Coleridge--Opium Eater

t is well-known Coleridge suffered through a series of addictions: laudanum, opium, morphine, brandy, tobacco, among others. In James Gillman’s assessment of Coleridge as a case-study, it is a trend seen in genius: “men of genius move in orbits of their own; and seem deprived of that free will which permits the mere man of talent steadily to pursue the beaten path…Coleridge…was made to soar and not to creep” (qtd. by Lefebure 44). By Coleridge’s own admission, he very much desired to soar, “I should much wish, like the Indian Vishna, to float about along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotos, & wake once in a million years for a few minutes – just to know that I was going to sleep a million years more” (qtd. by Mayberry 100).

Given his disposition to undertake ambitious large projects, often a threat to his welfare, and his characteristics, “disorganised, weak-willed, and easily influenced by other’s opinion of him…plagued by bills, frequent illness, and deep religious doubts” (qtd. in Coleridge 8), it is no surprise he resorted to drugs for relief. It was a habit formed early, possibly in childhood sickness, and one to which he resorted for rest of his life. He wildly indulged after failing to win the Craven scholarship, to salve spates of neuralgia, to cope with a broken affair with Sara Hutchinson, to retreat from economic instability and to balance a lifelong waver in poetic self-esteem and product. He was not alone in his habit for opium and similar drugs had created a stir during English Romanticism because of their mixture of fantasy and dark hallucinations. They became the perfect vessels for the spirit and the spirited mind and experimented with by several of Coleridge’s contemporaries, who clustered around a Dr. Thomas Beddoes of Bristol. Beddoes translated John Brown’s, Elementa Medicinae (1780) which offered a theory that opium could be used for beneficial purposes in the “vital process” (Lefebure 61). Those Beddoes kept in his circle included: Tom Wedgwood, James Mackintosh, Charles Lloyd, Thomas De Quincey and S.T. Coleridge.

Nevertheless, Coleridge’s reputation as a junkie lived with him through life and in death. Charles Lloyd, contemporary and fellow drug-eater, fashioned the character Edmund Oliver, of the novel bearing the same name, in the ilk of Coleridge, focusing on the period prior to Coleridge’s defection to the army (Early Visions 53). In Oliver’s words, “I have at all times a strange dreaminess about me…with that dreaminess I have gone on…from day to day; if any time thought troubled, I have swallowed some spirits, or had recourse to laudanum” (qtd. by Lefebure 30). Others, such as Joseph Cottle, attempted a more objective analysis of Coleridge’s drug-eating habits. Though cognizant of aspects of Coleridge’s character which were deplorable and regrettable, he acknowledged Coleridge’s desire to do right despite habit and believed, “if [Coleridge] could now speak from his grave…he would doubtless utter, ‘Let my example be a warning!’” (qtd. by Lefebure 31)

The true debate is about how drugs affected Coleridge’s work. He offered three poems which are forever linked to his habit: “Kubla Khan,” “Christabel” (for which he completed only two of what was to be a five-part poem), and “The Pains of Sleep.” He said the first was conducted, “in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grams of Opium, taken to check a dysentery, at a Farm House between Porlock & Lynton, a quarter of a mile from Culbone Church, in the fall of the year, 1797” (qtd. in Coleridge 13). The story goes that in his walking reverie, he composed the entirety of the poem, “without any sensation of consciousness of effort” (Coleridge qtd. by Mayberry 103) and was feverishly transposing reverie to word when he was summoned to Porlock for business. Upon returning to his desk, he found the trance had been lost and with it the remaining lines of the poem. He said of the inspiration for “Christabel,” flowed “with the wholeness, no less than the liveliness of a vision” (qtd. by Lefebure 27). Molly Lefebure argues in her biography that the public at the time, and in the future, was and is quick to accept Coleridge’s claim at face-value, for we carry with us the romanticized ideal of the Poet as a conduit between truth and literature; the in-between is effortless. Although Coleridge “presented himself as a slothful, opium-steeped dreamer who had had the poems miraculously given to him” (Lefebure 27), he in fact pored over and revised his work more diligently than any other of his time, and frequently looked to Wordsworth and Southey for criticism and improvement (Lefebure 27).

In "The Pains of Sleep," far more suited to his ability, Coleridge sets forth the agony of drug-induced experience:

But yester-night I prayed aloud
In anguish and in agony, Opium
Up-starting from the fiendish crowd
Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,
And whom I scorned, those only strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
Still baffled, and yet burning still!
Desire with loathing strangely mixed
On wild or hateful objects fixed.
Fantastic passions! maddening brawl!
And shame and terror over all!
Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
Which all confused I could not know,
Whether I suffered, or I did:
For all seemed guilt, or remorse or woe,
My own or others still the same
Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame (Reeve 109-110)

Despite his self-glorification and his penchant for easy remedy, Coleridge nevertheless was acutely aware of the consequences of addiction and found no respite from it. He could never offer the advice, “Let my example be a warning!” – and sadly, though he brought the addiction to an equilibrium by 1821, those who knew he still took drugs cast a sardonic smirk to those in company, as when pedestrians whisper gossip about a passerby, and he died the lonely Poet, “on the brow of Highgate Hill” (Carlyle qtd. in Coleridge 42).