Imagination and Growth: Coleridge and Wordsworth in Germany (1798-99)

Abstract

On 16 September 1798 the packet boat with Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and his Nether Stowey friend John Chester on board sailed from Yarmouth to arrive in Hamburg three days later (Frank 220). Behind Coleridge and Wordsworth lay the year of shared creativity that Wordsworth refers to in the lines quoted above (Owen 270), and that culminated in the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, published in Britain on 4 October 1798 (Gill Oxford DNB), a mere two weeks after its authors had disembarked in the German Hanseatic city. Before Coleridge and Wordsworth lay a long, fiercely cold winter of separation; the Wordsworths spent it in Goslar, a decaying medieval town in Lower Saxony, whereas Coleridge and Chester first stayed in Ratzeburg and then, in February 1799, moved on to the then thriving university town of Göttingen. While Coleridge was learning German and coming into close contact with German academia, the Wordsworths lived a secluded life in Goslar. Here, Wordsworth sought to compose The Recluse, his intended poetical masterpiece which envisaged Coleridge as a contributor of thought (Wu 189; 448), and which may have taken their shared creativity to a new level. Nevertheless, Wordsworth found himself unable to prolong this joint creativity through writing The Recluse in the absence of Coleridge, in whose company he had spent “virtually every day” of the preceding year (Wu 189). Instead, Wordsworth began his lasting poetical venture The Prelude – and, in that same narrow space and timeframe – composed the majority of the “Lucy Poems” (300; 326; 356). These poems will be referred to in inverted commas, since Wordsworth never grouped them as such; Victorian scholars initiated the grouping that has led to the modern canon (Jones 7). This paper focuses on how the months in Germany – from September 1798 to late April 1799 in Wordsworth’s case, and to July of the same year in Coleridge’s – influenced the poets’ joint as well as individual creativity. The paper’s central claim is that Wordsworth invented the character of Lucy in order to voice his anxiety about the endangered mutual creativity in Coleridge’s absence, and that the “Lucy Poems,” just as The Prelude, address Coleridge. The “Lucy Poems” complement and extend The Prelude; they leave Wordsworth with the composition of The Prelude as his poetic collaboration with Coleridge comes to an abrupt halt, while the “Lucy Poems” also pick up the reader where The Prelude leaves them, namely at the point in Wordsworth’s poeticised autobiography where he is about to meet Coleridge, and where their collaboration is about to begin. In all her luminous imagery, Lucy is the poetic personification, the enlightening “Phantom” of Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s shared creative imagination behind the Lyrical Ballads that the poets envisaged to grow into The Recluse; she is the “happiness” of “that summer” of 1798 in The Prelude’s “Book Fourteenth.”