Adam Sisman
The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Viking, 480 pages, $27.95
Writers, craving praise and hating criticism, are unusually contentious. Their personal quarrels, which spill into print, are notorious: Pope and Colley Cibber, Johnson and Lord Chesterfield, Ruskin and Whistler, Wells and Henry James, Wilson and Nabokov. These bitter fights are balanced by many warm, stimulating friendships: Pope and Swift, Johnson and Boswell, Byron and Shelley, Frost and Edward Thomas, Owen and Sassoon. Adam Sisman’s book focuses on the apparently ideal six years of friendship (1797–1803), first in Somerset and then in the Lake District, of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Ultimately their poetic alliance bred rivalry and tension, and erupted in a destructive quarrel.
Before their meeting, Coleridge had enlisted in the dragoons under the pseudonym S. T. Comberbache; four disastrous months later he was discharged as “insane.” Wordsworth had had an affair with Annette Vallon in Orléans and Blois. He left France before the birth of their daughter and did not see the child until she was nine, when he returned, during a break in the Napoleonic wars, in 1802. Both young poets had seen revolutionary France as the hope of mankind, but became intensely disillusioned by the reign of terror and the subsequent imperial rule of Napoleon. Coleridge, who’d called for revolutionary reforms in England, no longer blew “his squeaking baby-trumpet of sedition.” But an English policeman, sent to spy on him, overheard the poet talking about Spinoza and assumed that Coleridge was referring to him
