Despite the large number of Coleridge's poems, it is generally confessed that only "The Ancient Mariner," "Christabel," "Kubla Khan," "Love,"
All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
"Youth and Age" (1822-1832), "Time, Real and Imaginary," with "Dejection" (an ode, 1802), and parts of "France" (an ode, 1798) represent that in the poet which was absolutely his, and his alone. The vision, supernaturally clear, the music, the glow, the strange beauty, are present in these poems, things inimitable and unequalled. Coleridge was always a "teacher" and had been a Unitarian preacher: his early poems are constantly didactic, but, in his poems which live, there is no "lesson" (unless we regard "The Ancient Mariner" as a tract for the prevention of cruelty to animals). The great poems appear to have been given to him in flashes of vision, as "Kubla Khan" certainly was given in sleep, and broken by the arrival of "a person from Porlock" on business. It is fairly apparent that "Christabel" had its germ in a brief vision of the meeting of the innocent heroine with a being beautiful and horrible,
I guess,'twas frightful there to see
A lady so richly clad as she—
Beautiful exceedingly.
We may even conjecture at the close of the vision, a thing so grotesque as well as terrible, that the poem could never find a conclusion.
It is not clear that Coleridge's poems had much effect on those of younger contemporaries. Without Coleridge, Shelley would have written as he did write; if anything by Keats is influenced by Coleridge it is "La Belle Dame sans Merci". To Scott, Coleridge gave only the idea of the metre of "Christabel". In close intimacy Coleridge and Wordsworth stimulated each other. In other respects Coleridge's critical and philosophical ideas welled from him in lectures, orally delivered; his Shakespearean criticism was of the highest merit in spiritual appreciation. In "The Friend," an unsuccessful and unexhilarating periodical; in his "Biographia Literaria" (1817-1818) which is not so biographical or so literary as it is reflective, and critical of Hartley's philosophy and Wordsworth's poems, he is too discursive to be easily read; and the systematic works on philosophy about which he dreamed and talked were never produced.
His life, after his visit to Italy and Malta in 1804-1806, was desultory; his friendship with the Wordsworths was interrupted; Lamb, always true to him, could describe him as "a damaged Archangel"; Hazlitt, furious with Coleridge's later conservatism, insulted his "Christabel" in the "Edinburgh Review": and declared that the praises given to it by Scott and Byron were inspired by desire of praise from Coleridge. From 1816 to his death in 1834 Coleridge lived quietly and more happily with Mr. Gillman at Hampstead, much visited by people who hoped to be instructed as well as charmed by his conversation, or rather by his monologues.
In 1820 Keats met him and walked two miles with him. "He broached a thousand things—nightingales, poetry—on poetical sensation—metaphysics, different genera and species of dreams—a dream accompanied by a sense of touch, a dream related—first and second consciousness—the difference explained between will and volition—so say metaphysicians from a want of smoking" (that is detecting) "the second consciousness—monsters—the Kraken—mermaids, Southey believed in them—Southey's belief too much diluted—a ghost story!"
"The second consciousness" may be the "subconsciousness" or "subliminal self" of modern psychologists. "He is a kind good soul," says the sardonic Carlyle, "full of religion and affection, and poetry and animal magnetism." Scott met "this extraordinary man" at dinner. Coleridge (after dinner) lectured on the Samothracian Mysteries as the origin of all fairy tales; and on the "Iliad" as a miscellany contributed to by many authors during a century. "Zounds, I never was so bethumped with words."
Walter Scott.