Imagination and Growth: Coleridge and Wordsworth in Germany (1798-99)
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Date
2007Author
Hunnekuhl, Philipp
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Abstract
On 16 September 1798 the packet boat with Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, and his Nether Stowey friend John Chester on board sailed from Yarmouth
to arrive in Hamburg three days later (Frank 220). Behind Coleridge and Wordsworth lay the
year of shared creativity that Wordsworth refers to in the lines quoted above (Owen 270), and
that culminated in the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, published in Britain on 4 October
1798 (Gill Oxford DNB), a mere two weeks after its authors had disembarked in the German
Hanseatic city. Before Coleridge and Wordsworth lay a long, fiercely cold winter of
separation; the Wordsworths spent it in Goslar, a decaying medieval town in Lower Saxony,
whereas Coleridge and Chester first stayed in Ratzeburg and then, in February 1799, moved
on to the then thriving university town of Göttingen. While Coleridge was learning German
and coming into close contact with German academia, the Wordsworths lived a secluded life
in Goslar. Here, Wordsworth sought to compose The Recluse, his intended poetical
masterpiece which envisaged Coleridge as a contributor of thought (Wu 189; 448), and which
may have taken their shared creativity to a new level. Nevertheless, Wordsworth found
himself unable to prolong this joint creativity through writing The Recluse in the absence of
Coleridge, in whose company he had spent “virtually every day” of the preceding year (Wu
189). Instead, Wordsworth began his lasting poetical venture The Prelude – and, in that same
narrow space and timeframe – composed the majority of the “Lucy Poems” (300; 326; 356).
These poems will be referred to in inverted commas, since Wordsworth never grouped them
as such; Victorian scholars initiated the grouping that has led to the modern canon (Jones 7).
This paper focuses on how the months in Germany – from September 1798 to late April
1799 in Wordsworth’s case, and to July of the same year in Coleridge’s – influenced the
poets’ joint as well as individual creativity. The paper’s central claim is that Wordsworth
invented the character of Lucy in order to voice his anxiety about the endangered mutual
creativity in Coleridge’s absence, and that the “Lucy Poems,” just as The Prelude, address
Coleridge. The “Lucy Poems” complement and extend The Prelude; they leave Wordsworth
with the composition of The Prelude as his poetic collaboration with Coleridge comes to an
abrupt halt, while the “Lucy Poems” also pick up the reader where The Prelude leaves them,
namely at the point in Wordsworth’s poeticised autobiography where he is about to meet
Coleridge, and where their collaboration is about to begin. In all her luminous imagery, Lucy
is the poetic personification, the enlightening “Phantom” of Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s
shared creative imagination behind the Lyrical Ballads that the poets envisaged to grow into
The Recluse; she is the “happiness” of “that summer” of 1798 in The Prelude’s “Book
Fourteenth.”