Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel

Abstract

SINCE IT WAS published in 1971, Norman Fruman's Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel has perplexed and divided its readers. The book reinvigorated the debate about Coleridge and plagiarism, and widened the split between those critics who eulogise, or ignore, Coleridge's plagiarisms and those who condemn them. Coleridge, like Wordsworth, wanted his modus operandi to be seen on its own terms, though critics have tended to take neither at his word. Andrew Bennett, for instance, has recently investigated Wordsworth's paradoxical denial that he wrote poetry at all, but somehow intuited and improvised it into existence, and has shown persuasively that Wordsworth's surviving manuscripts actually reveal a painstaking process of ‘writing, re-writing, deleting, scratching out and overwriting … revision and replacement, deletion, review, re-revision, alteration, correction and editing’.1 Bennett's unmasking of a writer's myth about himself broadly follows in Fruman's footsteps; but where Bennett disputes Wordsworth's denial of writerly labour, Fruman is most concerned to explode Coleridge's running denial of plagiarism: Intellectual dishonesty in a man of genius seems bizarre, as does petty greed in a man of great wealth. Yet compulsive acquisition of reputation or power derives from overmastering personal needs, the ultimate sources of which are always obscure. The broad outlines of Coleridge's profoundest intellectual aspirations are clear enough: above all he was driven by a desire to achieve a reputation for dazzling creative gifts and universal knowledge.2

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