PREFACE
Poems on various subjects written at different times and prompted by very different feelings; but which will be read at one time and under the influence of one set of feelings—this is an heavy disadvantage: for we love or admire a poet in proportion as he developes our own sentiments and emotions, or reminds us of our own knowledge.
Compositions resembling those of the present volume are not unfrequently condemned for their querulous egotism. But egotism is to be condemned then only when it offends against time and place, as in an History or an Epic Poem. To censure it in a Monody or Sonnet is almost as absurd as to dislike a circle for being round. Why then write Sonnets or Monodies? Because they give me pleasure when perhaps nothing else could. After the more violent emotions of Sorrow, the mind demands solace and can find it in employment alone; but full of its late sufferings it can endure no employment not connected with those sufferings. Forcibly to turn away our attention to other subjects is a painful and in general an unavailing effort.
"But O how grateful to a wounded heart
The tale of misery to impart;
From others' eyes bid artless sorrows flow
And raise esteem upon the base of woe!"[1136:1]
The communicativeness of our nature leads us to describe our own sorrows; in the endeavor to describe them intellectual activity is exerted; and by a benevolent law of our nature from intellectual activity a pleasure results which is gradually associated and mingles as a corrective with the painful subject of the description. True! it may be answered, but how are the Public interested in your sorrows or your description? We are for ever attributing a personal unity to imaginary aggregates. What is the Public but a term for a number of scattered individuals of whom as many will be interested in these sorrows as have experienced the same or similar?
"Holy be the Lay,
Which mourning soothes the mourner on his way!"
There is one species of egotism which is truly disgusting; not that which leads us to communicate our feelings to others, but that which would reduce the feelings of others to an identity with our own. The Atheist, who exclaims "pshaw!" when he glances his eye on the praises of Deity, is an Egotist; an old man, when he speaks contemptuously of love-verses, is an Egotist; and your sleek favourites of Fortune are Egotists, when they condemn all "melancholy discontented" verses.
Surely it would be candid not merely to ask whether the Poem pleases ourselves, but to consider whether or no there may not be others to whom it is well-calculated to give an innocent pleasure. With what anxiety every fashionable author avoids the word I!—now he transforms himself into a third person,—"the present writer"—now multiplies himself and swells into "we"—and all this is the watchfulness of guilt. Conscious that this said I is perpetually intruding on his mind and that it monopolizes his heart, he is prudishly solicitous that it may not escape from his lips.
This disinterestedness of phrase is in general commensurate with selfishness of feeling: men old and hackneyed in the ways of the world are scrupulous avoiders of Egotism.
Of the following Poems a considerable number are styled "Effusions," in defiance of Churchill's line
"Effusion on Effusion pour away."[1136:2]
I could recollect no title more descriptive of the manner and matter of the Poems—I might indeed have called the majority of them Sonnets—but they do not possess that oneness of thought which I deem indispensible (sic) in a Sonnet—and (not a very honorable motive perhaps) I was fearful that the title "Sonnet" might have reminded my reader of the Poems of the Rev. W. L. Bowles—a comparison with whom would have sunk me below that mediocrity, on the surface of which I am at present enabled to float.
Some of the verses allude to an intended emigration to America on the scheme of an abandonment of individual property.
The Effusions signed C. L. were written by Mr. Charles Lamb, of the India House—independently of the signature their superior merit would have sufficiently distinguished them. For the rough sketch of Effusion XVI, I am indebted to Mr. Favell. And the first half of Effusion XV was written by the Author of "Joan of Arc", an Epic Poem.
Notes attached to a first draft of the Preface to the First Edition [MS. R]
(i)
I cannot conclude the Preface without expressing my grateful acknowledgments to Mr. Cottle, Bristol, for the liberality with which (with little probability I know of remuneration from the sale) he purchased the poems, and the typographical elegance by which he endeavoured to recommend them, (or)—the liberal assistance which he afforded me, by the purchase of the copyright with little probability of remuneration from the sale of the Poems.
[This acknowledgement, which was omitted from the Preface to the First Edition, was rewritten and included in the 'Advertisement' to the 'Supplement' to the Second Edition.]
(ii)
To Earl Stanhope
A man beloved of Science and of Freedom, these Poems are
respectfully inscribed by
The Author.
[In a letter to Miss Cruikshank (? 1807) (Early Recollections, 1837, i. 201), Coleridge maintains that the 'Sonnet to Earl Stanhope', which was published in Poems, 1796 (vide ante, pp. 89, 90), 'was inserted by the fool of a publisher [Cottle prints 'inserted by Biggs, the fool of a printer'] in order, forsooth, that he might send the book and a letter to Earl Stanhope; who (to prove that he is not mad in all things) treated both book and letter with silent contempt.' In a note Cottle denies this statement, and maintains that the 'book (handsomely bound) and the letter were sent to Lord S. by Mr. C. himself'. It is possible that before the book was published Coleridge had repented of Sonnet, Dedication, and Letter, and that the 'handsomely bound' volume was sent by Cottle and not by Coleridge, but the 'Dedication' is in his own handwriting and proves that he was, in the first instance at least, particeps criminis. See Note by J. D. Campbell, P. W., 1893, pp. 575, 576.]
