received, from a friend so revered, the first knowledge of a poet by
whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted and
inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the
undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal with which I laboured to make
proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed,
of whatever rank and in whatever place. As my school finances did not
permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half,
more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to
those who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight
did I receive the three or four following publications of the same
author." To Bowles' poems Coleridge ascribes the credit of having
withdrawn him from a too exclusive devotion to metaphysics and also a
strengthened perception of the essentially unpoetic character of Pope's
poetry. "Among those with whom I conversed there were, of course, very
many who had formed their taste and their notions of poetry from the
writings of Pope and his followers; or, to speak more generally, in that
school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by English
understanding, which had predominated from the last century. I was not
blind to the merits of this school, yet . . . they gave me little
pleasure. . . . I saw that the excellence of this kind consisted in just
and acute observations on men and manners in an artificial state of
society, as its matter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed
in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form. . . . The
matter and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic
thoughts as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry."
Coleridge goes on to say that, in a paper written during a Cambridge
vacation, he compared Darwin's "Botanic Garden" to a Russian ice palace,
"glittering, cold, and transitory"; that he expressed a preference for
Collins' odes over those of Gray; and that in his defence of the lines
running into each other, instead of closing at each couplet; and of