Coleridge and other people's lines
Coleridge kept pocket-books so he could talk back to other people's lines. Hartley printed the pile as Anima Poetae.
Coleridge did not keep a fair copy of what he had read. He kept pocket-books. More than fifty survive. The earliest, begun in 1795, is the Gutch Memorandum Book in the British Museum. The rest mix tours in Germany and the Lakes, notes for lectures, schemes of metre, and, mixed through that, sentences lifted from Greek, Latin, German, and Italian books, some with a comment, some without. In June 1823 he called those books "the confidants who have not betrayed me, the friends whose silence was not detraction." He wanted, if he ever finished the public work, to print what was left "in the words in which I told and talked them to my pocket-books." The talk was the point. Other people's lines went in so he could keep talking.
Ernest Hartley Coleridge, publishing a selection in 1895 as Anima Poetae, had to decide what that pile was. It was not Table Talk. Henry Nelson Coleridge had already made that book in 1835 from sentences that fell in company, arranged so the unities held. Hartley says his volume is "essentially different, not only in the sources from which it has been compiled but in constitution and in aim." He would not print the notebooks in full. They were private memoranda, "a sacred trust." He also would not let them vanish. Coleridge, he writes, "had no mind that they should perish utterly." So he cut. He took unpublished aphorisms and self-communings, put them in date order from the start of the literary career to the 1828 tour, and left the later Flycatchers (biblical commentary, student work) out. What remains is not a digest of favourite quotations. It is the record of a keeper choosing what to talk back to.
That talk-back is the whole method. Hartley opens Chapter I with Sir J. Stewart on memory: present objects strike too hard to be compared fairly with what the mind only recalls. Coleridge does not store the sentence as a specimen. He contradicts it on the same page. The objects of memory, he writes, are often so dear and vivid that present things are injured by the comparison. The item is Stewart's. The recollection is the refusal to let Stewart have the last word. Collecting other people's lines, here, is not filing. It is keeping a mind in the room with the sentence until something answers.
He had already named the tool he wanted for that room. In 1823 he asked when he would have time to reduce the pocket-books to "an Index or Memoriae Memorandorum." Hartley supplied the nearest thing the printed book can give: an index of proper names, so Taylor, Stewart, Bruno, Wordsworth can be found again. The index is only a way back. The work happens in the entry, where someone else's line sits next to what the keeper could not help saying.
Sources: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anima Poetae, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: William Heinemann, 1895). Project Gutenberg eBook #41705. Public domain in the USA. Pocket-book count, Gutch book, 1823 confidants note, Hartley's distinction from Table Talk, and the request for an Index from the Preface. Stewart on memory and Coleridge's answer as printed at the opening of Chapter I.
You may also like
The letter
Read issue 1. Ten we kept this week, and how to keep your own. Or start with how to keep.