I keep returning to Samuel Taylor Coleridge because he was, in many ways, a miserable failure.

He’s remembered well today, of course, two hundred years after his career. With his friend William Wordsworth, S.T.C. is one of the most famous Romantic poets. And even in his own day Coleridge was considered a giant. He wrote poetry, delivered public lectures and sermons, worked on philosophy and translation: a true polymath. You may know a sample of his poetic work from an introductory British literature course; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (“Instead of the cross, the Albatross / About my neck was hung.”) is commonly anthologized.

But after years of studying him at the undergraduate and graduate level, I’ve come to know the man better, and have seen his immense flaws. Despite a list of accomplishments, his life was pocketed by failures. The man grappled with years of deep depression. His marriage to Sara Fricker fouled quickly, leading to a lifetime estranged from his wife without possibility of divorce. Creative ambitions to write a grand poetic work were stymied by Wordsworth’s success and his own inability to write with discipline. He struggled with a lifetime addiction to laudanum rivaling that of his contemporary, Thomas De Quincey, the confessional Opium-Eater. Coleridge’s productive friendship with William and Dorothy Wordsworth soured. At the end of his life, Coleridge believed, or hoped, that philosophy would be his primary legacy, but despite his brilliant readings of German philosophers – Fichte, Kant, and Schelling – his philosophical work is nonetheless a reimagining of their ideas, and not entirely original. Worse, several critics levied a charge of plagiarism against him for producing philosophy that is suspiciously close to its German antecedents, though at the same time those critics acknowledge the incredible intelligence involved in his adaptations. The scholar Norman Fruman famously called him “the Damaged Archangel.” Despite Coleridge’s numerous accomplishments, his friends and family, as well as later scholars, often sadly felt that he wasted his raw intellectual power.

Why do I appreciate Coleridge?

Officially, this blog is an exploration of topics in literature, philosophy, science, and religion. First and foremost, I’m writing informal essays about topics that interest me, and I am writing for my own understanding. This blog is not a diary, although I shall include a few personal anecdotes or stories should the occasion arise. The personal can be very potent. And instructive.

Hidden in Coleridge’s complete works is a quirky poem, written for his son, Derwent, that is both personal and esoteric. The first part is a fun mnemonic designed for Derwent to remember the poetic ‘feet’ of English and classical poetry. The second part, addressed exclusively to his son, acts as a fond blessing. For me, both stanzas make it a keenly useful poem for understanding self-education. Here, in its entirety, is the little poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Read it aloud (especially the first section) and try to enjoy the musicality.

 “Metrical Feet”

Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot! yet ill able
Ever to come up with dactyl trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long; —
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng;
One syllable long, with one short at each side,
Amphibrachys hastes with a stately stride; —
First and last being long, middle short, Amphimacer
Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud high-bred racer.

If Derwent be innocent, steady, and wise,
And delight in the things of earth, water, and skies;
Tender warmth at his heart, with these meters to show it,
With sound sense in his brains, may make Derwent a poet —
May crown him with fame, and must win him the love
Of his father on earth and his father above.
     My dear, dear child!
Could you stand upon Skiddaw, you would not from its whole ridge
See a man who so loves you as your fond S.T. Coleridge.

Years ago I studied common metrical feet for a high school literary competition and came to enjoy reading poems by figuring out their cadence, even waving my hand in the air to easily discern the trochees and anapests, like the conductor of an orchestra. By the time I began undergraduate English, I was comfortably familiar with meter in a way that most graduates don’t appreciate. Although we study primarily English literature, I haven’t met many fellow students who appreciate meters of poetry. They know enough to discuss iambic pentameter in referencing Shakespeare, but often consider the assortment of metrical feet unknown, esoteric, and useless.

Nonetheless I found my quirky delight in memorizing metrical feet had a clear benefit: I was understanding and enjoying poetry.

Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett coined a Chestertonian line in his book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking in which he said “the strange inversion of reasoning” offered by Darwinian evolution is that “whereas we used to think (before [Alan] Turing) that human competence had to flow from comprehension (that mysterious fount of intelligence), we now appreciate that comprehension itself is an effect created (bubbling up) from a host of competencies piled on competencies.”

I don’t believe a college sophomore must know the distinction between an amphimacer and a spondee to read Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” and acknowledge what it is saying. But knowing what a poem is and comprehending it are two different things; they are characterized by one important difference. As I began reading poetry “with meters to show it,” I was enjoying poetry for the first time.

Appreciation, in this sense, is analogous to the kind of comprehension that Dennett references. It’s next-level. Memorizing meters and learning poetic feet are a specific set of literary competencies. My spirited interest in the building blocks of a poetic line ‘bubbled up’ into a form of comprehension. After playing for hours upon hours with the orchestral and auditory qualities of verse, I appreciated more poems. Cognitively deconstructing and appropriating units of sound in lines of poetry mediated the mental puzzle of understanding poems literally and semantically. Arguably it enhanced the experience, since appreciation is its own reward. My subjective engagement with poems was therefore much different than – and perhaps vastly improved upon – how my fellow graduate students read poems. I began to think about appreciation as its own form of knowledge or wisdom.

I read “Metrical Feet” as a parable about knowledge acquisition and self-education. In a playful way, Coleridge’s “Metrical Feet” illustrates how achievement is realized, by pairing virtue (“innocent, steady, and wise”) with genuine appreciation (“delight in the things of earth, water, and skies”) and importantly, incorporating a masterful competence of basic elements, i.e. poetic feet (“with these meters to show it”). I’m not claiming it’s necessary to learn iambs and dactyls to achieve just anything – never force a physics grad to learn prosody, lest they respond in kind with multivariable calculus! – but knowledge and comprehension begin in rudimentary competencies. Competencies – in whatever field – may look simplistic, esoteric, or useless on the outside, but nonetheless store incredible value for the person who is willing to commit to them without question.

This topic interests me because, like Coleridge, I consider myself a miserable failure (at certain things). Proper knowledge of the piano should begin with scales and chords, and I never mastered the piano, despite six angsty childhood years of lessons, pretending to learn how to sight-read. Muddling across the keyboard one note at a time – no matter how skilled I became at reproducing any piece from memory – was no substitute for genuine competence with scales and chords. Today, sadly, I know nothing about the piano. Likewise, I spent years of high school and college Spanish classes coasting on natural talent for the language, and then was disappointed and discouraged when comprehension didn’t come. Somewhere along the way I mistook my ease of speech and my decent memory for random vocabulary as a type of competence, without submitting to the rote work of uncomprehendingly practicing Spanish skills that is necessary to churn competencies into comprehension. In other words, I was undisciplined.

I risk speaking reductively if I claim that literature is a vehicle for self-improvement, but certainly it can be a means of understanding. Literature is the articulation of human experience, and where human experience intersects philosophy, science, cognition, and religion, even skill and language acquisition, the literary scholar may have something profitable to say. That intersection is the territory I want to explore.

The hidden story of my writing is centered around potential – a personal attempt to grasp potential. To write diligently, to think better thoughts, to learn how to think clearly, to improve the life of my mind, to develop a more robust imagination, to absorb knowledge and turn it into wisdom. I want this blog to document that project. I return to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s biography and writings again and again, because his genius, creativity, and personal failure inspire me. The Damaged Archangel! – an appropriate guide for the beginning of an intellectual venture.