ABSTRACT
Matthew Arnold had so little to say about Coleridge’s poetry (but one remark in all his works, letters, and notebooks) that it is difficult to make out where he would have placed him as a poet. In the one place where he acknowledged Coleridge’s poetic genius, he paired him with Keats as the composer of a very few pieces of surpassing worth, his remaining poetry being of inferior quality. As for Shelley, Arnold sometimes associated him with Keats and the Elizabethans, and sometimes with Byron as a modernist. However, Arnold did think of Coleridge and Shelley as similar in some ways. In the first place, they were apparent exceptions to his dictum that the Romantics did not know enough: ‘Shelley had plenty of reading’, he admitted; ‘Coleridge had immense reading.’4 Secondly, Shelley and Coleridge, in spite of their book learning, were the two greatest failures among the grander names of the Romantic movement. In a famous summary Arnold said: ‘I for my part can never even think of equalling with [Wordsworth and Byron] any other of their contemporaries [but Keats];— either Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium; or Shelley, beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.’5
