The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. Ed. Lucy Newlyn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. ISBN: 0 521 65909. Price: US$23.99.

“Since the early 1980s, major developments have occurred in the way British Romanticism is approached and understood” (1). This is the first sentence of Lucy Newlyn’s introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, and it firmly establishes the purpose of the companion, which seeks to introduce its readers to the new social, political and economic contexts in which contemporary critics approach Coleridge. And let me say at the outset that the Companion is a handsome volume. It is written with admirable clarity, and the contributors have pitched their chapters well at the sort of level required by the advanced undergraduate or the beginning graduate student. I imagine that teachers will find it an invaluable place for their students to begin their background reading. And if I have some reservations about the approach personally, that is because I am incurably old fashioned. I suffered a guilty start at Newlyn’s claim, in the second paragraph, that “it would be unthinkable nowadays to design a course on British Romanticism based around the works of six male poets” (1). It would indeed be unthinkable; and I for many years introduced Finch, Smith, and others, as examples of eighteenth-century sensibility, and Barbauld as the writer of late-eighteenth-century philosophical poetry, so as to sharpen the students’ sense of what was new in mainstream romanticism. I know that that was naughty of me, because I know that we are supposed to think (after the century of Wittgenstein and of critical theory) that there are no essences, and no essence of romanticism, and that the term “Romanticism” should be expanded to include the “minor” writers of the period. The trouble is that, much as I love the quiet sensibility of the mid-eighteenth century, my students weren’t ready for it. They were nineteen, had never read a poem before in their life, and were delighted by the pyrotechnics of the big six. Music in poetry (quantity, rhythm and pitch) were things they were only just discovering, and the quiet music of the eighteenth century was beyond them. I also tried, occasionally, to teach some of Coleridge’s earlier, more overtly political poetry, but since I could never muster the expected outrage over his apostasy, it was hard to find reasons for reading the early poetry if it meant missing out of the symphonic tonalities of Adonais. The still, small voice kept insisting that some poetry is just bad. All of this was reprehensible. I also know, after twenty years in the business, that aestheticism is deeply suspect. But something else in Lucy Newlyn’s introduction caught my attention. For Newlyn brings the political context of the mid 1790s to bear on “Frost at Midnight,” with its apparently less than innocent mention of a “secret ministry,” a suggestion which is reinforced by mention of the “eave-drops,” or the eavesdropping of the “Spy Nozy” incident (3,4). This is an offspring of the kind of reading which Kelvin Everest originally taught us, and which Paul Magnuson’s chapter in the Companion sets up with great economy. But at first, something irremediable in me rebelled at Newlyn’s reading. Gradually I was brought to admit that Coleridge was a punster, that the poem was first published in a volume with the unavoidably political title, Fears in Solitude, and that it is quite possible that Coleridge was aware of the political implications of his poem. But a reservation remains. Is this the kind of understanding that one wants as the focus of the student’s experience of the poem? And do the students understand that this relatively arcane kind of reading is a corrective to the kind of …