MAVERICK GENTLEMAN

Samuel Bronston’s Vanishing Empires

by Nick Zegarac

“True heroism is remarkably sober, very un-dramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.” – Arthur Ashe

In producer Samuel Bronston we have an interesting dichotomy between the man who ‘would be king’ and a lonely Russian immigrant who desperately craved the autonomy of a legendary movie mogul. By the time his gargantuan and costly epic, The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) debuted in theaters, Bronston’s best years as a film maker were arguably already behind him. Most certainly, his golden period in Spain had come to an abrupt and unfortunate end.

A scant three years earlier Bronston had been justly celebrated as the producer of El Cid (1961) – a lavish recanting of the iconic Spanish hero, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar. Indeed, Broston’s flair was well suited for the 1960s, a decade in which virtually all the major studios indulged in ‘super productions’ – elephantine movies of immense scope and considerable length that sporadically did well at the box office.

However, in Bronston’s case, the overwhelming success of El Cid proved a Maguffin as illusive, imaginary and fleeting as any mirage set upon the desert sands. Within a few short years of this critical and financial success, Bronston would find himself ousted from power, penniless and blacklisted. He would adopt the coloring of ‘box office poison’ and appear, at least on the surface, to be a broken man…or – perhaps not. This is his story.

THE ROUGH ROADS AHEAD

In the Spring of 1958, Samuel Bronston packed up his family and moved from Los Angeles to Madrid to produce American movies abroad. It was not a revolutionary concept. By the mid-1950s various film producers had done independent productions all over the world. Going even further back in history, since the mid-1930s, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had had permanent foreign production facilities in Britain. However, in Bronston’s case, he was venturing into decidedly uncharted territory as few of his contemporaries had done or would do for many years to come.

There was little about Samuel Bronston’s past that should have propelled his dreams forward. He was, by 1959, considered something of a has-been in Hollywood. To date, Bronston had produced two successful films; And Then There Were None (1945 – based on Agatha Christies’ Ten Little Indians) and the stirring war film, A Walk in the Sun (1945). However, each had gone so wildly over budget that Bronston was forced to sell off his shares in both projects. In the final tally, he managed to sell himself clear out of the business of making movies in America. It was an ominous prelude of things to come.

Yet, perhaps this financial turmoil that dogged him for most of his life had, in fact, been preordained. Bronston was born at the cusp of the revolution in Bessarabia, Russia (now the Republic of Moldova) on March 26, 1908. His cousin, Leon Davidovich Trotsky (below)was Vladimir Lenin’s right hand and a formidable force in the October revolt that toppled the Tsarist regime.

Young Bronston’s father had been a moderately successful businessman with cultural interests prior to this erupted chaos in his homeland. In fact, Bronston’s father despised the revolution and sought to rid his family of the stigma by association with Trotsky with a move to Paris in 1918. Unfortunately, with little money to travel on, the Bronston family (nine siblings) arrived in France dirt poor. For the next several years Sam and his brothers would have no real home. One story of this period in young Bronston’s life recollects that there was only one good pair of pants to the family name and those were reserved for the eldest boy to attend school. Another childhood story casts Bronston as an impoverished busker on the streets, begging for his supper by selling scraps and family heirlooms.

What is for certain only now, years after his death, is that the early sketch of life that Bronston provided to the press in later years - that of a well educated and self-professed film savvy zeitgeist - seems to have been largely a fabrication derived from Bronston’s own fertile imagination and his sheer determination to succeed in a business he knew absolutely nothing about.

To be certain, Bronston’s ability to cordially liaise with the highfaluting jet set made him the most appealing and elegant of social sponges – schmoozing wealthy friends as he lightened their pockets for dream projects that, as yet, he had neither the means nor the wherewithal to actually produce. Employed as a clock worker in Marseilles, Bronston finagled his way into United Artist’s French production unit by professing a deep understanding of making movies. It was a colossal lie, but it worked.

All appeared well on the surface for the Bronstons. However, in 1932 Sam was accused of writing bad checks. Following a brief incarceration, French authorities politely suggested that he ‘move on,’ and so Bronston migrated with his family to England the following year. There, he forged his first fortuitous alliance with the second wife and widow of famed author, Jack London – Charmian Kittredge (left). Bronston would produce his first independent project as an exaltation of the author, in part a thanks for Charmian’s faith in him; the rather turgid, though profitable The Story of Jack London (1943).

In that same interim, Bronston moved his wife and his cousin, Leon Patlach to New York City, then Washington and finally Los Angeles. Of all the adult associations that Bronston would have throughout his life and career, perhaps none was as personally beneficial or rewarding as the one shared with Patlach – an utterly devoted, compassionate and intelligent man, who at least made valiant attempts to steer and manage Bronston’s professional life away from the pitfalls of total financial ruin.

MAN OF VISIONS

To suggest that Samuel Bronston was a visionary is perhaps a stretch. Though Bronston believed in the proliferation of film as art, there was nothing particularly cutting edge about his approach to film making. What set Bronston apart from most of his contemporaries was his inexhaustible optimism and his insatiable consistency in generating and regenerating ideas into feasible projects.

With $75,000 schmoozed from a Dutch expatriot, Bronston financed a comfortable home on Beverly Drive in Los Angeles where he sat idyll for the next two and a half years. An alliance with legendary producer, Budd Schulberg eventually led briefly to a career at Columbia Studios where Bronston produced The Adventures of Martin Eden (1942) and City Without Men (1943), the latter a B-movie starring then unknown Linda Darnell. It was during this tenure that Bronston quickly learned the film business from the ground up.

In retrospect, Bronston’s early days as a wily chameleon on the streets of Paris – cajoling, conning and conniving rich patrons - had provided him with the ideal training for this period in his life. Hence, when the Knights of Columbus planned an ambitious project to photograph the wonders of the Vatican, Bronston was there to take them up on their offer and commit to a thirty film series.

Granted unprecedented access to the considerable archives of the Catholic diocese and numerous papal audiences, Bronston arrived at the Sistine Chapel with a veritable army of crew and photographic supplies. Unfortunately, the intense heat generated from the enormous lights caused a minor fire in the famed chapel and a major scandal that succinctly ended the project on a decidedly sour note. With one ill-timed event, Bronston had effectively managed to alienate the Catholic church and burn his bridges in Hollywood. He could have easily given up. Instead, Bronston turned to an unlikely country for the rebirth of his greatest ambitions – Spain.

MOVIE MAKING ON A GRAND SCALE

In hindsight, Samuel Bronston and his adopted country – Spain – seems a perfect fit. Neither Bronston nor Spain had been particularly well received on the world stage. Both were in line for a major overhaul and both had their sights set on new horizons.

Under the totalitarian rule of General Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teodulo Franco y Bahamonde (Franco, for short), nationalist Spain had been perceived as something of a direct threat to the free democratic countries of the world. Indeed, Franco’s regime held close to the fascist trappings of Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, with no international trade and an economically backward approach to foreign investment. (Americans could put money into the country. They just couldn’t take any money out!)

Even with this rigid structure in place, independent Hollywood film makers like Stanley Kramer and Robert Rossen had managed to shoot movies within the country’s borders with the films becoming an exportable commodity and generator of profits abroad rather than the initial investment in the project itself. The reason for these film makers shooting their large scale movies in Spain can be summed up in one word – frugality. Apart from the agreeably warm climate, Spain’s cost of labor and extras was dirt cheap.

Samuel Bronston, however, had a different slant. If, as Rossen and Kramer had proven, films could be made more grandly and cheaply in Spain, why leave the country after their shoot was over? Why not establish a permanent production facility right in the middle of Madrid? Into this brainstorm, Bronston reformulated ties he had already established in Washington with the Rockefellers and Pierponts; two of the most influential and wealthy families in the United States.

Bronston’s key investor in his newly amalgamated Spanish film making empire was Pierre du Pont III; a man of considerable clout and affluence as part of the Du Pont Corporation. Under du Pont’s personal assurances and guarantees with various banks across America, Samuel Bronston was afforded loans for his set up and production costs in Madrid.

Unfortunately for du Pont, the onus for repayment was not on Bronston’s success. Should Bronston fail to produce a hit film, the responsibility to pay back creditors would revert to du Pont. Evidently, Bronston’s checkered financial past and shaky personal credit were of little concern to du Pont. After all, his credit was exemplary. Indeed, the Du Pont family was wealthier than most of the financial institutions from which monies were being borrowed.

For outside investments, Bronston employed a savvy ‘pre-sell’ marketing philosophy that, while quite common today, was virtually unheard of during his time. In essence, Bronston would shoot some of his biggest and most impressive set pieces and sequences first, develop the footage, then use it to market an, as yet unfinished, film to potential distributors while procuring funds necessary to complete his movie.

However, the slickest of all bait and switches was yet to come. A financial arrangement between Bronston and the Franco government involving the oil industry would cap off monies required to make Bronston’s movie dreams a reality. Franco licensed Bronston to act as an intermediary in the purchase and import of oil for Spain. Bronston purchased the crude at a fixed price on the open market, then turn around and sold the import to Spanish refineries for a considerably higher cost, skimming the differential off the top and funneling it back into his film productions.

For du Pont, the Bronston oil deal was just as lucrative, though on different terms: legal money laundering. Since no investment in the Spanish economy could be refurbished in anything other than Pesetas – the national currency – and since du Pont would only accept his remuneration in American dollars - du Pont’s sale of oil to Bronston was repaid by the international monies garnered from Bronston’s completed movies after they had began to turn a profit on the world market.

For their efforts, the Franco government was well repaid in the court of popular public opinion. Once viewed as a pariah state, Spain was now being officially recognized as a tourist Mecca with an endless stream of dignitaries and stars parading through the gates of Bronston’s studios in Madrid.

QUICKENING RISE/METEORIC FALL

Very early in the planning stages, Bronston realized that what he required to make his empire fly was a ‘heavy’ in his front office – someone with a slick and dedicated business acumen who could organize his dream into a stable reality. That man was Philip Yorden (right), an attorney whose own deal with Bronston created quite a stir. For his services as writer/script doctor, Bronston agreed to pay Yorden a then unheard of $400,000.00 per project. In turn, Yorden, who actually knew very little about screenplay writing, tapped blacklisted writers in Hollywood.

A deal was reached with writers Ben Barsman and Bernie Gordon whereby the two would write scripts for a modest fee and Yorden would receive sole screen credit. Barsman and Gordon’s first project was a turgid retelling of the life and times of American patriot John Paul Jones. Their second collaboration would yield one of the best epics yet produced.

El Cid (1961) is usually accredited as being Bronston’s first epic, but actually King of Kings (1959) deserves that honor. Released under the MGM banner, the film starred Jeffrey Hunter as Christ and became the brunt of unceremoniously bad and scathing reviews. In a snap assessment that was picked up by others, the New York Times dubbed the film ‘I Was A Teenage Jesus.’

Nevertheless, Bronston’s move to Spain, coupled with a then staggering $6,000,000.00 investment on El Cid quickly remedied this setback and resurrected Bronston’s reputation within the industry. El Cid took in a staggering $26,000,000.00 in the United States alone and at least that much worldwide, making it one of the most successful movies of its generation. It was the beginning of a very brief, but meteoric golden age for Samuel Bronston.

Immediately following this initial flush of success, Bronston attempted to secure actor Charlton Heston’s services for a follow-up project; The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964). It was perceived that the success of El Cid had largely been due to Heston’s star power on theater marquees – something King of Kings had lacked with the casting of forgotten matinee idol Jeffrey Hunter. Heston, however, was disinterested in the product, judging it too close a cousin to Ben-Hur (1959); the film that had won him his Best Actor Oscar.

As was usually the case with Bronston, he had more than one project on the go simultaneously. Even though he had already begun construction on the sets for The Fall of the Roman Empire, the producer came back to Heston almost immediately with another script for 55 Days at Peking (1963). Heston agreed and Bronston tore down the sets being built for ‘Fall’ to accommodate construction on the Forbidden City for ‘Peking.’ At the time, the Forbidden City set was the largest ever constructed for a motion picture – a record Bronston would break one year later when he ordered the construction of an almost exact replica of the Roman forum for The Fall of the Roman Empire.

To suggest that Bronston’s approach to film budgeting was liberal is to understate the immense costs he frequently incurred in his obsessive quest for historical authenticity. Indeed, both the Forbidden City and Roman Forum sets designed by production manager C.O. ‘Doc’ Erikson were not only built full scale, but also three dimensionally so that regardless of the camera angle chosen they could be photographed on all sides as an actual city rather than facades with mere cardboard backing.

Ironically, given the lavishness and attention to detail, the cameramen working on these movies chose to utilize very little of either set in the finished films. But this did not concern Bronston, who derived a certain amount of sublime pleasure when local and world historians arrived to witness the film shoot, only to be met with jaw-dropping historical accuracy that dwarfed their imaginations as it boggled their minds.

So long as Bronston could be reassured that he would be able to roll the profits from one ‘super production’ into the next, this precarious cycle of financial turnover in his film empire remained renewable. Unfortunately for Bronston, 55 Days at Peking did not perform as well at the box office as El Cid, placing a strain on the studio’s next project; The Fall of the Roman Empire.
When Production Manger ‘Doc’ Erikson approached Bronston with a $9,000,000.00 budget for this latter project – of which Bronston had only secured seven and a half million at his immediate disposal – the producer fastidiously went to work on procuring more outsider investment to make up the difference rather than cut his costs down to suit his bottom line.
ALL ROADS LEAD TO RUIN

In retrospect, it appears as though Samuel Bronston’s motives for investing heavily in movies that, comparatively speaking, returned very little to his coffers, was a pursuit founded and grounded purely in artistic reverence rather than crass commercial greed. As example; when, in 1963 studio manager Paul Lazarus had suggested that the company make B-exploitation films (cheap, quick and dirty) to procure monies for the more lofty epics, the request was flatly rejected by Bronston with the assurance that he would never be willing to compromise anything in quality for the sake of a quick profit.

As a result, Samuel Bronston - described as “a battleship with a fixed rudder” by his own son – never acquired the prowess of a forward planner per say beyond the scope of his next big movie. That he entrusted the daily operation of his studio to colleagues who chose to mismanage monies elsewhere, and, eventually took advantage of Bronston’s hospitality to the point of no return where it bankrupted his Spanish adventure, remains a debatable travesty with social implications.

For Pierre du Pont, the fallout was more immediate and decidedly more embarrassing. When several defaulted loans made to the Bronston organization found their way to du Pont’s desk following the disastrous release of The Fall of the Roman Empire, du Pont was forced to pay in excess of several million dollars to resolve the fiasco – ruining his impeccable credit, ousting him from his inherited family business and publicly humiliating him within his immediate circle of close friends.

Thereafter, du Pont made it his life-long purpose to destroy Samuel Bronston and put an end to his film making endeavors forever. The release of Circus World (1964) not withstanding, Samuel Bronston’s next project; Paris 1900 never went beyond the planning stage.

It is perhaps too easy to simply blame Samuel Bronston outright for his inability to harness all the financial and political energies he had accrued up until this point. Bronston’s finesse for business matters had always been unrefined and clumsy. Despite a federal investigation into ‘secret’ bank accounts in Switzerland (that earned two indictments against Bronston before being overturned by the Supreme Court), the unvarnished truth surrounding Samuel Bronston’s personal finances was that he lived the remainder of his years on a meager social security check of $367.00 a month with his children supporting him for the rest of his life.

In the last twelve years of that life, Bronston never stopped planning his big comeback, though the onset of Alzheimer’s disease did much to slow down and eventually end his ability to conduct business that might have procured one last return to greatness. He died of pneumonia on January 12, 1994 in Sacramento California and, as per his request, was buried in Madrid.
PAVED WITH GOOD INTENSIONS

In the years since his passing, the importance and stature of Samuel Bronston’s filmic legacy has only grown and this is as it should be. Few of his movies were embraced by critics during their original theatrical run: regrettable, though not surprising. Jealousy is often accompanied by a wicked tongue. And there is much to be envious in Samuel Bronston’s personal mantra; a man whose epic idealism was bonded to a decisive need to do things his own way, in his own manner and without any thought or concern for the interpretation or misperception of his artistry visible only in its final cut.

Was Samuel Bronston a failure? The question invariably arises. Financially, there seems to be little debate. Yet, is the measure of a man only to be found in his wallet or also in his whimsy? Bronston’s great gift to the world will always be the four epics he left behind: El Cid, 55 Days at Peking, The Fall of the Roman Empire and Circus World. The films are not just grand in size, scope and style. They speak to Bronston’s daydream-like ability to will past civilizations to life; to his sense of history, his passion for living and his commitment to quality. These are not failed pursuits but rather dreams concretely realized.

Was Samuel Bronston an egotist? Perhaps – but since when is personal pride an imperishable evil, especially when it is coupled to such incredible genius that gave and gave freely of both himself and his movies?

Was Samuel Bronston a con artist? Perhaps…but one who truly believed in the sincerity of his abilities to ‘sell’ practically anyone on any venture during his lifetime. That Bronston was preyed upon by those closest to him during his brief golden period in Spain speaks more to a sacrificial lamb quality rather than base personal greed.

So, is Samuel Bronston a tragic figure? Hardly - for there is little of the man, either in his prime or even during his final years, that would have accepted his best work was behind him. In Bronston’s heart and mind he was always one step away from his next big filmic adventure. He never stopped planning. He never stopped dreaming. Hence, the dream endures even as the dreamer is no more.

The world of entertainment today has not produced another Bronston since. It is fairly unlikely that tomorrow’s generation of film makers will either. For, when all is said and done and written, after the critics and the vultures have lost interest and decamped the bones of success that have been picked clean, the inevitable measure of Bronston’s own ‘success’ is perhaps best distilled into these simple few words from Benjamin Disraeli: “The legacy of heroes is the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example.”

In such context, Samuel Bronston was one of the best.@Nick Zegarac 2008 (all rights reserved).

"Tintern Abbey" And "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison": Wordsworth And Coleridge’s Theories Of The Imagination

The ruins of Tintern Abbey in Wales

The great Romantic poet William Wordsworth, back when he believed in human progress and political liberalism

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, laundanum aficionado and visionary: is it teatime yet?

"Tintern Abbey" And "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison": Wordsworth And Coleridge’s Theories Of The Imagination

Back when I was a junior at Princeton in December 1975, Professor E.D. H. (Dudley) Johnson, an internationally-recognized authority on British Romantic and Victorian poetry (and an amazing collector of British Victorian painting, which was quite out of vogue at the time) praised this college English paper highly and deemed my interpretation “strikingly original.” Check out his illustrated anthology The Poetry of Earth (1966), the definitive collection of British nature poetry, illustrated with British nature art; it’s stunning.

While this essay lacks some of the sweeping apocalyptic power of some of my earlier essays, such as my pieces on Heart of Darkness, Captain Ahab, Huck Finn, the American apocalypse, the Idylls of the King, Bartleby the Scrivener, and Dr. Benway, it still takes it pleasure in quiet things, and it might even shed a slim sliver of light on how the consciousness of two revolutionary sensibilities operated at the birth of the modern era, during the French Revolution and the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

For your convenience, I’m including the complete text of both poems before my essay begins, in case you’d like to read the poems themselves and see what I’m talking about.

For those of you who aren’t very familiar with British Romantic poetry, Wordsworth bestrode the age like a colossus, and he was considered the Godfather of the Romantics, because he was the first and because of his extraordinary power and transcendental worldview; as a nature poet, and as a poet in general, he clearly had a huge effect on Walt Whitman, and Emerson could only gnash his teeth in envy, because there was no way in the world he could ever match Wordsworth’s creative talent.

Wordsworth toward the end of his life, after he had lost faith in the future

But there was another side to Wordsworth. He began his career as an outspoken liberal and advocate of the French Revolution; but he quickly became a rock-ribbed conservative and turned on all the ideas of progressive social change that had formerly inspired him. Think John Dos Passos or Jack Kerouac, or (gulp) David Horowitz. (Or Dennis Hopper and Jon Voight in our own day: ex-hippies who now lovingly embrace Bush.) Byron considered Wordsworth a traitor to the liberal cause—and Byron should have known, because he was practically the coolest man in the world back then. James Bond is a Byronic hero.

Coleridge—well, Sam liked to get high. (Like Norman Mailer, Andre Malraux, William Burroughs, Allan Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, William Brammer, and Robert Stone in his younger years.) For many years he was an opium addict—God bless him, the poor devil—laudanum was his thing, as prescription drug abuse is for many people today (laudanum, or tincture of opium, was widely prescribed back then) . But he used it to fuel his wild imagination, as seen in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kublai Khan,” and as a fantiasist, there’s no question he had a profound influence on Poe, the father of the modern horror story; and maybe through Poe, his influence even reached into Rimbaud and The Flowers of Evil and the other French Symbolists and Decadents.

The great American supernatural writer H.P. Lovecraft: a remarkable child prodigy who recited poetry at age two and wrote complete poems by six, he was cursed by a terrible inferiority complex--because of his lantern jaw, he thought he was as hideous as any of his fantastic creations

Strangely enough, there’s a direct link between Coleridge and Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. As you’ll see when you read my essay, Coleridge’s poem is solely about his friendship with the poet Charles Lamb—and Lovecraft uses an amazing quote from Lamb as an epigraph to his great horror story The Dunwich Horror (1925)—arguably the greatest single work of supernatural literature in the twentieth century. Read this quote from Lamb, think of the uses of the imagination (at which Lovecraft was a master), and then please tell me if the hairs on the back of your neck don’t stand up in awe and terror. Jung couldn’t have put it better:

Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras—dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies —may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition—but they were there before. They are transcripts, types—the archtypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body—or without the body, they would have been the same... That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual—that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy—are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.

- Charles Lamb: Witches and Other Night-Fears

Wilbur Whateley, the Dunwich Horror: his twin brother looked even more like their father

By the way, since we’re on the subject of Lovecraft and The Dunwich Horror, I’d like to take the liberty of sharing with you the brilliant first five paragraphs of The Dunwich Horror—and after you read them, please tell if you don’t agree with me that this is writing that, in terms of mood and technical mastery, can stand up against any short story by a major American writer in the 1920s:

When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.

The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation.

As the demented Wizard Whateley, talented character actor Sam Jaffe was the only great thing about the dismal 1970 AIP film adaptation of The Dunwich Horror: when he cries out, "Let me tell ye suthin—some day yew folks'll hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top o' Sentinel Hill!”, the hair stands up on the back of your neck, and it's real Lovecraft

Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

The magnificent fantasy artist Virgil Finlay, one of the greatest American illustrators of the twentieth century (and an unsung genius who died in poverty) captured the spirit of the man he admired, whose work he so often illustrated in Weird Tales: Lovecraft' secret self, the 18th-century aristocrat and man of letters

Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.

As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no road by which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the neighbouring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterwards one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.

The acclaimed 2005 silent film adaptation of Lovecraft's classic short story, "The Call of Cthulhu"

* * * * *

"Tintern Abbey" by William Wordsworth (1798)

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur. -- Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.

These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: -- feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: -- that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on, --
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

If this

Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft --
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart --
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all. -- I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. -- That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, -- both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

Nor perchance,

If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance --
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence -- wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love -- oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

By William Wordsworth (1770-1850).

[Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,

On Revisiting The Banks Of The Wye

During A Tour. July 13, 1798.]

This Lime Tree Bower My Prison - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1797)


Addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London

Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost
Beauties and feelings, such as would have been
Most sweet to my remembrance even when age
Had dimm’d mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,
Friends, whom I never more may meet again,
On springy heath, along the hill-top edge,
Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,
To that still roaring dell, of which I told;
The roaring dell, o’erwooded, narrow, deep,
And only speckled by the mid-day sun;
Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock
Flings arching like a bridge;—that branchless ash,
Unsunn’d and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne’er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fann’d by the water-fall! and there my friends
Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds,
That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)
Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge
Of the blue clay-stone.
Now, my friends emerge
Beneath the wide wide Heaven—and view again
The many-steepled tract magnificent
Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,
With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up
The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles
Of purple shadow! Yes! they wander on
In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined
And hunger’d after Nature, many a year,
In the great City pent, winning thy way
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And strange calamity! Ah! slowly sink
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun!
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,
Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend
Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes
Spirits perceive his presence.
A delight
Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad
As I myself were there! Nor in this bower,
This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark’d
Much that has sooth’d me. Pale beneath the blaze
Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch’d
Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov’d to see
The shadow of the leaf and stem above
Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut-tree
Was richly ting’d, and a deep radiance lay
Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps
Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass
Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue
Through the late twilight: and though now the bat
Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters,
Yet still the solitary humble-bee
Sings in the bean-flower! Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes
’Tis well to be bereft of promis’d good,
That we may lift the soul, and contemplate
With lively joy the joys we cannot share.
My gentle-hearted Charles! when the last rook
Beat its straight path along the dusky air
Homewards, I blest it! deeming its black wing
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
Had cross’d the mighty Orb’s dilated glory,
While thou stood’st gazing; or, when all was still,
Flew creeking o’er thy head, and had a charm
For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom
No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.

* * * * *

"Tintern Abbey" And "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison": Wordsworth And Coleridge’s Theories Of The Imagination

An old photo of Tintern Abbey

In their poems "Tintern Abbey" (1778) and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" (1797), William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, respectively, revealed the theories of the imagination they held at that time. In light of the similarities and differences between the two poems, it is certainly interesting that they were composed a year apart, but it is not in the scope of this paper to judge what amount of cross-fertilization, if any, occurred between the minds of the two poets. However, the two poems do compare and contrast, and the points of divergence and intersection that become discernable shed light on the revolution of perception (the Imagination) that the Romantic sensibility was helping to engender after the French Revolution.

Both poets use nature as a substitute for God to satisfy their individual emotional needs and to adjust to the treacheries of life, Wordsworth to reconcile himself with the loss of his boyhood innocence; Coleridge uses it as a vehicle for his empathy with Charles Lamb, in order to heal the tensions that will later supply his tragic view of life. In the process, both men expose much of their personalities.

The greatest similarity between the two poems is the method of their construction. Both poets composed their poems to place us inside their minds while they were undergoing the experiences they describe. In each, as the poems unfold, the poet provides us with clues that indicate the psychological process through which his emotions led into each other. These mental triggers, comprised of sophisticated images, create a chain reaction that culminates in the total emotional and intellectual realization that the poet experienced.

The most striking difference between the two poems is their style. Both poets tailor their language to suit their artistic needs. Wordsworth, immersed in his subjective world, speaks entirely in abstract concepts, in order to communicate the moods and thoughts dominating his mind. Coleridge accumulates details to crystallize the powerful emotions moving him.

"Tintern Abbey" deals with the relationship of time, space, and mind. Wordsworth sets the tone at the outset with the words, "Five years have passed..." The description of the famed ruins of Tintern Abbey in Wales that follows is deceptive. Ostensibly the poem is an account of the visit Wordsworth paid there with his sister, but in reality it is about how, despite the fact the place has remained the same, the narrator has changed in the interval, and the poem is about his dawning awareness of and solution to that change.

An aerial view of the spectacular ruins of Tintern Abbey

At first glance, the pastoral scene he paints in the first stanza is an Edenic paradise. Images of peace—"a soft inland murmur" in line 4, "deep seclusion" in line 7, "the quiet of the sky" in line 8, and the "repose" of line 9—accumulate until disconcerting images begin to creep in. "Here, under this dark sycamore" (l. 10), he sees trees with "unripe fruits," a symbol of his young, unfulfilled life, and he senses "some Hermit's cave, where by his fire/The Hermit sits alone" (ll. 21-2), adding a note of human isolation in the midst of nature and suggesting Wordsworth's own loneliness.

Wordsworth's death mask

The second stanza suggests the source of his depression. Referring to the images that comprise his description of the Abbey, he says:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
in hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
with tranquil restoration--…. (ll. 24-30)

Dove Cottage, Grasmere, Home of William Wordworth

Clearly he has incorporated his visceral memories of pastoral beauty into his consciousness with such desperation because of the shock he received migrating from the country to London. (In large part, this facet of his art may account for his popularity in the midst of Industrial Revolution, when many rural boys like himself were deeply unsettled by their exposure to large cities.) Later in the poem, he elaborates on the aspects of urban life that disturbed him so, asserting to his sister that nature will protect them from these evils:

evil tongues,
Rash judgements, nor the sneers of selfish men.
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life.... (ll. 128-131)

With these realities, he associates images

In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart— (ll. 51-54)

For consolation, he turns to his happy memories of Tintern Abbey, and the natural world it represents. He was able to bear London because his memories imparted the transcendent peace through which, he says, "We see into the life of things” (l. 4o). The third stanza is a reiteration of his dependence in London on his memories of pastoral peace.

Dove Cottage

In the fourth stanza, his mind moves him to enlarge upon the implications of his state of mind as presented in the second stanza, and here he introduces the theme to which he will devote "Ode to Intimations of Immortality." He mourns the loss of his unself-conscious boyhood embrace of nature, but in his maturity, he discovers recompense in having found acceptance of the cosmic unity of existence, shown in this world in nature, and of his place in it. No longer is he living in the halycon days

when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led. (ll. 67-70)

"I cannot paint/What then I was" (11. 67-70), he laments. Now he is

more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. (ll. 70-72)

So, unable to accept human society, he has come to Tintern Abbey. However, with the end of youthful joy, he has gained an adult awareness. In the following passage, his inkling of the tragic possibilities of human life leads him into perceiving a guiding force that not only manipulates these possibilities but that also molds all of existence by virtue of its universal permeation. In other words, he has what is almost a religious vision.

A watercolor of Tintern Abbey

For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Not harsh or grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused.... (ll. 88-96)

From there, his images slowly expand to include the continuum of all matter and all sense perception, until his contact with this transcendental entity supplies him with the rationale of his existence, when he is

well pleased to recognize
in nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and the soul
Of all my moral being. (11. 108-111)

In the fifth and last stanza, almost as an afterthought, for the first time Wordsworth mentions his sister, whom we learn has been accompanying him all this time. Initially he claims the mystical experience he has just undergone is inconsequential because she is with him, which rings false, due to the overwhelming power of the revelation he has just related; he is making the claim out of a sense of guilt, because under the influence of the ecstatic epiphany, he has totally forgotten her presence.

But what then follows does sound sincere. In her, he can see his past self, and through empathy, he shares her joy and looks forward to the day when she reaches his level of understanding. And he hopes that after his death, she will remember their moment of shared happiness at Tintern Abbey and recall how the emotional impact of her presence enriched his vision. Thus will the quintessential experience of his life be passed on, and his immortality will be assured.

Coleridge, in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," shares many of the same concerns. Like Wordsworth he uses the permanence and beauty of nature as a consolation; but since Mary Lamb's insanity and homicide are infinitely more painful and terrible than Wordsworth's depression, Coleridge mobilizes empathy—for her brother Charles Lamb, a dear friend and fellow poet—as a much more powerful tool than Wordsworth's epiphany. For Wordsworth it was enough to receive a mystical experience passively to cure his discontent, but Coleridge understands that to salve Charles Lamb's wounds a much more active force is necessary. That force is love.

A portrait of the young Coleridge, around the time he wrote "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison"

The first stanza finds Coleridge confined to his home because of an accident, while Charles Lamb and other visiting friends roam the countryside without him. Coleridge experiences deep regret because he is unable to accompany Lamb and so provide the comfort he needs, owing to his sister Mary's mad murder of their mother. His frustration is intense:

I have lost
Beauties and feelings, such as would have been
Most sweet to ray remembrance even when age
Had dimm'd mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,
Friends, whom I never mere may meet again,
On springy heath, along the hill-top edge,
Wander in gladness.... (ll. 2-8)

Unlike Wordsworth. Coleridge cannot ramble through nature in order to garner pleasant memories (in this case, a precious emotional experience rather than observation) for future reference. As the poem progresses, we notice he is unlike Wordsworth in another respect. Where Wordsworth forgot his sister until almost the last moment, so wrapped up was he in his experience, Coleridge's constant and primary concern is the happiness of his close friend Lamb.

Mary and Charles Lamb

Coleridge finds a solution to his predicament by joining Lamb on his jaunt in spirit. Through his imagination, Coleridge is able to be with his friend, and the extent to which he accomplishes this feat is proven by the rich detail he uses to describe the imaginary walk. He reinforces this poetic construct with an image that represents himself, the poet as Aeolian harp:

that branchless ash,
Unsunn'd and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fann'd by the water-fall! (ll. 13-16)

The image suggests that even though Coleridge, like the ash, is too strong to be shaken by the great upheavals of life (the gale), he is still sensitive enough to be affected by Lamb's plight (the waterfall).

Coleridge's supernatural masterpiece, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

In the second stanza, Coleridge continues his psychic journey with his friends, so vividly that he mentions each detail to the viewer as it would directly occur. The "wide wide Heaven" (l. 21) conveys the impression of an expansive vault of sky the beholder must crane his neck to see. Then in line 26, Coleridge introduces the reason for his empathy, the "evil and pain/And strange calamity!" (ll. 31-2) that Mary Lamb caused. On its heels comes the image of the sunset.

Here Coleridge feels so deeply for Lamb that, in his poetry at least, he seeks to orchestrate nature for his friend’s benefit. He makes the command,

Ah! slowly sink
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun!
Shine in the slant beams 0f the sinking orb,
Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue Ocean! (ll. 32-37)

The image of the sunset is of great importance, for it stresses appreciation of the beauty of the fading day; metaphorically Coleridge is asking Lamb to find joy somewhere in the midst of his sorrow.

In the lines that follow, Coleridge explains the object of his directive to nature; he wants the sunset to occur

So my friend
Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing around
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes
Spirits perceive his presence. (ll. 37-43)

By invoking a transcendental God. he is struggling to induce, in Lamb as well as himself, a mystical sense of union to eradicate the tragedy that befell Lamb. But his attempt is nowhere as stirring as Wordsworth's amazing evocation at the end of the fourth stanza of "Tintern Abbey." Yet Coleridge's failure is noble; apparently visions of Wordsworth's kind, for which Coleridge is striving, can only occur in tranquillty. As a result, the response that Coleridge produces with his enveloping image of transcendence is intellectual rather than emotional.

Welsh poet and literary figure Charles Lamb

Coleridge opens the third and last stanza with an exclamation of pleasure, believing that in the revelation described in the preceding lines, he has established a spiritual connection with Lamb. Then he turns from the subjective world of interpretation inhabiting his head to the objective world surrounding him, namely the lime-tree bower of his front yard. "Pale beneath the blaze/Hung the transparent foliage," he says in lines 47-8 ; for him the foliage is transparent because he can see Lamb straight through it. The physical world presents no barrier to his imagination. In lines 53-6 he mentions

the ancient ivy, which usurps
These fronting elms. and now, with blackest mass
Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue
Through the late twilight

Here the ivy is the screen of his imagination; through it, the darkness of Lamb's tragedy is filtered into a lighter shade in the quiet of his garden: "Yet still the solitary bumble-bee/Sings in the bean-flower!" (11. 58-9). Coleridge the poet clearly identifies with the singing bee.

As a consequence of these phenomena that Coleridge witnesses in his garden, which lead him to think that nature is sympathetic with Lamb’s sorrow, he believes that

Henceforward shall I know
That Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty! And sometimes
'Tis well to be bereft of promised good,
That we may lilt the soul, and contemplate
with lively joy the joys we cannot share. (ll. 59-67)

To us cynical twentieth-century post-Romantics, this passage may smack of rationalization; but Coleridge is simply making use of what spiritual materials he has at hand. Without belief in an omnipotent God who knows what He is doing, Coleridge must draw on the best substitute he has, namely omnipresent nature. He must see nature as a source of consolation in the face of tragedy because he cannot reconcile himself to a brutal unjust universe, which is just as well. If he could, he might not bother trying to console Lamb.

With his final image, Coleridge drives home the impact of his love and empathy for Lamb with tremendous force. Spotting a rook flying overhead, he imbues it with his love, and with his imagination, he sends it on its way to Lamb, hoping that his friend, when he sights it, will recognize it as a symbol of the life that must go on, the life that Coleridge and Lamb treasure so dearly. As Coleridge says so beautifully,

My gentle-hearted Charles! when the last rook
Beats its straight path along the dusky air
Homewards, I blest it! deeming its black wing
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
Had cross'd the mighty Orb's dilated glory,
while thou stood'st gazing; or, when all was still.
Flew creeking o'er thy head, and had a charm
For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom
No sound is dissonant which tells of life. (ll. 68-75)

A reader finishes "Tintern Abbey" with the startling power of Wordsworth’s mystical experience and his guarantee of life everlasting ringing in his or her head. The same reader comes away from "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" impressed with Coleridge's generous warmth and powerful love. It is unfair to accuse Wordsworth of practising "the egotistical sublime" as Keats did. It is equally unfair to criticize Coleridge either for his failure to reproduce Wordsworth's epiphany or his strained attempt to account for how a benevolent nature (or God) can produce horrors, without that force being organically flawed in some sense. Both men were born into a spiritual lurch of groping uncertainty, and much of the power of their poems is derived from that tension.

They responded to the situation in which they found themselves to the best of their abilities, in accordance with the individual personalities. Wordsworth, who let himself be guided "Wherever Nature led," acted upon by psychological forces following his adolescent move to London, couched his state of mind in purely conceptual terms, and as a result of his passivity and sensitiviy, a revelation struck him, Coleridge, placed in a situation where Lamb needed his active help, and frustrated by his immobility, exercised his imagination to practise a form of poetic astral projection, and he invested the natural world with the profound moral significance of his choosing. The greatness of their poems originates in the fidelity with which they recorded their struggles. They lived at the beginning of what we now recognize as the modern age, of which we are the inheritors.

Can we formulate better answers than they did?

* * * * *

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "This Lime-Tree Bower Thy Prison.” English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins. New York, 1967.

Wordsworth, William. "Tintern Abbey." English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins. New York, 1967.