1.
When the time came to name my son, we chose the name Samuel. His name wasn’t derived from anyone in the family. We chose Samuel because three of the writers who moved me most were named Samuel: Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Samuel Beckett. As it turned out we weren’t the only people in our neighborhood who had chosen to name their boys Sam. (And there is no shortage of Samanthas, which has led of late to some funny banter.) My Sam’s two best friends in daycare and pre-kindergarten (Purple Circle and the possibly disastrous The Magical Years) were also named Sam. It turned out that among the handful of parents with whom I became friends—once we were thrown into what is called “a community”—two had sons named Sam. There was an actor and writer who was also amused when we addressed our Sams in varying tones to differentiate—unless we resorted to Sam Rudman and Sam Denisov.

Imagine for a moment walking into a room full of children where parents, teachers, nannies, and other desultory characters are calling out, “Sam P., Sam G., Sam D. . . .” and then three-year-old “Samantha” who quips back, “Sam!” I think most of the other parents had members of their families who, in living memory, had been named Sam, or had chosen the name for its earthiness.

I, on the contrary, had rather thoughtlessly chosen the name Sam over the dead body of my beloved grandfather Abraham Tarzan Levy. How could this have happened? Because his brother and my uncle were named Sam. If I had had a special affection for Uncle Sam (Levy) it would have been one thing, but although I saw him frequently during the first fifteen years of my life, I didn’t. The most notable thing about my uncle Sam was that there was nothing notable about him. He was, and I do not mean this cruelly, a shadow of my grandfather. He was probably dwarfed by my grandfather’s charisma and gifts. The most notable thing about Uncle Sam was that he contributed almost nothing to any conversation, although sometimes he might tap his cane. Once, twice, never more than three times. He was no talker. He could draw out the word “yeeeeaahhh in a gravelly monotone, like Krapp relishing the syllables of “Spooooool.”

In other words, Uncle Sam was more or less present in a room with other members of this often mercurial and always animated family, and that was it, amazingly, except for a mild resemblance he had to the actor Ralph Bellamy, who around that time portrayed FDR in the film Sunrise at Campobello, a biopic to stir the blood of the middle-aged (I begged not to be dragged to it). I hope that my grandfather hasn’t been turning over in his grave all these years because I named my Sam Sam.

Not long ago Sam blew into our apartment, in the midst of a high-spirited interaction with a seventeen-year-old girl (windy hair, jeans torn at the knee) whom he introduced as Samantha. I didn’t see her after that and one day, for reasons too delicate and personal to mention here, I asked if he had seen her. And when he responded, “Who? Sam?” I felt the dizziness of the Sams.

But just as the naming of my son had nothing to do with my uncle, the fact that my son and these three are named Sam has little or nothing—or perhaps everything—to do with my concerns. One day, somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2004, it came to me for no reason whatsoever that when Samuel [Taylor] Coleridge wrote the line “My genial spirits fail” in “Dejection: An Ode,” he couldn’t have meant what he said. Coleridge, despite the tragic vicissitudes of his life, never, or rarely—as when in the grip of severe laudanum withdrawal—lacked geniality, affection, the desire to be with other people in any of a number of capacities in addition to the one that required (and desired) him to hold discourse. This possible confusion about Coleridge’s intended meaning occurs because genial means something very different to us from what it meant to Coleridge. For Milton, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, genial spirits are linked to your genius—that is, your presiding deity, which produces the sexual energy for creation, for the propagation of children as well as poems. Since Coleridge was married to one Sara (Fricker) and loved another Sara (Hutchinson), whose code name was Asra, his affections became paralyzed. The lack of love between Samuel and Sara had gradually grown into a hole he could not fill, a wound he could not stanch; or a wound that he could have stanched, but only if he had been able to exchange one Sara for the other.

Ted Hughes identified Coleridge’s lifelong pattern of reliance on women as a direct effect of his past: “When his beloved father died, S.T.C. being only ten, his mother sent him off to the monastic garrison of Christ’s Hospital—from which, it seems, he was allowed to return to her bosom only three or four times in the rest of his school days. During this period he shifted his passionate dependence onto his sister, Anne—who then died, after a long illness, just before he left school for university. Later on, to one half-affectionate woman or another, he would say his mother never gave him any feeling of what it was to have a mother.” If Hughes was right, this would have left him prone toward emotional bankruptcy and failure. If he didn’t feel he deserved to be loved, choosing the wrong wife would have been almost inevitable.

2.
My wife, Madelaine, and I made the pilgrimage to Nether Stowey and Hay-on-Wye in the summer of 1976. We headed, with heady optimism, to this site where Coleridge composed some of the greatest poems in the English language. There were miles and miles of pylons, tormenting the yellow grass, bleached from the drought. The little village was white and spotless. I was beginning to get the kind of nervous feeling I like to pretend that I don’t have in the vain hope that it will go away. We had arrived at the exact instant that the shops and pubs were pulling down their shutters and hanging closed signs on the doors. These are the empty hours in Europe. We pushed ahead down the deserted highway. Nary a sign, a directional marker, for Coleridge’s house. When we arrived, there was a sign swinging in the wind, the kind of sign that you might have seen at an inn, with a picture of the long-locked, round-faced S.T.C. We paid the nominal entrance fee to a matron who made it very clear that she had no interest in or really any idea of what she was doing, except that it was a job that paid and that she resented having to interrupt her knitting. We walked through the display of Coleridge’s letters and poems under glass and became especially involved in his correspondence with Charles Lamb. Being there made it manifestly clear how few people had been working to create what became the Romantic revolution and how dependent they were upon each other’s friendship. I had looked forward to seeing the lime tree bower where Coleridge composed the poem he dedicated to Charles Lamb. It was long gone. Standing on the property, idyllic but isolated, I realized why he had seen fit to repeat the phrase “my gentle-hearted Charles” three times in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” as if to prove to himself that his friend was truly steadfast and constant.

What may have also contributed to the loss of his genial spirits in “Dejection: An Ode” was his awareness of Milton’s copious use of the word in Paradise Lost. One angel brings Eve to Adam: “What day the genial Angel to our sire/Brought her in naked beauty more adorned.” A line even more saturated is “satiate with genial moisture.” The line of Milton’s that most accentuates Coleridge’s sense of sexual deprivation occurs in Samson Agonistes: “So much I feel my genial spirits droop.” What comes instantly to mind is an emphasis on geniality that I remember Lionel Trilling stressing in his introduction to “The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters.” Trilling makes a forceful and convincing case for “Keats’s geniality toward himself, his bold acceptance of his primitive appetite and his having kept open a line of communication with it,” and the “decisive effect upon the nature of his creative intelligence.” This is a stunning and valuable insight; but it is Trilling, not Keats, who uses the word “genial.”

Now, since I was long ago infected with the bracing insights in Trilling’s essay and have often since then thought of Keats in connection with some form of life-enhancing geniality, I set myself up to be slightly misled, slightly off-target, when it came to Coleridge. Despite the despair that it elicits, it is a more powerful line of poetry than the one by Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey”: “If I were not thus taught, should I the more/ Suffer my genial spirits to decay.” Coleridge, I argued to myself, did not suffer from a loss of geniality, taking the word as I remember Trilling used it in relation to Keats, in which case geniality is what you think it is, for better and for worse. It can even mean something as quotidian as liking to be among other people, which stands in contrast with so many pernicious myths about poets, especially Romantic poets, and certain writers such as Samuel Beckett. Coleridge, I thought, must have used the word “genial” in that phrase for the sake of assonance so delectable it would have pleased Keats, though Keats was more the priest of the open vowel than of the dental. For all we know, Keats may have marked this line of Coleridge’s for special praise in his own sonic quest.

Richard Holmes testifies in his biography that “Coleridge wrote to Estlin on 18 May: ‘I have known him [Wordsworth] a year & some months, and my admiration, I might say, my awe of his intellectual powers has increased even to this hour—& (what is of more importance) he is a tried good man . . . His genius is most apparent in poetry— and rarely, except to me in tête à tête, breaks forth in conversational eloquence.’” In other words, Wordsworth wasn’t particularly genial except as it pertained to the higher order of functioning.

It’s also possible, and we will come to this eventually, that Coleridge may have derived the word “genial” from one of his fabled German sources, which he so prodigally plagiarized, as he did Miltonic ones. But I want to stay for a moment with the more quotidian notion of geniality, and it is worth restating that for both Coleridge and Wordsworth, prior to Keats, the notion of health and well-being and Eros as the ground out of which poetry would spring was already a preeminent factor in their radical new poetics. Keats would find geniality a fundamental resource, an inroad into imagination and certain ideas—frequently misconstrued—for which he is known. For Coleridge this vein of geniality—the thrill of performance, of mesmerizing others with his monologues—would become like a drug, perhaps as much of a drug initially as the laudanum to which he became enslaved.

There is talking within the work of art and talking outside of the work in the realm of life; that is where the dangers surface. Of Coleridge, Hazlitt observed:

I accompanied him six miles on the road. It was a fine morning in the middle of winter, and he talked the whole way. The scholar in Chaucer is described as going . . . Sounding on his way. So Coleridge went on his. In digressing, in dilating, in passing from subject to subject, he appeared to me to float in air, to slide on ice. I observed that he continually crossed me on the way by shifting from one side of the footpath to the other. This struck me as an odd movement; but I did not at that time connect it with any instability of purpose or involuntary change of principle, as I have done since.

The sociable aspect of geniality would for Coleridge become a dark source. In some ways it would become a dark source for his namesake Samuel Johnson as well. This may seem absurd, but bear with me. To put it bluntly, they each aspired beyond anything else to write poetry. It doesn’t matter if it was great poetry or not: the point is that both Coleridge and Johnson ceased to function as poets at a ridiculously young age. Pin the blame on laudanum or overwork as much as you want, the result is the same: the genius in their genial spirits had failed them. In some essential way they were no good to themselves. It’s interesting to speculate on how people feel about their own achievement in light of their early aspirations.

I am led down this path by the dark fates of both my fathers. We can’t let ourselves forget that Samuel Johnson didn’t write one word of the book he is best known for, Boswell’s Life of Johnson. The fact that he was among the two greatest talkers in the history of England, the other being Coleridge, did little to curb his internal sense of failure, of disappointment. Alongside this lay the fact that Johnson was among the most sociable of men, one who loved nothing more than human company, who hated nothing more than being alone.

Samuel Johnson metamorphosed James Boswell. The two in one created a dialogic form that would transcend anything they would have done on their own. Coleridge remained grounded in the conversation poem. There was often talk about doing a book of conversations with Coleridge, modeled on Boswell’s Life of Johnson. He couldn’t have gone any further—no one has—with the supernatural ballad that he evolved in “The Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel,” and for him the conversation poem did not develop into the kind of dialogic poem that would have brought into being an ongoing genre, which in turn would have sustained his poetic imagination. The idea of other people being there was far more real for Wordsworth than it was for Coleridge; just the idea that he was addressing his friend in The Prelude was enough to give it its own subtle internal dialogical structure. In fact, Wordsworth’s imagination could encompass a dialogue with all of nature.

...

Printed in the New England Review

For the complete Poem please click on the Prose tab