Of all the poets I read when I was young Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of those I loved best. In the sixth form at school there were five of us who knew Kubla Khan by heart and one of us only had to begin and the rest would join in the sacred chant that ended the poem:
And all shall say Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
The lines, the whole poem, all Coleridge’s poetry still fill me with delight. And as I grew older I graduated to his prose works, his letters, his diaries, his great Biographia Literaria. Dip into his writings anywhere and there are treasures. About the lessons of history: “If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!” About writing poetry: “I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry: that is, prose = words in their best order, poetry = the best words in the best order.”
The excursions Coleridge made within his own mind were travels as wondrous as any man has ever undertaken. He finds the meaning of civilization and his own salvation in the irrepressible life of language. His notebooks pour out a torrent of enchantments and interrogations. He questions whether life – or literature – can have real meaning without some form of Divine continuity or assurance within the structure of reality. Often he loses faith and expresses black despair, but even his despair is extraordinarily lit by one of the most creative and visionary imaginations which has ever worked with language.
This is why the report a few years back that 300 poems written by Coleridge, but lost since he wrote them, had been re-discovered was a piece of news easily more important than most of the ephemeral or degrading rubbish highlighted in the media. A fair equivalent might be if in some dusty vault a treasury of lost Cézannes were found or old film of Nijinsky dancing or George Headley making a century of which nobody had kept a record but in the imagination.
The Coleridge manuscripts were unearthed in a fanatical search over twenty years on five continents by Professor Jim Mays, then head of the English Department of University College, Dublin. We are forever in debt to such wonderful obsession. The works range from two-line fragments to poems ten pages long and include thousands of new versions of poems already known. There are six versions of an elegy to the poet’s broken shaving pot. There is a vivid poem written in Greek and Hebrew about a friend who had trouble sustaining erections with his frisky young wife. One poem is written on pale seaweed. Some are written in the medicine Coleridge took for his gout, some in blood drawn when he bit his thumb after running out of ink. “If you are stuck on a mountain, inspired by the falling night, and you want to write something, your own blood may be the only thing that’s handy,” Professor Mays commented.
In that magnificent and unexpected archive of lost work by one of the very greatest men of literature who ever lived, one extraordinary fact particularly struck me. It is that over 100 versions of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner were found by Professor Mays. Anyone who loves poetry, who loves the care and dedication and striving for unattainable perfection which must go into the best poetry, will be pleased to see that sign of a great poet at work. More than 100 versions of that one poem! And how many drafts of The Ancient Mariner did Coleridge crumple up and destroy, eternally dissatisfied with the results of grappling with the endless potentialities of language? You can be sure that Coleridge was never satisfied with any poem he ever wrote. For the most sublime creators perfection is a mirage glimpsed in the imagination’s eye but never grasped.
When Brian Lara was interviewed after one of his world records, the 501 scored for Warwickshire in 1994, he said he thought he still had a lot to learn. The reporters believed he was joking. I am sure that he wasn’t. I am sure he looked upon that remarkable innings as no more than a superior draft of work that certainly could be improved further. The greatest poets, the greatest artists are never satisfied even with their best work. Martin Carter felt that no poem he ever wrote was completed. He used to “release” his poems for publication but he was never entirely satisfied.
It is those without the slightest talent who are most smugly proud of what they produce on the spur of the moment. They never care to revise before they try to pass off their work as the fruits of pure inspiration and soon-to-be-discovered genius. They see no need to improve what is already perfection in their own eyes. Such petty versifiers could no more comprehend a Coleridge writing hundreds of drafts of a single poem than their equivalents in cricket will understand the fact that even after Sachin Tendulkar has made nearly a century of international centuries – Tests and ODIs – he is as certain as ever that it still remains for him to craft the best innings of them all.
