Sevoo's thoughts on Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In the fall of 1994, I wrote:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is both recognized as a poetic genius and critciized as a failure. Coleridge is a failure as a writer only in a narrow, economic definition of success, where the successful writer is expected to earn his living with his pen. If there is any failure present in Coleridge's life, it is writing that failed Coleridge in the larger goal of "communicating the truth"; however, Coleridge surpassed the limitations of any one type of communication by widening his sphere to encompass many types of writing, and supplementing that with a generous amount of oral discourse.

This paper was a very difficult one to write, for me. Unlike a the critical papers to which I am accustomed, I was not writing a dialogue between myself and the text, nor between myself and another critic. I was arguing with Coleridge's contemporaries, who labled him a failure. Who was I to tell them they, who knew Coleridge personally, were wrong about him, and that I knew better?

Nevertheless, I wrote a paper claiming that a hundred and fifty years of literary critics are wrong misjudging Coleridge because they are applying the wrong criteria. In the introduction to Table Talk, a collection of Coleridge's chatter, the editor states that Coleridge was a failure in comparison not with ordinary men, but only with the immense shadow of his own genius.

I don't claim to have resolved anything with this paper. I'm certainly glad that I wrote it -- it caused me to spend a semester immersed in the fascinating writings of a man who had pledged obedience to the apostolic command of Try all things: hold fast to that which is good.

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