He talked divinely
("an archangel a little damaged," Lamb said), and both by his talk and
his metaphysical writings profoundly influenced the literature and
philosophy of the century, both in England and America; but the poet in
him was dead.
"Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain,
And genius given, and knowledge won in vain;
And all which I had culled in woodwalks wild,
And all which patient toil had reared, and all
Commune with _thee_ had opened out--but flowers
Strewed on my corse, and borne upon my bier,
In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!"[1]
It would be a mistake to ascribe the paralysis of Coleridge's powers of
constructive imagination exclusively to laudanum. Rather the resort to
narcotics and the inability to control his creative faculty are alike
symptoms of a temperamental malady which had its roots in his nature
close to the seat of that special faculty. Under a favorable conjunction
of outward circumstance and inward state, imagination came; it possessed
him, and he labored in it, happily. Afterwards he could revise what he
had shaped, analyze it philosophically, perfect some details of it, but
he could not proceed in the creative act after the inspiration had left
him. His own description of his nature--"_indolence capable of
energies_"--is accurate as far as it goes. The opium, resorted to often,
no doubt, to quicken the dreams in his brain as well as to relieve his
bodily suffering, helped to enfeeble his will; but the "indolence" was
in him before he became addicted to opium, and he was never "capable of
energies" at the call of duty, but only at the call of his "shaping
spirit," over whose coming and going he had no control.
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