And Another Thing | 17 January 2009

A Pantocrat who should be on everyone’s curriculum

The decision by the authorities to drop Coleridge from the syllabus of state schools is intended as another nail in the coffin of English literature. He is to be replaced by a person unknown to me but apparently popular on TV quiz shows. No reason is provided for giving the old poet-philosopher the boot. Too difficult? A white, middle-class male? Not politically correct enough? It is true that, having been an extreme radical in his youth, planning to found a utopian settlement on the Susquehanna in America, in conjunction with Robert Southey and other idealists — it was to be called a Pantisocracy — he became conservative in middle age, and a pillar of Christianity, if rather an unusual and wobbly one. It is also true that his one practical experiment in demotic activity was a failure. In 1793 he ran away from Jesus College, Cambridge, and enlisted as a trooper in the 15th Dragoons, a regiment of heavy cavalry, under the name of Silas Tomkyn Comberback. But he not only failed to become a proficient rider; he found it difficult even to stay on a horse’s back. Eventually he was bought out by his elder brothers, an ignominious end to the foray, in April 1794.

On the other hand, I should have thought that in many ways Coleridge was surprisingly in tune with the more esoteric notes struck by advanced opinion in our times. His ‘Cologne’, for example, is the earliest poetical protest against the evils of river pollution:

In Köhn, the town of monks and bones,

And pavements fang’d with murderous stones,

And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches;

I counted two and seventy stenches,