"Desolation"

 In the Coleridge and Wordsworth section of his lectures on The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, T.S. Eliot introduces his discussion of the former poet's critical writings by portraying the state of Coleridge's mind at the time he composed the Biographia Literaria. Eliot seeks to present a contrast between the youthful rebelliousness of Wordsworth at the time he made his most lasting critical statement—in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads—and the somber mood of late-career desolation with which Coleridge composed his own most famous prose work. At the time he wrote the Biographia, Eliot reminds us, Coleridge "was already a ruined man."

The source of Coleridge's condition at the time, Eliot explains, was a fear that the flash of inspiration he had once experienced would never come again. This may surprise us. We tend, when thinking of the great poets and artists of history, after all, to imagine that their masterworks must have given them lifelong satisfaction—and sufficed them for lifelong occupation. They must have recognized their own most immortal works for the eruptions of genius they were, we think, and been able to spend all of their time in composing similar works or merely basking in the glory of their achievement. What we forget is that in this, as in all domains of achievement, no matter the merits of a single work we may have done, there is still, once it is accomplished, all the rest of life that needs somehow to be filled up.

This, as Eliot sees it, was exactly Coleridge's problem. He had composed his handful of great poems under the aegis of an inborn genius. Once they were finished, the muse deserted him and did not come again. But Coleridge the man remained. He had to occupy his days somehow. So he immersed himself in abstruse works of German philosophy. This, as Eliot sees it, was fatal to whatever poetic talent he might have had left. Eliot refers to the "stupefaction of [Coleridge's] powers in transcendental metaphysics." He sums up with the haunting verdict that, by the time he turned his attention to writing the Biographia, Coleridge was "condemned to know that the little poetry he had written was worth more than all he could do with the rest of his life."

I couldn't say whether, biographically, Eliot was at a stage in his own career at the time he gave these lectures (in 1932) when he feared something similar might be happening to him—whether he felt that he had exhausted his own powers, or that his best work was already behind him. Perhaps it's just a fear that besets every writer—the worst one imaginable, that of no longer being able to write—so Eliot had no trouble grasping the horror of Coleridge's mental prison. Whatever the cause, Eliot writes in this passage with an especially keen emotional intensity, and one can't help but feel that he is experiencing a sense of personal identification. He breaks off his lectures at the end, for instance, by calling our attention back to the image of Coleridge: he tells us that he had better stop theorizing, lest he end up the same way. 

I feel that identification too, in reading Eliot's description. I have been troubled all this past year, if not for even longer, by the thought that I have somehow outlasted my best self. That the work I had to do in the world was finished, yet I am lingering on. Of course, when we think of the great literary figures of the past, it is hard to imagine them experiencing something similar. We regard another life from the outside as if it were a single totality. "Coleridge accomplished great literary works that have lasted for all time and are still anthologized: his life must have seemed to him a success." This, of course, as even a fleeting acquaintance with Coleridge's biography shows, was not true. He, like each of us, experienced his life as a succession of states, not a single status of either success or failure. But it is harder to remember that the titans of the past experienced themselves as minnows of the present. 

And since each of us has to live our own life within the passage of time—and we do not have the luxury of regarding ourselves from the perspective of posterity as a completed vast entity, one life from beginning to end that can be weighed and measured—we confront Coleridge's problem too. This doesn't mean we are discontented or insecure with our own achievements, necessarily. We may well take pride in something we've done in the past. But that still doesn't solve the problem that comes after, and which stems from our condition as creatures of the moment. We still have to spend our time in the present worrying about what we will do now? What comes next? 

Coleridge in this was not alone. I think too of Arthur Rimbaud in the second chapter of his career in North Africa. After the boy-wonder of verse famously renounced poetry and sought a new life on another continent, he spent his time in pursuits that most of us would only see as an utter waste of his potential—a perverse self-denial of his own obvious poetic gift. Edmund White's slender biography of Rimbaud shows us the erstwhile poet in Africa ordering for himself by mail various practical manuals of engineering and the sciences, for instance—things that could not feed a poetic talent, in short, and that seem to us tantamount to throwing away the muse's treasures. The man who had written A Season in Hell could presumably write again, we think, if he didn't stock his mind full of unrelated technical lore, laying schemes for a practical middle-class career that strike us now as pathetic, because we know they would never materialize. 

Such seems to be Eliot's verdict on Coleridge as well. He condemns him for stultifying his own poetic talent by filling his mind with the dry and highly unpoetical dross of German transcendental idealism. He reads Coleridge's lines in the poem on "Desolation" as a confession on Coleridge's part of the realization that these metaphysical investigations were ultimately self-defeating. His "abstruse research to steal/From my own nature all the natural man," writes Coleridge, led ultimately to the death of his poetic muse, which he calls his "shaping spirit of imagination." He concludes: "that which suits a part [namely, his metaphysical researches] infects the whole, and now is almost grown the habit of my soul."

Yet, I don't feel I can join in the condemnation of Rimbaud or Coleridge. Their efforts to reinvent themselves and pursue different intellectual directions, after their mysterious inner urges to write verse had dissipated, is far too intimately familiar to my own experience. Of course, I cannot point to my own "Ancient Mariner" or Season in Hell in my past. But I do have a sense that I already used up whatever literary inspiration I was to be given, so if I am going to keep living from here, I need some new guiding star; some new projects. This is why, if people see these projects as out of character for me or a waste because they do not align with my prior interests or experiences, I can only say that it is precisely because they differ from what came before that they beckon to me now. Rimbaud must have felt the same with his science books; Coleridge with his metaphysics. 

Why should I feel that I led a complete life already? I don't know; I'm sure I didn't by most people's standards of what makes a complete life. But I did much of what I might have sketched out for myself, had I been designing my life as a teenager or in my early twenties. I received a fine humanistic education. I wrote voluminously if largely privately (were Coleridge's poems composed any differently, I ask?) I had a job in the sort of advocacy profession I believed in, and in which most of my time was devoted to writing about issues that mattered to me. I distilled on the page something of my experiences and values. I achieved self-expression. And more than this, I used my writing for the other purpose I always wanted it to serve: that of smashing cruelty, complacency, and hypocrisy. 

I fear now, as Coleridge did, that I may have done those things as well then as I ever will do them. To put it in admittedly self-dramatizing fashion, paraphrasing the Eliot passage above, what I wrote then "may be worth more than anything I will do with the rest of my life." They may have been made possible by ideals that I will never be able to believe in as assuredly again, or by emotions that I will never feel as intensely again. In that case, what I am inclined to do now is not to repeat myself or to try to do over what I have already done better than I could ever do subsequently. Instead, as Coleridge concluded, as Rimbaud concluded—I need to do something new. 

And, much like them, I am inclined to take advantage of a dimming of poetic intensity and fervor to focus now on what can only emerge from the cooling of the ashes of that fire—a taste for the more technical and practical disciplines, in which irrecoverable passions may not need to play such a large role. 

The important thing will be not to live to betray what I once was. Every person—even the poetical geniuses of the past—may be permitted to outlive the best of themselves. What we cannot forgive would be to outlive even the good in ourselves. I wonder for myself—what will it mean to keep the faith? If I do not quite see myself becoming exactly the same kind of advocate as I once was; if I do not see myself penning verse so much as I did in the past; is there nonetheless a way I can do right by my young self? Is there a way that a second career, even if it is in a more pragmatic and technical field, can nonetheless do service to the ideals of my poem- and blog-writing youth? And—who knows—by serving these causes, might it not even be the start of a great resurrection?