusiastic in his saintliness,
The bridegroom ordered harps, which rendered praise
To him for his forgetting lamps, and now
All that I say is what I know is true,
Though with a bitter voice that may be challenged
As the unspeakable, irrelevant,
To ears that have no need to hear it, and thus            [90]
One with the freezing blast that rises now,
Rattling the branches of its cage. O most
Miserable! O vain shadow of shadows!
I have seen the depth of shame, the bride weeping.
I have, outrageously, spoke my own sentence,
And our triangulation, like the new maps
Commissioned by the Ordnance for the War,
Creates a blankness in the living world
That may not be traversed.
                                            All evening
I sit in the parlour in my great-coat like                   [100]
Satan hiding his wings ....

The risk this poem runs (and which, I think, it manages to avoid) is of concocting a Coleridge persona out of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, a sort of Frankenstein's-creature of orts and scraps of famous Coleridgeanisms. So one context, previously mentioned, is ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’. A second is ‘Frost at Midnight’, in Fuller's Coleridge's address to his infant son Hartley, and in some of the set-dressing (‘the coals burn thinly on their wretched altar’). Plus the peroration to Joy in the middle clearly owes something to ‘Dejection: an Ode’. There are various less obvious references too: the ‘Mountains of the Moon’ in central Africa were one of the inspirations for ‘Kubla Khan’, according to John Livingstone Lowes. Coleridge did call Hartley ‘dear heart’ and ‘reconciling the Many with the One’ [59-60], or more fancifully arranging the union as Bride and Groom of infinity with Personality [1-2], describes STC's larger creative ambition pretty well. Other elements here that seem to have the smack of Coleridgean pretentiousness are actually pure Fuller: STC never uses the word ‘hysteroplast’ [64] for instance—presumably it means surgical intervention into the uterus, which seems an odd way of referring to a baby—and neither is ‘cess of words’ a Coleridgean phrase (cessation of words? assessment of words? I'm not sure). But one important context for the poem that does, I think, need unpacking is its references to the ‘cheese entire’.

Fuller is thinking of a remarkable incident from Coleridge's early youth in Ottery St Mary, related in a letter he sent to his friend Thomas Poole (16 October 1797) and worth quoting at length.

I had asked my mother one evening to cut my cheese entire, so that I might toast it: this was no easy matter, it being a crumbly cheese — My mother however did it — / I went into the garden for some thing or other, and in the mean time my Brother Frank minced my cheese, ‘to disappoint the favourite.’ I returned, saw the exploit, and in an agony of passion flew at Frank — he pretended to have been seriously hurt by my blow, flung himself on the ground, and lay there with outstretched limbs — I hung over him moaning and in a great fright — he leaped up , & with a horse laugh gave me a severe blow in the face. — I seized a knife, and was running at him, when my Mother came in & took me by the arm — I expected a flogging — & struggling from her I ran away, to a hill at the bottom of which the Otter flows — about one mile from Ottery. — There I stayed; my rage died away; but my obstinacy vanquished my fears – & taking out a little shilling book which had, at the end, morning & evening prayers, I very devoutly repeated them — thinking at the same time with inward & gloomy satisfaction, how miserable my Mother must be!

It doesn't stop there. Oh no.

I distinctly remember my feelings when I saw a Mr Vaughan pass over the Bridge, at about a furlong's distance — and how I watched the Calves in the fields beyond the river. It grew dark -& I fell asleep — it was towards the latter end of October — & it proved a dreadful stormy night — / I felt the cold in my sleep, and dreamt that I was pulling the blanket over me, & actually pulled over me a dry thorn bush, which lay on the hill — in my sleep I had rolled from the top of the hill to within three yards of the River, which flowed by the unfenced edge of the bottom. — I awoke several times, and finding myself wet & stiff, and cold, closed my eyes again that I might forget it. —— In the mean time my Mother waited about half an hour, expecting my return, when the Sulks had eyaporated — I not returning, she sent into the Church-yard, & round the town — not found! — Several men & all the boys were sent to ramble about & seek me — in vain! My Mother was almost distracted — and at ten o'clock at night I was cry'd by the crier in Ottery, and in two villages near it — with a reward offered for me. — No one went to bed — indeed, I believe, half the town were up all one night! To return to myself — About five in the morning or a little after, I was broad awake; and attempted to get up & walk — but I could not move — I saw the Shepherds & Workmen at a distance — & cryed but so faintly, that it was impossible to hear me 80 yards off —— and there I might have lain & died — for I was now almost given over, the ponds & even the river near which I was lying, having been dragged. — But by good luck Sir Stafford Northcote, who had been out all night, resolved to make one other trial, and came so near that he heard my crying — He carried me in his arms, for near a quarter of a mile; when we met my father & Sir Stafford's Servants. — I remember, & never shall forget, my father's face as he looked upon me while I lay in the servant's arms — so calm, and the tears stealing down his face: for I was the child of his old age. —— My Mother, as you may suppose, was outrageous with joy — in rushed a young Lady, crying out — ‘I hope, you'll whip him, Mrs Coleridge!’ — This woman still lives at Ottery & neither Philosophy or Religion have been able to conquer the antipathy which I feel towards her, whenever I see her. — I was put to bed — & recovered in a day or so — but I was certainly injured — For I was weakly, & subject to the ague for many years after. [Coleridge, Letters 1:351-52]

There's a lot that might be said about this famous episode, beyond goggling at how intensely self-melodramatic and obstinate the young Coleridge was. I mean: bloody hell. But for now I'm interested in what this context says about Fuller's poem.

‘Coleridge in Stowey’ is, in part, about Coleridge's sense of isolation, and therefore about the valences of self-pity. And the cheese incident is a kind of ne plus ultra of youthful self-pity: the excessive public performance of stubborn self-immolation almost to literal death. But Coleridge has enough insight to be able both to dramatise how ridiculous he was being, and to understand that his self-pity was tangled in with a desire to punish not his brother Frank, but his mother: feeling profoundly sorry for himself ‘thinking at the same time with inward gloomy satisfaction, how miserable my Mother must be’. We wound ourselves in order to wound other people, and it is no coincidence, I think, that this whole episode involves a dairy product. Indeed, milk, that metonym of the maternal, also figures as the laming disability that confines Coleridge whilst his friends go off rambling in ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’ (his wife had ‘accidentally’ tipped a skillet of boiling over his foot).

I have to say, I'm not entirely convinced by the first portion of Fuller's poem. Since lime tree boughs and branches grow out and up, ‘sprawling tent’ seems a misdescription (maybe Fuller is thinking of a willow?) and ‘aromatic keys’ just baffles me. Why keys? I see, I suppose, how this relates to the conceit that Coleridge's ‘space’ of melancholy-joy is a kind of prison, and that prison doors I suppose have keys, but I can't relate it to the material object being described. Plus the doublet ‘Truly a prison that the season locks/As a mind is locked by thoughts that put it there!’ throws me out somewhat. It's a sentence without a main verb, so far as I can see, and I can't work out to what the ‘it’, there, refers back. I'm sure this says more about my obtuseness than it does about the poem. And the step-down into plainer speaking captures the point of Coleridge's dialectic of self-pity and other-resentment nicely:

The satisfaction of the solitary
Is to think to be defined by others' thoughts
Concerning him, enjoying their concern,
Relishing misery so long as he
Is made its object, like a Pietà.  [22-26]

‘Pietà’ is probably too Roman Catholic an image properly to fit Coleridge's imaginarium. But now I really am nitpicking.

Coleridge styles himself a solitary heron, a worm, an unrewarded poet, and then (line 35) the poem moves inside. The sun, setting in the poem's opening three verse paragraphs, has set, and Coleridge is at his fireside with infant Hartley. ‘The woman’ [68] is presumably Coleridge's wife Sara, but may be a maid; either way that's a stiffly alienating way of referring to a human being, which I suppose is Fuller's point. Coleridge gives his child a piece of ‘cheese entire’, which evokes for the reader his traumatic childhood escapade, quoted above. The woman, whoever she is, feeds the lad soup, into which potage Hartley drops the cheese. Coleridge tells the lad stories, making up something about the shadow figures cast by the flickering fire, and about the white Mountains of the Moon. The poem compares the distant imaginary saw-tooth of these mountains with the zig-zag pattern of blue-veins in white cheese, which in turn provokes in him a memory of a younger-still Hartley feeding at the blue-veined, lunar white breast of his mother:

     in his first slumbering stillness where
Feeding with ruddy cheek against the moon's
Blue vein-of-a-mountain, the new god's
Baby feet twitched in clouds of linen.   [80-83]

Though this passage flirts, perhaps, with obliquity, it still strikes me as a beautiful, rather moving image. And I'd say that Fuller handles the self-melodramatising over-reaching of his Coleridge effectively, without allowing the poem itself to tumble into that swamp: the Dantean pretensions of ‘To find my self not in an obscure wood,/But somehow lost beneath a single tree’ [14-15]; the domestic Miltonism of the final line and a half. There's a level, more or less non-negotiable, at which a poem like this works because its collocated images resonate in some way for this reader or that, and possibly they don't for this other: the tree and the fire; the shadows on the wall; the child and the cheese it eats; the white mountain; the white breast; the blank map. It all has ‘to do’, we could say, with Coleridge's tangled-together erotic and maternal disappointments. There is a connection available to others that is not, it seems, available to him. He is marginalised, imprisoned, isolated and alone. How is this a space of joy? In his ‘Dejection’ ode, Coleridge addresses Sara Hutchinson as an avatar of purity:

O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me
What this strong music in the soul may be!
What, and wherein it doth exist,
This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,
This beautiful and beauty-making power.
           Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given,
Save to the pure, and in their purest hour,
Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower,
Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power,
Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower
           A new Earth and new Heaven,
Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud— [‘Dejection, an Ode’, 64-70]

The kick is that Coleridge is both those two things: acutely conscious of his prideful stubbornness (and from an early age, as the cheese-tantrum episode illustrates), and sensually as well as spiritually attracted to his ‘Asra’. Fuller spins this Joy in a more compromised manner. Still: it is a Joy, it seems:

For there is joy upon the cess of words
Spoken in heat, joy in admonishment,
Joy in the melancholy pilgrimage
Our staffs pace out in almost unison
Greater than joy itself.  [45-9]

If cess of words means stopping-speaking, then it's hard to see what kind of joy this made-of-words artefact is proposing; although perhaps the phrase means something like cess-pit or sewage of words (though a cesspit is so called because it is enclosed; which is to say, cess doesn't mean shit). But I suppose the passage as a whole is saying something like: there is a kind of joy in those moments when our relationships don't run smoothly, when we fight and shout at one another. And there is a related kind of joy in the mutual estrangement that follows such arguments, as the not-speaking-to-one-another partners plok along the promenade of life, their pilgrim-staffs not quite striking the road at the same time. Can we really call that joy? A flaming row may be cathartic, and make-up sex is famously prized. But the vignette implied here is of a row that leads not to passionate rapprochement but to chilly estrangement, and it's hard to see in what meaningful way we can call that joy. Quite apart from anything else, Fuller's phrasing here, positing as it does a joy greater than joy itself, just looks self-contradictory.

But maybe that is the point? Space, as the philosophers tell us, is extension and separation, and any joy predicated upon such qualities will tend to remoteness and loneliness. ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’ is a poem about the compensatory joys of the imagination upon which Coleridge draws because he is separated, spatially, from his friends: they're off yomping through the countryside, he's stuck at home, but the point of the poem is (to invoke another poet) that their heard melodies, though sweet, turn out not to be as sweet as Coleridge's unheard ones.

And maybe that's what Fuller is getting at, in this poem and also through the whole of this collection. The pleasures of companionship, of partnership and marriage, of sex and consummation, are joys; but there is also something joyful in not getting those things in your life. Joys of not having to compromise with another human being. The complicated satisfactions of melancholy. Self-pity is socially lamentable, even deplorable, but it has the advantage of positioning oneself solidly at the centre of the cosmic stage—it's an illusion, of course, but an illusion that flatters the ego, and therefore one to which the ego can turn a blind eye. Look at young Sam, furious that his cheese entire got minced, on that Devonshire hillside! Sure, he's cold, and miserable, but then again the entire town is searching for him! He's the centre of all attention, the axle around which the entire town turns. Carried homes in the arms of the local nobility, the one woman who suggests he should be punished ignored and despised to this day. That's power. Physical comfort and emotional distress is a small price to pay, one might think.

Is that what Fuller is getting at, in this poem? We feel cast-out, disconnected, unhappy, and we're actually just rather pathetic figures sitting in our parlours in our great-coats (‘you won't feel the benefit’, as my old gran used to admonish us), but we flatter ourselves that we are actually Satans, hiding out wings? Is that a joy?

:3:

I want, finally, to move from Fuller's poem to some thoughts on Coleridge's hopeless passion for Sara Hutchinson, his ‘Asra’ (which is, in part, what the poem is about).

Some context, in case you don't know the story. So: Coleridge had married Sara Fricker in 1795, but it was very soon apparent that they were poorly matched to one another. My sense is that he was never strongly attracted to, or markedly in love with, his wife, even when they were courting. This was when he was planning to emigrate to America with Robert Southey and establish a pantisocratic utopia. They both agreed wives/helpmeets would be needful for this enterprise, and when Southey married Edith Fricker, Coleridge rushed into marriage with Edith's sister, Sara. The dreams of Pantisocracy quickly fell apart, leaving Coleridge, married in haste, repenting at leisure.

Before his marriage he had nursed an infatuated passion for a young woman called Mary Evans. Indeed, as he recalled in 1805, looking back more-or-less miserably on his miserable early life, during the early 1790s he endured a ‘Fit of Fears from sex’ and ‘a state of struggling with madness from an incapability of hoping that I should be able to marry Mary Evans (and this strange passion of fervent though wholly imaginary Love uncombinable by my utmost efforts with any regular Hope)’ [Notebooks 2:2398]. Mary married somebody else. Conceivably Coleridge rushed his proposal to Sara Fricker on the rebound.

Marriage did not settle him, though. Sara was far from stupid, but the two of them had nothing in common intellectually. Of their sex-life Coleridge noted, ruefully, that ‘all [is] as cold & calm as a deep Frost’, complaining that ‘she is uncommonly cold in her feelings of animal Love’ [Notebooks 1:979]. And the put-upon Sara clearly found her husband really, really irritating. In 1802 Coleridge wrote to his patron, Josiah Wedgwood, that his wife could furnish ‘an exact and copious Recipe, “How to make a Husband compleatly miserable”’:

Ill-tempered speeches sent after me when I went out of the house, ill-tempered speeches on my return, my friends received with freezing looks, the least opposition or contradiction occasioning screams of passion. [Collected Letters, 2:876]

The detail about not receiving his friends amiably was a recurring grievance for STC. Six years later, when the couple were working out the terms on which they were to separate, he wrote that ‘the one Main Mighty Defect of Female Education’ is that wives are not taught ‘how to receive [a husband] on his Return, how never to recriminate’ and in particular how to avoid the ‘Mischief of giving pain’ when ‘a Husband comes home from a Party of old Friends, Joyous and full of Heart’ only to be greeted by ‘the love-killing Effect of cold, dry, uninterested looks & Manners’ [Notebooks, 3:3316]. Why couldn't she enjoy the things he enjoyed? Why couldn't she like the people he liked? It was almost as if she was a completely different person to him, with her own tastes and friendships!

There certainly seems to have been something formidable about Sara Coleridge. Elsewhere in the notebooks Coleridge confesses to living in ‘constant dread in my mind respecting Mrs Coleridge's Temper’ [Notebooks, 2:2398]. Things were going badly, but they were at least going, and the marriage produced three children who survived to adulthood as well-functioning people, so it wasn't a dead loss. But things hit a fatal snag in 1799 when Coleridge met another Sara: Sara Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworth's wife Mary, who lived with the Wordsworths and helped keep house. Coleridge fell deeply, catastrophically in love with Sara, ‘Asra’ as he called her, but though she was friendly and warm with him she did not love him back. This hopeless unreciprocated passion dominated Coleridge's life for many years.

There's a particularly good essay in Adam Phillips's Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (2012) called ‘On Not Getting It’. Phillips unpacks the various ways in which we might not ‘get it’, from jokes (‘no one wants to be the person who doesn't get it—doesn't get the joke, doesn't understand what's being said, what's going on’) to our heart's desire. His Phillipsian-Freudian point is that we don't actually understand our heart's desires. We don't understand why we want what we want, and sometimes we don't even understand what we want (although we can't help knowing that we want). Because of this, Phillips thinks our desire has much more to do with what we don't get than with what we can and do.

I'm not sure I entirely ‘get’ John Fuller's ‘Coleridge at Stowey’ poem (I'm curious, actually: do you?) But saying so is probably not a criticism of the poem itself. Indeed, admitting that I don't ‘get’ Fuller's poem throws the onus on me, rather than Fuller: it sounds much more like a criticism of me and the insufficiency of my readerly faculties than of ‘Coleridge at Stowey’. It's often the case that we don't ‘get’ a poem, and that fact only occasionally correlates to the worth or otherwise of the text. I don't think I really ‘get’ ‘Kubla Khan’ or ‘The Ancient Mariner’ (or Wordsworth's Immortality Ode, or The Waste Land, or Macbeth's ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow’ speech or ...), and it's exactly the specific quality, the unique eudaimonia of those masterpieces, the stuff that eludes ‘getting’, that's so integral to their greatness. By contrast, I think I mostly do ‘get’ Coleridge's Conversation poems, which is a way of saying that they are lesser achievements. The love we feel for poetry is not the same as the love we feel for other people of course, but it is still a love, and it is as meaningful to talk about the vectors of desire in an aesthetic as an erotic sense.

‘Getting’ can also mean: ‘begetting’ (Phillips says some fascinating things about the way Desdemona's father Brabantio washes his hands of his daughter after she falls in love with Othello: ‘I had rather to adopt a child than get it’ he declares, which he links to the impossibility of comprehending not only the object but the fact of our children's sexual desire). And ‘getting it’, ‘getting some’, ‘getting lucky’, is a way of referring to sexual intercourse, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, to sexual conquest. Back in 1987 poodle-haired cock-rockers Def Leppard boasted of the copiousness of their sexual relations in their thudding hit single ‘Armageddon it’. Because if you're a randy young man the only thing more important than ‘getting’ sex is letting all your friends know that you're getting it. It's a matter, it seems, of world-ending, apocalyptic, armageddon-worthy importance.

Step back two centuries and here's Coleridge recording in his notebook in 1802 the day after the birth of his daughter (also called Sara—so many Saras!) that his wife Sara had become ‘the Conductor and thunder-rod of my whole Hatred’ [Notebooks, 1:1311]. That's a strikingly extreme, almost Armageddon-ish way to refer to one's wife, don't you think? A woman with whom Coleridge was still (as baby Sara's birth proved) having sex. Phillips's Freudianism is much too subtle to stoop to noticing obvious things like clumsy Freudian symbols, but still: thunder-rod? Really?

‘What I am interested in,’ says Phillips

is what might be discovered, or found, or experienced, in the not getting it that might be of value (how, for example, might one write about a poem if one made no attempt to explain it?) Because this, in effect, is what Freud is saying we might do with sexuality; all our inclinations—including parts of the inclination that is psychoanalysis—are to explain it, to know about our desire; to give oneself and others an account of it ... But when it comes to sexuality we never know how things actually are. On giving an account we make of sexuality, of our desire, something that it is not and can never be. It is as though we are trying to stop having it its effect, prevent it taking its course. [Philips, Missing Out (2013), 78-79]

Of course it was trivially true of Coleridge's grand passion for Asra that had she given-in and slept with him the whole thing would have stopped being a majestic drama of the thwarted heart and would have instead diminished, become people-sized: an affair, sex, one of those everyday human things. The fact that Coleridge wasn't ‘getting it’ with Asra may have made him miserable, but it also maintained the grandeur and purity of his love. It's easy for love to stay elevated and magnificent if it always avoids contact with human actuality. It's probably something of a stretch even to call that sort of infatuation love, though it is surely a specie of joy.

It was evident to the people who lived with Coleridge that he was in love with Sara Hutchinson. He was not good at hiding it. But that didn't mean that these others ‘got’ it—that they understood why this particular woman held such a fascination for him. That's often the way with other people's love, of course (‘what does s/he see in him/her of all people? I just don't get it!’). From an early age, Coleridge's daughter Sara could tell there was something going-on between her father and Sara Hutchinson, but neither as a child nor as a grown woman reflecting back on those years did she ‘get’ his infatuation: ‘my father used to talk to me with much admiration and affection of Sara Hutchinson,’ Sara Coleridge later recalled. ‘She had fine, long, light brown hair, I think her only beauty, except a fair skin, for her features were plain and contracted, her figure dumpy, and devoid of grace and dignity. She was a plump woman, of little more than five feet. I remember my father talking to me admiringly of her long light locks’ [Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge (1877) 17, 20]. Why would anyone find such a person irresistible? How could so unprepossessing a woman provoke such overwhelming and life-dominating in a man? As Brabantio could not comprehend what it was about Othello that made his daughter fall in love, so this daughter can't comprehend what it was about Asra that her father loved so.

But then again, you don't have to read very far in Coleridge's notebooks and letters to see that he himself didn't really get it, either. So: she had nice hair. Isn't that a trivial thing to fall for? Then again, what, specifically, about the people we fall in love isn't reducible to suchlike triviality? Maybe it's best not to pull on that thread, or the whole tapestry of our grand passion might start to unspool. In 1808 Asra changed her look.

Back at Allan Bank in October, Asra took to covering the long hair that Coleridge so admired with a cotton mob-cap. It took away the youthful softness of her face, and emphasized her bony nose and prominent chin. Coleridge was shocked by the transformation: ‘astonishing effect of an unbecoming Cap on Sara. It in the strictest sense of the word frightened me ... producing a painful startle whenever she turned her face suddenly round on me.’ He urged her not to ‘play these tricks with her angel countenance’, but she refused to take it off. [Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (HarperCollins 1998), 150]

The fright of this is, I suppose, his teetering on the brink of understanding, of finally ‘getting’, that what he desired in Asra did not actually coincide with Sara Hutchinson. ‘What if on my Death-bed her Face,’ he confided to his notebook, ‘which had hovered before me as my soothing and beckoning Seraph, should all at once flash into that new face?’ [Notebooks, 3:3403] What did he want from Asra, anyway? She was his friend, his amanuensis and confidant, but this wasn't enough. What was it that he wasn't getting from her?

Again: as Mother of my children—how utterly improbable dared I hope it: How impossible for me (most pure indeed are my heart & fancy from such a thought) even to think of it, much less desire it! and yet at the encouraging prospect of emancipation from narcotics, of health & activity of mind & body, worthy of the unutterably [in cipher: dear one], it is felt within me like an ordinance of adamantine Destiny! Sweet Hartley! What did he say, speaking of some Tale & wild Fancy of his Brain?—“It is not yet, but it will be—for it is—& it cannot stay always, in here” (pressing one hand on his forehead and the other on his occiput)—“and then it will be—because it is not nothing” O wife thou art! O wife thou wilt be! [Notebooks, 3: 3547]

Maybe little Hartley gets it, after all. Coleridge doesn't want Asra to become his wife. He wants to want Asra to become his wife. That is, after all, the real space of joy: between forehead and occiput.

The Λόγος in the Logic

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As early as 1803 Coleridge told people he was planning a book-length treatise on logic, although it wasn't until the 1820s that he actually began drafting the work. What he produced was based on a set of Thursday evening classes, or discussion sessions, he ran for a group of eager young (male) acolytes 1822-23. By dictating his thoughts to a number of different amanuenses most of a book emerged. Coleridge offered this, in a more or less desultory way, to several publishers in the later 1820s, none of whom were interested, and it seems that without the pressure of a publication deadline he couldn't summon the impetus actually to finish the whole. He planned a four-part work comprising: a lengthy introduction on the topic of logic as such, a section on the syllogism and structures of logic; a section on ‘the Criterion or Dialectic’ and a final section on what Coleridge calls ‘Noetic’ logic, covering after a fashion the practical application of logic, logic-in-action, logic-in-actual-thought (νόος). This last section remained unwritten, and the three-quarters we have, since STC never actually readied them for publication, make for clogged and difficult reading.

Not to beat around the bush, Logic is by far the most boring thing Coleridge ever wrote: repetitious, very often obscure, digressive, interminable. It doesn't help that the text comes to us, as it were, pre-motheaten: full of holes where his amanuenses (one of whom at least doesn't seem to have had Greek—quite the problem if one is taking dictation from Coleridge) didn't understand or feel confident about a word, a technical term or a phrase and so just left a gap. Modern editors have made educated guesses to fill some, but not all, of these. And, yes: Coleridge's actual history of publication makes it look naive of me to imply that revising all this for publication would have involved him smoothing out all obscurity and digression. The triumph of scholarly hope over experience, that. Still: the work as have it is a more-or-less indigestible lump.

After his death the manuscript of the Logic seems to have simply nonplussed his literary executor, Joseph Henry Green, who made no effort to publish it. At the end of the century Charles Ward, working for Macmillan, heard rumours that a book-length unpublished Coleridge manuscript was knocking around, acquired it and sent it to Oxford for a report on how to ready it for possible publication. He later recollected that the MS came back to him after three months ‘without a single word of comment from anybody, either combative or appreciative’ [‘Coleridge’, Athenaeum, 26 October 1895]. A whole other century passed before the work actually saw the light of day, as part of the Bollingen edition of the complete Coleridge in 1981, edited by J R de J Jackson. Excitement in Coleridge circles about a brand new book-length STC work finally seeing the light of day quickly became disappointment at just how turgid and baffling the Logic actually is.

And there's one more problem. Having myself now waded all the way across this river of treacle I can confirm what previously scholars have already noted: almost all of the Logic is just Kant, either summaries of, or lengthy passages translated directly from, the Critique of Pure Reason and the Prolegomena, titivated only a very little by the addition of occasional illustrative examples from STC's own ambit. Perhaps Coleridge believed such summary and excerpting useful in their own right (Francis Haywood's first English translation of the Critique did not appear until 1838, after all) but it renders the book superfluous to any reader who knows Kant, and the summaries are neither systematically laid-out or, it has to be said, attributed. This latter point is the old problem of whether we're dealing with sloppiness or conscious plagiary on Coleridge's part, a problem never very far away where this author is concerned. ‘There is a danger,’ J R Jackson says with a nice dryness of tone, ‘that readers unfamiliar with his sources may mistake vintage Kant for vintage Coleridge’ [Jackson, lvi]. Reader, beware.

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For a number of reasons, Murray J Evans brackets the Logic with another of Coleridge's unfinished big, late-career books, the Opus Maximum (also sometimes called the Logosophia):

First, they are roughly contemporaneous, with Logic likely written across the 1820s and most of Opus Maximum in the period 1819-23. Second, both texts were draft texts, not published in Coleridge's lifetime; both only first appeared in the Bollingen editions in the last thirty years, Logic in 1981 and Opus Maximum in 2002. Finally, judging by the sparse extant scholarship, the texts have attracted very few modern readers, relative to readers of the Biographia Literaria for example. This is only partly for reasons of late publication, since they are both difficult texts. The Logic is an apparently dry treatise on an apparently unimaginative topic, and Opus Maximum resists wholistic reading. [Evans, ‘Coleridge as Thinker: Logic and Opus Maximum’, in Frederick Burwick (ed), The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford University Press 2009), 323]

Evans—author of the world's only monograph on the Opus Maximum, the fascinating Sublime Coleridge: the Opus Maximum (Palgrave 2012)—naturally spends much more of his essay here on that other work. The Logic he reads as a preliminary to the Opus Maximum: ‘OM largely jumps off from what would have been Logic's missing Part 3 on the Noetic’ [326]. On the Logic itself, he agrees with Jackson, who insists that there is nothing new in the book at all. ‘The philosophical arguments of the Logic are often complex and subtle,’ is how Jackson puts it, but ‘the complexity and the subtlety are Kant's. Coleridge is a faithful interpreter of his master in the field of logic, and he does not at any point attempt to revise, refute or refine. He comments and explains, and he paraphrases and selects, but he does not offer new arguments’ [Jackson, lxii].

I don't think that's right, actually. Which is to say: whilst Coleridge certainly does spend most of his time here paraphrasing, commenting on and explaining Kant, he also argues something new; or, if that is perhaps a stretch, he at least gestures towards such an argument. It's not in the book's Part 2, which really is nothing more than summarised Kant; and it's not in Part 1 either, which is a rather confusingly assembled bundle of sections about what Coleridge calls ‘Pure Logic’ or ‘the Canon’. This Part 1 swamps, rather, what you might expect a book on logic to cover in a welter of discussion of other things. So for example: although Coleridge does include some discussion of the syllogistic forms (‘All men are mortal; Caius is a man; therefore Caius is mortal’ is one example he offers [1.1.4(a)]), he buries this in a lengthy discussion of how elements are separated off from the universal into the particular, calling the apprehension of the former ‘the act of clusion’ and the latter ‘the act of seclusion’ [1.2.2]. And he's very interested in the idea that the subject and object of a sentence are always separate things, except in the single instance of the utterance I am, where the subjective ‘I’ and the objective ‘am’ unite into a single form. Which is all very interesting I'm sure.

Really, STC's emphasis here reflects the fact that he just wasn't very interested in the forms of the syllogism. In a conversation recorded in the Table Talk [23 Sept 1830] he scoffed at those logicians who could ‘spin ... ten or a dozen pages’ out of the varieties of syllogistic logic (‘all those absurd forms of syllogism are one half pure sophisms, and the other half mere forms of rhetoric’). The Logic itself copies a few illustrative syllogisms out of Kant, and touches on the importance of avoiding post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking, but otherwise this is a book that considers the formal structures of logical thinking more-or-less simple and self-evident. The clusion/seculsion thing, on the other hand, speaks more directly to Coleridge's concerns, because he is so fascinated, as a poet as well as a thinker, by the relation of the particular experience to the whole:—the relationship, that is, of individual subjectivity to the collective and to the divine. The One and the Many. This relationship is dialectical in that it runs in mutually engaging ways. On the one hand, Coleridge insists that logic is exclusively concerned with what he calls ‘derived’ perception: the way our minds combine and coalesce variegated perceptions into a mental unity. On the other hand, Coleridge again reverts to one of his perennial concerns: the fragmentary and isolated individual consciousness and its relationship to (divine) unity. This (if I'm reading the Logic right) has its formal-logical aspect, because syllogisms require the separation of individuated particulars—as it might be, our friend Caius, aforementioned—from generalities—‘all men’, or ‘mankind’ or whatever—such that logical syllogisms formally embody the division of the individuality of separate subjectivity from the unity of collective existence.

Coleridge is especially interested in the way this separation relates to the semantic structures of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ as they manifest in both sentences and in our mental structures for understanding the universe. The fullest subject, for Coleridge, is a whole human subjectivity, and the fullest object is the entire universe; and the structures of language depend upon the separation of subject from object. This, Coleridge seems to be arguing in Part 1 of the Logic, has to do with the way syllogism and clusion/seclusion invoke opposition as a structuring principle of syllogistic logic. I'm not sure about my reading here, though I think it's right. I think it underlies, for instance, passages like these:

In the first act [of perception] we have seen that a principle of unity is contributed by the mind itself. But if there be a uniting power, there must be that which is to be the subject or matter of the union, and by what name shall we designate this latter? The opposite to one is the many ... the external, the immediately sensuous, the supposed impressions from external agents are comprised under the common term of ‘the many’, ‘the manifold’, or ‘multeity’, or ‘the indistinguishable’ (to which we may add the phrases adopted by symbolical writers or mystics, viz. ‘chaos’, ‘the waters’, etc etc) [Logic, 1.2.19]

If you are tempted, as I was on reading this, to say: ‘but why should the opposite to one be the many? Mightn't it be the none?’ then Coleridge is ahead of you. He insists several times in the Logic that ‘opposita semper unigena: there is no opposition between heterogeneous subjects’ [1.2.7], or at greater length: ‘opposita semper unigena; in omni oppositione datur suppositum in quo (seu, tenus quod) opposita unum sunt. Thesis = antithesis in aliqua prothesi’ [2.12.2], which means ‘oppositions are always of the same genera; in every opposition a supposition is given in which (or insofar as which) opposites are unified. Thesis = antithesis in some prothesis’. Coleridge himself glosses his own Latin thus: ‘terms that can be rightly opposed to each other’ (earlier he gives the example ‘north’ and ‘south’) ‘in their evolution of a truth must be identical in the root, that is, radically one. These are different ways of expressing the same principle, a principle of paramount importance in philosophy no less than in logic’ [2.12.2].

Now, none of this is original to Coleridge: it's from Kant's Prolegomena (and therefore ultimately from his Critique of Pure Reason), all except for the examples from ‘symbolical writers’, which give us some sense as to how Coleridge grasps his Kantian concepts: ‘chaos’, ‘the waters’, etc etc. But those examples are significant, I think. From Moses Mendelssohn's 1790 Morgenstunden oder Vorlesungen über das Dasein Gottes (‘all legitimate syllogisms are grounded on a just analysis of conceptions’ [1.1.7]) Coleridge borrows the symbol of a tree, in order to illustrate the division of concepts into smaller constitutive concepts:

The total sum of human knowledge may be represented under the image of a tree, so as to convey in a just and lively manner the princple on which all formal logic rests. The outward points meet in sprays; these under in twigs; the twigs in boughs; the boughs in branches; and the branches in one common trunk. [Logic, 1.1.7]

But though it ends with this second-hand image, this chapters opens with an original Coleridgean portrait of the non-specific observing poet as a young man:

There are few who cannot recollect or place themselves in that state of mind in which their eye has rested either on a cloudless sky or the general aspect of the starry heavens or on a wide common bounded only by the horizon without consciously attending to any particular object or portion of the scene. There will be many too, I doubt not, not unwilling to confess that they have been sometimes in that state of mind which they could perhaps describe by no other term than that of thinking, and yet if questioned of what they were thinking about must answer nothing. Nay this is a state which not seldom takes place when the mind is preparing itself for the highest efforts of thought and even during such efforts the energy continuing during the momentary occultations of the part objects of the consciousness, as we continue the act of gazing in the brief intervals of the flashes at night in a storm of thunder and lightning. [Logic, 1.1.1]

Similarly, by way of illustrating Kant's conception that length and the lines that mark it are artefacts of our consciousness rather than objective elements ‘out there’ in the real world, here is Coleridge on flies, or ‘ephemerae’:

It was length without any necessity of abstracting from breadth or depth; in other words, it was a self-conscious act snatched away as is it were from the product of that act. The most exact but assuredly the most amusing mode of conveying what I mean, I have seen in the ephemerae and other minute and half-transparent insects who by the exceeding velocity of motion actually present to our eyes a symbol of what Plotinus meant when, speaking of the geometricians and the of Nature of acting geometrically, he says Θεωρουσα Θεωρηματα ποιει, her contemplative act is creative and is one with the product of their contemplation. [Logic, 1.2.15, quoting Enneads 3.8.4]

Coleridge then quotes accounts of swarms of emphemerae (‘emphemerae in jointed and articulated triangles of silver light’) by Réaumur, Kirby and Spence before adding:

I can add that I have twice seen the ascent of the ephemerae in strong moonlight, the beams passing through an opening in a branching tree that overhung the water on which the moonlight formed a small island in deepest shade, and here by intensely watching the phenomenon I satisfied myself that the different spiral figures were each produced by the image of motion which the single insect left on the eye; each of which overtook the preceding before the impression had ceased. [Logic, 1.2.16]

Nowadays we all know the technical term for this particular perceptual effect: the persistence of vision—and we know it because precisely this effect underpins the whole edifice of our visual culture from cinema to television and video gaming. There's no doubt in my mind that Coleridge, had he been born two centuries later than he was, would have been profoundly engaged by the domination of our cultural discourse by screen-displayed visual texts. The Logic includes a fascinating account of the way the kaleidoscope (brand-new tech this, invented by David Brewster in 1818) generates aesthetic beauty from ‘fragments, bits of coloured glass, a steel filing or two, ends of thread’. Put these elements in a ‘dice box’ and toss them on the table, Coleridge says, and you could ‘waste an hour or a week’ never forming any kind of beautiful figure; but put them in a kaleidoscopic tube and every twist of the end produces ‘some new and distinct form of beauty in endless succession, the number inexhaustible and all beautiful, though not all equally delightful’ [2.4.11(b)]. (Coleridge thinks the beauty comes from the addition of symmetry to these objects. I wonder if there's more to it than that).

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In all this, through Parts 1 and 2 of the incomplete Logic, Coleridge presents other people's ideas, and by ‘other people’ I mean Kant, mostly. But the Logic is not all Kant; and the bit that most substantively adds something new to Coleridge's Kantian summary is the Introduction.

This Intro is in two chapters, the first called ‘Sketch of the History of Logic’ (a chapter which in no way sketches the history of Logic) and the second titled ‘Chapter 1’, which suggests to me that Coleridge had decided on a do-over. In this latter chapter Coleridge derives the word, but also the concept, of logic from its Greek root in a way that is simultaneously perfectly conventional and  frankly eccentric-to-the-point-of-bonkers. Conventional, because after all, the word does indeed come via the Latin logica from the Ancient Greek λογικός (logikós ‘of or pertaining to speech or reason or reasoning, rational, reasonable’), and so from λόγος (lógos, ‘speech, reason’). But eccentric, because nobody before Coleridge, so far as I can see (and certainly not Kant) argued that logic is the formal manifestation in the sensible forms of our worldly intuition of the Johannine λόγος, that is Christ in the world and God substanding it and some spiritually holy third thing as well. But that's what we have here. This is how the second chapter of the introduction of the Logic, titled ‘Chapter 1’:

Logic from the Greek λέγω. The absolute etymon of this word, by which I mean the particular visual image, or other sensuous impression, which is at the root of its proper constitutive syllable, is far beyond historic research. [Logic, ‘Introduction’ 2:1]

He gives it a go, though, for eighteen dense pages, starting with the theory that ‘the initial λ’ of the word embodies ‘the sense of additional force, whether in consequence of a single energy or of the same energy repeated’, and a pendant dismissal of the theories of lexicographers that λ-words in Ancient Greek tended to express ‘feelings of disgust and hatred’ in favour of his own theory that λ represents ‘continuity and the absence of resistance’ [‘Intro’ 2.4]. From here, he goes via a etymological tracing of the meanings of λόγοι, ‘things weighed or considered’, ‘considerate, well-weighed, deliberate words’, to truthful and considered ‘histories’, as distinguished from the ἔπος (épos, ‘song, epic’) and ποιητής (poiētḗs, ‘creator, maker, author, poet’), since the latter invented rather than accurately recorded. ‘Thus,’ says Coleridge, ‘the derivatives from λόγος are now appropriated to men of superior knowledge, the highly informed, the men of understanding’ [‘Intro’ 2.15]. From here Coleridge leaves the lexicographers far behind to propose a triad of meanings. λόγος came to exist, he argues,

in a threefold relation: first it signified the logical faculty, the reasoning power, in short the understanding including the judgment, in distinction from the νοῦς or reason. Secondly it signified the understanding as a discursive faculty, or that which employed itself on the conceptions of the mind and the general terms representing them, in distinction from the intuition, or intuitive power of the mind, as employed on the forms of perception in time and space, that is, number and figure ... Thirdly λόγος was used in a somewhat larger sense as the mind or intellective power abstractedly from the νοῦς, or pure reason, as the supposed identity of the intellectio and the intelligibile; from the reason, I say, as at once the light of the mind and its highest object. [Logic, ‘Intro’ 2.20]

None of this is in Kant; it's all, so far as I can read it, Coleridge more-or-less tortuously bending the etymology of the word ‘logic’ round to fit it to his trinitarian conception of the λόγος of John 1.1. The identity of the intellectio, or intellect, with the intelligibile, or intelligible reality, happens (Coleridge argues) in one place only, the ‘I am’ that unites subject and object in one objective subjectivity, and which in the Biographia and elsewhere (though not here) he connects to the pronouncement God makes to Moses in Exodus 3:14: I AM THAT I AM. That's an absolutely central Biblical text to Coleridge's thought, that one. And this threefold definition of logic gives us (1) a structuring principle of the individual subjectivity, (2) the form of our engagement with the outside world (time and space) and therefore a structuring principle for our intersubjectivity, and (3) the ground of all such structures and subjectivities, the ‘highest object’ that provides the foundation for all particular iterations of mind, what he a little later calls ‘the sum of all the subjective comprehended in the name of mind or intelligence’ [‘Intro, 2.25’].

All this does at least explain, or it seems to me to do so, why STC's book on logic has so little truck with maths, syllogisms and, well, logic as the term is currently understood. The purpose of the exercise for him is not drily mathematical, but is rather the laying out of what he takes to be the divine structure of living consciousness, something (for him) in no way merely mechanical or material. It is the grammar of reality as such, and that grammar is divine. As Coleridge wrote elsewhere, probably in the late 18-teens, ‘the language of nature is a subordinate Logos, that was in the beginning, and was with the thing it represented, and was the thing represented’ [quoted in Prickett, Words and The Word (1986), 133]. Stephen Prickett is only one of a great many critics to note how core this λόγος is to Coleridge's aesthetics and metaphysics.

For Coleridge, the ‘Word’ is itself redolent of the hidden powers of meaning, at once latent and ‘living’ through tension with other apparently dissimilar notions ... The word [is] ‘bi-focal’. What is at one level operating below the threshold of consciousness in every act of perception, is also the power by which we create our ‘internal’ worlds. We perceive nature and create fictions by essentially the same process. But the languages of nature and of fiction interact ... The subordinate logos of nature is a repetition in the finite human mind of God's eternal act of creation. [Prickett, Words and The Word (1986), 143-44]

This is why Coleridge's Logic is such a strange work. Although all this commitment of the spiritual importance of the λόγος as the foundation of logic as such is not Kantian, Coleridge does believe that Kant is right about the way reality as such is structured by our apperceptions, which means that any Coleridgean Logic must entail a detailed summary of those Kantian ideas. There's no doubt in my mind that if Coleridge had gotten around to writing his final Part 3, it would have explored the action of the imagination, both secondary and primary, and would have had nothing to say about mathematically watertight sequential syllogisms.

This in turn explains a couple of the odder features of the Logic as they present to a modern-day reader. For one thing Coleridge throughout prioritises geometry over mathematics. Since nowadays both logic and geometry are seen as branches of what we nowadays tend to call, simply, mathematics, that might seem strange. In part this is just a matter of historical context. The Ancient Greeks had discovered lengths in geometry that they could not express as simple, or what are called ‘rational’, numbers, or even as the ratios of rational numbers: the length of the hypotenuse on a right-triangle where the other two sides are one unit long, for instance; or the relationship between a circle's diameter and its circumference. These lengths the Greeks called ‘irrational’, and on account of them they believed geometry and mathematics (which is to say, arithmetic) to be two quite different disciplines.

That was still, more or less, the intellectual world in which Coleridge was working. It wasn't until 1872 that Richard Dedekind showed that irrational numbers could indeed be defined in terms of rational numbers, and so in effect unified geometry and arithmetic; and it wasn't until 1910-13 that Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica proved that logic itself is mathematical and so brought all three disciplines under one umbrella. We can't blame Coleridge for not anticipating these giant steps of professional mathematicians, of course, although we may still be puzzled by his fondness for geometrical diagrams. Here, for instance, he illustrates his argument that ‘the verb substantive (“am”, sum, εἰμί) expresses the identity or coinherence of being and act’:

In this, ‘A = the point of identity’, which is, Coleridge assures us, generated by ‘perpetual eradiation [of] the line BC, the pole B representing being in its greatest predominance, and the pole C action in like manner’, while ‘a’ expresses ‘the indifference of being and action, of substantive and verb’ and ‘A’ is ‘the point of identity, is the verb and substantive in one and as one’ [‘Intro’, 1.20]. Clear? No? Try this one then:

The Λ there stands for λόγος and the Θ for θεωρία (theōría, ‘contemplation, speculation, a looking at, things looked at’, from θεωρέω ‘I look at, view, consider, examine’; Coleridge uses the word as shorthand for the perceptual understanding by which we engage with the world). N represents νοῦς, or pure reason, and E is the Eye, ‘as determining the chord connecting Λ and Θ; and we will also suppose that the eye is directed upward, from the chord to the centre’. Coleridge then glosses the diagram at exhausting, though not exhaustive, length: ‘the extracircumferential E, the power of acting on or from without, and the chord ΛΘ serve at once as the common boundary and medium of communication. Thus we have a view of the powers from which the sciences derive their name and character ... [with] N as representing the indemonstrable, because the ground of all demonstration, or the absolute, that is irrelative, because the ground of all relation (the consideration of which, as the primary truths—aeternae veritates—independent of all time and place and in which the reason itself consists’ [‘Intro’, 2.23(a)].

It's not entirely allergic of comprehension, all this, but more than the content of these quasi-mystical rebuses is their form. STC is explaining the structure of his whole book, Part 1 of which will cover Λ, Part 2 will cover Θ (via Kant) and the unwritten Part 3 would have covered N, as the ground of all relation. I suppose these diagrams don't exactly make things clearer for the general; although one thing they do is suggest strongly that Coleridge is pattern-making after the prototype of the Christian trinity. All these triangles. All these tripartite unities of ground, derivative and abstract, or reality, perception and unified-reality-perception, or Being, Action and Identity, or Father, Son and Spirit. What are they really about? They are Coleridge saying, as Kant nowhere does, that the logic according to which the world coheres and makes sense is just another name for God.

If we take the Johannine λόγος as Christ specifically (and I know, this is a very complicated topic, chewed-over by many generations of theologians, but for the sake of argument) then Coleridge's position here has some striking implications. Talking about the logic of Christ, or of Christ as the manifestation of logic in the world, might seem counterintuitive to the theological status of Christ as intercessor, the embodiment of forgiveness, redemption and so on. Does it make sense to describe Christ, as Coleridge does Logic, as ‘the science of the permanent relations in conceptions’ [‘Intro’ 2.23(a)]. I suppose that positing Christ as the underlying coherence and structure of reality is a way of saying that reality is fundamentally man-shaped. Not in terms of arms and legs, but in terms of love and lack, of care and connection, will and hope. The unwritten Part 3 might have made this plainer, and the Opus Maximum, with its addition of a divine Will to the conventional Christian trinity, perhaps goes some way towards following-through on all this.

Notebook Scatology

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One of the (many) things Coleridge used his notebooks for was jotting down obscenity. He loved playing with ruderies of various kinds, and was fascinated by ribald, off-colour, scatological or sexual observations. Or at least, he was fascinated with these things in the decent privacy of writing never intended for publication. In public, his respectable morality shaded into something more like actual prudishness. Read, for example, the ‘Critique of Bertram’ included as Chapter 23 of the Biographia Literaria (1817), in which he clutches his pearls at the way Maturin's play portrays adultery not as deplorable moral turpitude but rather in terms of a tragically-doomed and heroic love affair: ‘O! the mingled horror and disgust with which I witnessed it’, he gasps. ‘The very fact then present to our senses, that a British audience could remain passive under such an insult to common decency, nay, receive with a thunder of applause, a human being supposed to have come reeking from the consummation of this complex foulness and baseness, these and the like reflections so pressed as with the weight of lead upon my heart...’ And so on. In the private textual spaces of his notebooks, though, he permitted himself much more licence.

What follows is not a comprehensive survey of such moments: that would take a very long time. But it is a more or less representative sample, assembled in order, in part 2 of this blogpost, to make a larger and, I think, important point about Coleridge's imagination.

I've already blogged about the four-line poem Coleridge wrote in 1809 on the topic of tribadism, or sexual frottage, which (I speculate) was provoked by his jealous suspicion that Wordsworth was, in addition to his wife, also sleeping with his wife's sister Sara Hutchinson, whom Coleridge himself loved with a desperate, unreciprocated love. My take was that Coleridge doodled some rather bitter verse about his hurt feelings, speculating that Wordsworth and Sara were engaged in mutual sexual rubbing and cunnilingus (to avoid the risk of pregnancy), writing in English but using the Greek alphabet to disguise what he was doing:

Oυῑφ σιστηρ ὕσβανδ—ὕσβανδ σιστηρ oυῑφ
Γυνανδριαν ἰνσεστ ὕνιον, νατυρς στρεῑφ.
Σολυτιον ὀφ θέ ριδδελ θοῦ το σηκ
Tρι-βαδ ἰς συκσες … θάτ νῆρ συκσηδ!

Wife sister husband—husband sister wife
Gynandrian incest's union, nature's strife
Solution of the riddle thou to read:
Tri-bad success, the sort that ne'er sucks seed!

(The reason my transliteration differs in minor ways from the Greek is explained at the link to the original post) In this case, Coleridge hides an English poem behind the obscurity of the Greek alphabet. In other cases, he cloaked his rudery in Latin. In both cases the assumption is that a person who has acquired enough Classical education to be able to understand the obscenity would have sufficient character not to be corrupted by it: a belief, howsoever odd, common enough in the nineteenth-century, marinated as that era was in both classism and sexism. The Loeb Greek library used to have a policy where editors would translate everything into facing-page English except for material deemed obscene, which would be translated into Latin. And talking of Latin, here's a four line poem of Coleridge's own, from 1811 or 1812:

Infelix, ah plusquam infelicissimus Ille,
Semivir in thalamum qui duxit Sesqui-puellam,
Mutumque ossitiens, tantique voraginem hiatüs
Vix rigidi tubuli lacrymoso röre lacessit! [Notebooks 4108]

Unlucky, ah more than unlucky he,
That half-man who beds a woman half-as-much again,
And into her silent, thirsty, wide-open cavern
Weeps a little dew from his tiny, rigid tube.

Kathleen Coburn thinks this is about John Morgan, the diminutive friend with whom Coleridge lived for several years in the eighteen-teens and who sometimes acted as amanuensis. Did Morgan (married, but perhaps not faithful to his rather dominating wife) confess sexual incapacity, perhaps aspermia or premature ejaculation or maybe a less specific erotic inadequacy, with a larger, enthusiastic but unsatisfied woman? Coburn speculates whether ‘the relationship’ between Morgan and Coleridge ‘was a more sympathetic and important one than our ignorance of John Morgan's life has allowed us to surmise’. Maybe so.

Here are two jokes about bodily functions that amused Coleridge enough in 1810 for him to jot them down.

The one advantage of p—— one's breeches.
   The two Judges on Horseback in a hard rain—Nares proposed to dismount, micturus—the other told him—to keep his seat &c—You can't be wetter, and you may be warmer.—
   The crooked Lady whose crepitus had all the effect of a french horn—the same that swallowed a nail, & it came out a cork-screw. [Notebooks, 3942]

Nares is George Nares, a once-famous judge. The old joke about the crooked lady has lasted into the modern age. Field Marshall Gerald Templer once told Lord Mountbatten, ‘Dickie, you're so crooked that if you ate a nail you'd shit a corkscrew’.

Talking of shitting, here's a four-line poem about flies and merde:

Sit alba, sit fusca
(Ni res est absurda)
Quod fuit Merda in Muscă
Jacet Merda in Merdà

Tricky to translate and preserve the joke. The notebook entry of which this poem is a part [Notebooks 4:4710] includes jocular speculation on what it calls the ‘grave’ problem of whether the uptake of excrement by shit-eating flies is equalled by the shit those same flies excrete—we might translate: ‘whether white or black-dye/(Unless it's absurd)/What was shit in the fly/Lies as turd in-turd’. And here is a little doodle from 1817.

The Greek means ‘old woman who collects things’; as does the Latin. It was a usage noted by Heyschius and other grammarians, and is cited, with its Latin equivalent, in lots of places, so we can't be sure where Coleridge chanced upon it. Here it is, for example, in the notes to a contemporary (to Coleridge) edition of Aulus Gellius:

Coburn thinks that little doodle is a broom (I suppose she's thinking of an old woman sweeping lots of things into one heap). I don't think it's a broom. My imagination lives more in the gutter than Coburn's, evidently. You see, whilst anus does mean old woman, it also means ... well, anus. And I think Coleridge was tickled at the idea of a collecting, rather than emitting, arsehole, which he has sketched there at the end of that little crease.

And here, from August 1811, is a bit of fake Homer on the topic of Achilles taking a dump.

Achillis cӕna hesterna,
distichon nunc primo a MSS. omnium Codicum homericarum aperte vetustissimo

Πώγον υποκτείνων πετρας ἀπο σκληροκιρυγδοῦς
שλιששλoשιται Aχιλεύς φλoשβoש ἐπί ρωoριμoίo  [Notebooks, 4102]

The first bit in Latin, there, means ‘Achilles's Yesterday's Meal: a distich, now first printed from what is evidently the oldest of all Homeric codices’. πώγων, the first word of the Greek, means ‘beard’, but was also used, for instance by Aristophanes, to refer to the hairy pubic area—here, it clearly means arse. Also: the second line of the Greek incorporates the Hebrew letter shin, a ‘sh’ sound, into two of its words. This gives us:

Extending his arse beyond the hard rock
Achilles hurriedly shlishshlosh-es over the floshbosh

[I'm not sure about ρωoριμoίo, but presume its a variant of ῥώoμαί, ‘to move with speed’; Coburn's transcription has ρωαριμoίo, which so far as I can see isn't any kind of word, and which I'm assuming is a slip]. What I find particularly interesting here is the way the excremental expresses what is, surely, a grammatological point of entry: because the Greek alphabet has no sh sound, which makes it hard to write suitably onomatopoeic verse in Greek about shitting into rivers. Conceivably Coleridge is even toying with the idea that very early Greek, Graecus primus, had such a letter, perhaps akin to the Hebrew ש, but that like the digamma it disappeared. What gives this an interesting extra layer is that ש was one Coleridge's ciphers for Sarah Hutchinson, his Asra (SH, you see). And that's not an arbitrary reference either, I think.

:2:

At this point, in a manner more or less, and I daresay less, likely to convince you, I aim to turn this blogpost around. Because the more of these examples I pile up from the notebooks (and there are very many more), the less I see it as merely lavatorial humour, or occasional ribaldry, and the more I find myself thinking we're touching on something quite profound and important to Coleridge's poetic and philosophical imagination. That looks unlikely, I concede; but bear with me for a moment and I'll try to argue the case.

I'm going to segue into my larger point with two more notebook entries, neither of them merely jokey. Here is Coleridge considering a bowl of piss:

What a beautiful Thing Urine is, in a Pot, brown yellow, transpicuous, the Image, diamond shaped of the of the [sic] Candle in it, especially, as it now appeared, I having emptied the Snuffers into it, & the Snuff floating about, & painting all-shaped Shadows on the Bottom. [Dec. 1803, Notebooks 1:1766]

This is the very essence of the Coleridgean notebooks, and one of the things aficionados love about them (Seamus Perry calls the notebooks ‘the unacknowledged prose masterpiece of the age ... a work, by turns, of philosophical profundity, descriptive beauty, verbal brilliance and human comedy—and sometimes tragicomedy, and sometimes tragedy’, and I agree with him). That STC could spin such a beautifully vivid and expressive paragraph about something so apparently unpromising as the contents of his pisspot seems to me a marvellous thing. It might have been merely pretentious, but somehow it isn't: rather it reverts our attention back onto something we have been acculturated to consider abject and untouchable to bring out its aureate loveliness.

Transpicuous means transparent, but Coleridge is surely thinking of Milton (‘that light/Sent from her through the wide transpicuous air,/To the terrestrial Moon to be as a star’, Paradise Lost 8:140-142), which positions the piss less as a fluid and more as a medium, as, indeed, a kind of lens through which we see certain things more clearly. It is a candlelit colour, warm and precious, and those little slips of the pen (‘the of the’) run the risk of distracting us from how exquisitely this little section of prose plays with language. At the risk of sounding like Malvolio pulling the cs, us and ts from his lady's letter: look at how prolific this passage is with ‘p’s and ‘i’s and ‘s’s of piss: pot, appeared, painting, is-in-in-it-it-I-into-it, transspicuous shaped especially as snuffers snuff shaped shadows. Or again, look how rapidly Coleridge's imagination skips from association to association in what amounts to a chain of Latin punnery, consciously framed as such or otherwise: urine in Latin is urina; pot in Latin urna; burnt-colour (brown, yellow) uro; ‘to plunge into water’, like a diver (or like an dicarded snuffer) is urino. And shadow (umbra) isn't that far away. Coleridge isn't piddling around here: he is shaping a verbal text that captures beauty in the unmentionable, the discarded, the impolite.

And finally here is a notebook entry from a few years later, about a hawk in flight: unpublished in Coleridge's lifetime, but to me a piece worthy to stand with Shelley's ‘To A Skylark’:

The soil that fell from the Hawk poised at the extreme boundary of Sight thro' a column of sunshine—a falling star, a gem, the fixation, & chrystal, of substantial Light, again dissolving & elongating like a liquid Drop—how altogether lovely this is to the Eye, and to the Mind too while it remained its own self, all & only its very Self—. What a wretched Frenchman would not he be, who could shout out—charming Hawk's Turd!—[Sept 1808; Notebooks, 3:3401]

This seems to me gorgeous writing, but I have to concede those critics who have deigned to notice it haven't taken it so seriously as I do. John Worthen, for instance, notes the ‘rapturous’ tone of the paragraph, but swiftly qualifies his judgement: Coleridge, he says, ‘also knew such language teetered on the edge of absurdity’ [Worthen, The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Cambridge Univ Press 2010), 76]. I'm not sure he did know that, because I'm not sure that such language does, actually. 'Frenchman' is a generic insult, of course; but the entry is saying: don't be that Frenchman. Delight in the hawk's turd! It is, in its own specific way, a miracle of flight (turdus in Latin is a variety of bird—it means thrush, of course); and as such becomes a rebus for the spiritually transcendent beauty of all created things, poetry not the least. This particular notebook entry continues:

O many, many are the seeings, hearings & tactual Impressions of pure Love, that have a Being of their own—& to call them by the names of things unsouled and debased below even their own lowest nature by Associations accidental, and of vicious accidents, is blasphemy—What seest thou yonder? X.—The lovely countenance of a lovely Maiden, fervid yet awe-suffering, with devotion—her face resigned to Bliss or Bale, &c &c.—Y. A Bit of Flesh.
That which cannot be seen unless by him whose very seeing is more than an act of mere sight. ... The Polyclete that created the Ἀφροδίτη Καλλίπυγος thought in acts, not words—energy divinely languageless—(ο λογος εκ θεῳ και συν θεῳ θεος)—δια τον Λογον, oυ συν επεσι—thro' the word, not with words.

The Greek glosses the famous Johannine phrase, and means ‘the word from God and with God, God—via the Word not with words’. Nor is it irrelevant that it is the famous sculpture ‘Aphrodite of the Beautiful Buttocks’ (‘Aphrodite Cute-Arse’) that enters into Coleridge's thought as an embodiment of the expression of non-verbal beauty: this sexualised bottom balances the implied functional shitting bottom, as a way of dignifying sexual desire and bodily functions, rather than dragging classical sculpture into the gutter. This is not the edge of any absurdity, unless we want to expand that word to encompass the leap of faith as such. It is Coleridge saying that the dropping turd of the hawk in flight is beautiful, as the backside of Aphrodite is beautiful: transcendentally so. To treat it as vulgar, either for comic or lustful purposes, is actually blasphemous. This, to appropriate Blake's famous phrase, is Coleridge seeing Heaven in a grain of shit.

Coleridge's notional interlocutors, X and Y, do not see the same thing when they see a woman. For the latter she is only flesh to be lusted over; but the former really sees her, sees her for what she is, and that means he sees that something spiritually fine has been erected out of a universally excremental material. Dickens, a generation later, makes a similar play with the word dust: the ‘dust-heaps’ that are the source of the Boffins' fortune in Our Mutual Friend are collections of all the rubbish of London, and contain waste matter wet as well as dry, faecal as well as functional (indeed, the ‘night soil’ men of London made good money repurposing human and animal shit as fertilizer; for though not every crop can be safely grown in the former waste, some, like tomatoes, can). Behind the social reportage of an actual feature of 19th-century London life is a spiritual insight, as is often the case with Dickens. In this case, the whole novel is haunted by one of the most famous of Biblical verse: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. We may sanitize this mortal verse (Genesis 3:19) by thinking of something powdery and dry, but human corruption is rather wetter than drier, rather more excremental than powdery—and so, after all, is human conception. We don't produce a clean dry pollen like the plants of the field, after all. Indeed, whilst I'm no connoisseur of modern porn (I know: they all say that ...) I've often been struck that one of the most pathological aspects of that ubiquitous form of contemporary cultural production is now weirdly clean it all is: how washed and buffed, how depilated and teeth-bleached and plastic the players all are; how all human dirtiness and shoddiness and ordinary inadequacy has been banished from the whole performance. In that, Coleridge's X and Y mini-conversation seems to me still to have real relevance.

I don't want to stray from the Coleridgean point, for I do think these sorts of questions genuinely engaged him. Read his autobiography, and you can't help but be struck by how much grief his own bowels gave him. Severe constipation is one of the side-effects of opium (that is, heroin) addiction, and STC often had to endure what he understandably enough saw as the demeaning indignity of repeated enemas: clyster pipes inserted into his anus by an old female nurse (it would take a more disciplined critic than I to hold back from mentioning the anus collectrix here) for the purpose of forcably irrigating out his compacted shit.

For STC constipation was more than a mere physical inconvenience. He took it as symptomatic of a more *clears throat* fundamental spiritual problem: a blockage of the soul, an inability to work through and move healthfully on in his life and his work that Coleridge autodiagnosed as a pathology of the will. Being helpless in the grip of opium addiction will tend to do that to a person, I suppose. Nowadays we are less inclined to blame addicts. But Coleridge certainly blamed himself, vehemently and often self-laceratingly. In July 1808, prompted by stabbing stomach pains from a prolonged constipated episode so severe that he actually thought he might die, he wrote in his notebook: ‘O misery! when the occasion of premature Death is that which makes Death terrible! Savage Stab! that transpierces at once Health and Conscience! Body and Spirit!—ΩΠΜ’ [Notebooks, 3:3352] Those last three Greek letters, that Oh, Pee, Em, indicate the root of the issue. A drug like heroin takes away the shittiness of the world, and therein lies precisely its problem. That it takes away the actual, normal passage of excrement is almost too apposite.

Here, I think, we touch upon one of the great, if almost entirely overlooked, themes of Coleridge's intellectual and imaginative life. A book like Edward Kessler's Coleridge's Metaphor's of Being (Princeton Univ. Press 1979) does solid critical work isolating a series of focus-points for Coleridge's core poetic ideas: what Kessler calls ‘the Eddy-Rose’ (a sort of composite metaphor that combines eddies, whirlpools and the like with the patterns of petals of a beautiful flower); phantom life; Limbo and so on. But Kessler doesn't talk about the turd, in part because respectable published-in-his-lifetime Coleridge, critic and poet, doesn't bring turds into his work very often. But the notebooks are full of it, and as metaphors of being go it is, I think, hugely important. I understand why critics have generally avoided writing about it; but it does seem to me distorting.

The whole process of eating, drawing sustenance, and shitting out waste is an organic through-line that iterates the dream of health, both physical and more importantly spiritual, as far as Coleridge is concerned. His greatest poetic achievements are potent dramatisations of the breakdown of that healthful flow. The subterranean river in ‘Kubla Khan’ flows not out into the open ocean, but round and down in a turbid eddy that loses itself somewhere hidden and sunless. The Ancient Mariner's cursed, blocked voyage replicates a whole string of nightmare-death-in-life constipations (until, at least, a mystic Christian blessedness and forgiveness intervene: but even there the Mariner is caught in a recurring cycle of obsessive-compulsive retellings of his tale). ‘Christabel’ can't even (if you'll excuse me) shit out its own ending, so trapped it is in its recirculation of blocked and morbid desire. For Coleridge, shit, like the beauteous airborne turd of the flying falcon, is a symbol of health, of through-flow and freedom.

American critic Alan Jacobs has coined the phrase “excresacramental” for a particular sort of art, a Swiftian cacography that articulates not only the expressivity but actually the holiness of the abject-physical. From the point of view of the Incarnation, God becoming man is not God becoming the bizarrely soap-washed, clean-linen, dazzling-bleached-smile icon of modern cleanliness that many images of Jesus peddle to modern-day believers, complete with cleaner-than-clean halo shine, like the gleam of newly rinsed glasses in the dishwasher. It is, rather, the non-material taking on flesh and all that flesh is heir to. It is God becoming dust, wet and foul-smelling as well as dry and smoky. The point is, as Coleridge might say, that unless you can truly see that the hawk shitting its load into a sunbeam is as beautiful and holy an image as the white dove flying over blue waters beneath a new rainbow, then you haven't actually seen what beauty in the world fully means. The paraclete is also un(para)clean. For Coleridge, an apprehension of that place where religious transcendence, pure love, sexual desire (for instance, desire for a well shaped set of buttocks) and the healthy bowel-movement all express one another is not a satirical denigration of love: there's nothing of Swift's ‘Celia Celia Celia shits’ horror in STC's writing. Rather it is a strangely, unusually, wonderfully expressive epitome of the central mystery of a genuinely religious writer: the spiritualisation of matter, the materialisation of spirit. Samuel Taylor Kakaleridge.

Coleridge reads Sepúlveda's "De Fato et Libero Arbitraria" (1526) in 1810

So, as I noted previously, we know that in May 1810 Coleridge was reading the 1780 four-volume collected edition of seventeenth-century Spanish Catholic humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494-1573), or at least reading the fourth volume (title page above) of that edition. That vol collects together fourteen separate titles by Sepúlveda, concluding with De fato et libero arbitrio contra Lutherum libri tres (1526) and the Antapologia pro Alberto Pio, Principe Carpensi, in Erasmum Roterodamum (1531). The De Fato is an attack on Luther, and the Antapologia a more measured if still critical engagement with Erasmus, weighing in on the side of one of Erasmus's antagonists, Albert III of Carpi.

These are, it might seem, odd works for Coleridge to be reading. He generally wasn't particularly interested in Catholic theology, or the discourses of the Counter-Rreformation, and although he was not himself a Lutheran he had immense respect for Luther's writing, and praised him in the Biographia and elsewhere (according to E J Dahl ‘Luther was Coleridge's greatest hero and authority, and Coleridge considered that he had taken up his mantle as reformer and theologian’). Still: we know Coleridge was reading these two anti-Lutheran books, because in his Notebook for May 1810 he writes:

How interesting to read Sepulveda (Op. Vol 4 p.470) in a style worthy of Cicero, nay, more manly, yet equally elegantly, attribute all the miseries of Germany, their vices, infidelity, Lutheranism, to the Study, the pernicious study, of Eloquence & Belles Lettres—Item—his abuse of Erasmus for translating Lucian, & leaving the oddments of Aristotle untranslated or in barbarous Latin / Item / what great Mathematicians &c &c &c Germany produced before the restoration of Letters.!!!!!!—nothing since — [Kathleen Coburn (ed), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (5 vols: London: Routledge 1973) 3: 3809]

Here's page 470 of vol 4 (it's the third page of the De Fato, so STC didn't need to read very far into that volume to come across it):

Here's the relevant bit:

III. Sed antequam de iis rebus dico, quae propriae causae hujus esse videntur, non erit alienum, qui fons tantorum malorum, et quasi caput exstiterit, aperire, et de moribus et flagitiosis artibus Lutheri pauca breviter commemorare, ut a quibus initiis profecta nefaria scelestissimi hominis molitio vires paulatim sumendo processerit, intelligatur. Quo in loco illud pro comperto dicefe audeo et constanter affirmare, quod mirum cuipiam fortasse videbitur, studium eloquentiae humaniorumque litterarum Germanis hanc perniciosissimam pestem invexisse. ... Quamdiu enim Germania more patrio gravioribus disciplinis intenta, rebus rerumque solidae cognitioni, non verborum inani garrulitati ac sermonis lenociniis studebat, proveniebant in ea acutissimi mathematici, perspicaces philosophi, theologi gravissimi, honestissimi, religiosissimi: ut non modo sana doctrina, sed etiam optimis moribus ac exemplis ad homines instituendos, et vera religione imbuendos essent instructi. Postea vero quam his optimis disciplinis relictis, coeptum est a leviculis quibusdam hominibus Latini Graecique sermonis cognitioni, ac dicendi facultati accuratius indulgeri, provenere malo pravoque ingenio quidam, qui maledicorum impiorumque scriptorum commercio facile omnem impietatem caninamque maledicentiam imbiberent, seque ad morum pessima quaeque vitia multo etiam magis, quam ad eloquentiae virtutes dociles exhiberent. Itaque non hominum tantum, sed etiam Dei contemtores effecti, quantulamcumque dicendi facultatem comparaverant, hac ad omnem religionem tollendam abuti coeperunt: quorum partim jactatae voces, partim scripta sic Germanae juventuti latitans venenum infundebant, ut paulatim corruptos animos ad scelus impietatis concipiendum commodissime praeparaverint.

Which means:

But before I speak of these matters, and of their proper cause and relevance, it will not be off the point to mention he who was the source and fountainhead of so many evils; to outline, that is, the character and criminal practices of Luther, so that it can be clearly understood how, from small beginnings, his nefarious criminal enterprise was able gradually to grow in strength. At this point in my argument I dare to affirm what will, perhaps, seem extraordinary to some people, that this same pernicious plague was brought upon the Germans by the introduction into their culture of the Literae Humaniores and the study of eloquence [studium eloquentiae humaniorumque litterarum]. ... For as long as Germany followed her sober, native learning, studying the knowledge of true things, rather than the empty garrulousness of vain words and a shameless pimping-up of scholarship, then she produced the very sharpest mathematicians, the most clear-sighted philosophers, the most serious, honourable and religious theologians. They not only explored sound doctrine, but by the best customs and the best examples were able to educate people and instill in them true religion. Soon enough, however, the best of disciplines were abandoned, and this was because certain trivial men wanted to indulge in close study of Latin and Greek, after which there then emerged certain more evil and depraved people who by commerce with disreputable and evil books demonstrated how easily men can absorb all manner of impiety and rabid wickednesses, going from bad vices to worse ones much more than ever they learned the virtues that learning might have brought with it. And so they became contemptuous not only of men, but of God, and turned their small powers of eloquence to the utter destruction of every form of religion: partly just for the satisfaction of hearing the sound of their own voices, and partly to corrupt German youth with their writings, in which lay concealed the poison they were administering.

‘Pimping-up of scholarship’ looks like me being slangy, but it's literally what lenocinium means. So as STC notes, with amused astonishment: Sepúlveda straightforwardly says that the introduction of classical learning to Germany corrupted the nation and so led to Luther and Protestantism.

The reference to Erasmus, in the middle, is less to a specific passage, and more to criticisms Sepúlveda (himself a translator of Aristotle into Latin) makes several times: that Erasmus piddled around translating Lucian when he could have been adding to the glory of God by translating Aristotle. Here's a passage from early in the Antapologia (it's page 549 of the volume Coleridge was reading):

Primum, quod homo Graeca interpretandi studio deditus, Luciani fabellas, quarum cognitione Latini et theologi et philosophi sine ulla religionis aut morum jactura carere poterant, Latine expresseris diligenter, Aristotelis ne verbum quidem converteris, cum essent non pauca illius viri divini opera de philosophia, quae partim perperam, partim barbare conversa, Latinam orationem desiderabant.

Firstly, though you are a man learned in Greek, yet you give your time to the silly stories of Lucian, and diligently render them into Latin, when theologians and philosophers could perfectly well do without those, and yet you translate not one word of Aristotle into Latin, when no small number of that divine man's philosophical works remain untranslated or are only rendered into barbarous Latin.

We can't be certain as to why Coleridge was reading Sepúlveda in 1810, although it's surely likely that having wound-up The Friend in 1809, and starting to think of lecturing again to earn money, he was exploring Aristotle, and reading around the topic. Still, it was the Lutheran jibes that struck him, and it may be this strange little passage, in part, that led to Coleridge stressing in the Biographia how innately German, in language and thought, Luther's achievement was. As to whether Sepúlveda's Latin was at once more elegant and more manly than Cicero's: that you can judge for yourself.