Literary fight clubs

We may not like to admit it, but literary fights and feuds are much more entertaining than friendships

by Elaine Showalter / November 13, 2014 / Leave a comment
Published in December 2014 issue of Prospect Magazine

Wordsworth and Coleridge: literary frenemies

Literary Rivals by Richard Bradford (Robson Press, £14.99)

When I first began to study literary history at university, I was struck by the friendship between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. How was it that so many great British writers met their literary doubles and nemeses early in their careers? Which came first, the chicken of genius or the egg of empathy? Were Wordsworth and Coleridge magnetically drawn together because they were both great poets, or did they become great poets because they were drawn together? And why were these writers always male?

Richard Bradford begins his musings on literary rivalry with the friendship of Wordsworth and Coleridge. When they met in 1795, they were mutually enamoured as poets and radicals. “Wordsworth is a very great man,” wrote Coleridge, “the only man to whom at all times and in all modes of excellence I feel myself inferior.” Wordsworth found the mystical, adventurous, experimental Coleridge “the most wonderful man I ever knew.” Within six weeks, Coleridge had moved to Grasmere to be close to his new friend. While Wordsworth was inspired by Coleridge’s fireworks, Coleridge was steadied by his friend’s disciplined ambition. Their historic collaboration on the Lyrical Ballads (1798) kicked off the Romantic movement.

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Comments

Steve Sailer
November 14, 2014 at 11:04
Or Lennon & McCartney. British rock music history seems more comprised of squabbling friends than American rock history.
Reply
Adrian Michael Kelly
November 14, 2014 at 12:44
A scholar as meticulous as Dr. Showalter would appreciate, I hope, this minor correction: John Updike's Rabbit novels are about Rabbit Angstrom, not Bech, who has his own series, as it were.
Reply
Serge
November 19, 2014 at 14:41
The feuds and antagonisms are not entertaining or "delightful"; they are simply rude, and lower the esteem due to the individuals involved. If they cannot treat others with respect, then they deserve less respect themselves.
Reply
Evelyn T
November 21, 2014 at 13:55
To use Adrian Michael Kelly's gracious formulation, "A scholar as meticulous as Dr. Showalter would appreciate, I hope," being corrected on the subject of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Grasmere: Coleridge did not move to Grasmere to be near Wordsworth six weeks after the two met; in fact, Wordsworth only moved there four years after meeting Coleridge, who never lived there at all (though he did pay long and sometimes disastrous visits to the Wordsworth family at Dove Cottage). The two poets met in Somerset, and it was there that Wordsworth moved, in order to be near Coleridge, two years, not six months, after that first meeting. And Wordsworth called Coleridge (though only after his death) not "the most wonderful man I ever knew" but "the only wonderful man I ever knew." Ahem. Other reviewers have complained of Bradford's errors; I can only assume that these, too, are Bradford's.
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Elaine Showalter is a literary critic and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2012 for her book, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx