Coleridge as Blogger

March 24, 2007

In the April 12 edition of the New York Review of Books Richard Holmes has a review of a new book on the friendship between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. As perhaps the great biographer of Coleridge, one might have expected Holmes to be in fault-finding mode.. but there is none of that. He has many kind words for Adam Sisman, author of The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge.. and Holmes takes the opportunity to reflect on the nature of this passionate friendship.

Toward the end of the review I let out a cheer as Holmes tied Coleridge to bloggers:

...Coleridge's Notebooks, still insufficiently known, may be considered as an inspiration to all confessional writers, and may even become—in their wild informality—the secret bible of Internet bloggers.

I could not agree more. Twice I have tied the project of blogging to Coleridge's journals.. most notable here, but also tangentially in my very first blog.

My fascination with the Notebooks is the way Coleridge writes through theories about art and philosophy.. along with the books he is reading. I consider them one of the great monuments (if that word can apply to something so fragmentary) to the human creative consciousness hovering over the experience of the world. The Notebooks are ephemera that are not, in the end, ephemera. Coleridge points the way forward.. I certainly believe that..