Finishing each other’s sentences

IF it weren’t for “Brown Eyed Girl,” sad to say, Van Morrison wouldn’t get any radio airplay at all nowadays. That’s why only the cognoscenti know that Van the Man finds inspiration in the writings of John Donne, William Blake, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot and other literati, including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

“Did ya ever hear about Wordsworth and Coleridge, baby?” he croons in the obscure masterpiece “Summertime in England.” “They were smokin’ up in Kendal by the lakeside.”

Biographer Adam Sisman seems to understand that some of the personalities and events of the 1960s might help modern readers to better relate to these two distant figures. At the outset of “The Friendship,” Sisman points out that Wordsworth and Coleridge “have passed into legend as a pair, like Boswell and Johnson, or Lennon and McCartney.” And when Sisman describes the tumultuous times in which Coleridge and Wordsworth lived, a world rocked by changes so profound that he characterizes them as “a cultural revolution,” we are invited to compare the upheavals that we have witnessed with the ones that shaped their lives and work.

That’s not to say that Sisman has produced a pop biography. Quite to the contrary, he has penetrated deeply into his subjects’ lives, works and times, and his scholarship is on rich display. He draws as much from their private correspondence as from their published poetry, and he devotes a good deal of space and attention to background and context, with the result that Robespierre, Rousseau, Thomas Paine and Napoleon Bonaparte figure incidentally but importantly in his account.

Sisman has made the daring and invigorating decision to focus on the brief period, during the 1790s, when Wordsworth and Coleridge (then in their 20s) lived and worked in close proximity near Bristol, sometimes sitting and writing at the same table and reading out loud to each other. Lines composed by one poet, Sisman points out, showed up in poems attributed to the other one. They churned out poetry in such abundance that they “jokingly referred to themselves as ‘the Concern,’ a ‘commercial or manufacturing establishment’ for the production of verse.” At day’s end, they would ramble through the countryside and rhapsodize over the moon and the clouds.

“This was their annus mirabilis, when each man’s talent would ripen into maturity, and bear marvelous fruit; the year when they ‘together wantoned in wild Poesy,’ ” writes Sisman. “It was, perhaps, a kind of love.”

Sisman makes Wordsworth and Coleridge rise off the printed page and come fully alive. Sisman points out that Coleridge (whom he describes as “loose-limbed and scruffy, ‘a very gentle Bear’) believed himself to be ugly,” and he shows us that Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, thought the same. “[H]e is pale and thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth,” she wrote to a friend. “But if you hear him speak for five minutes, you think no more of them.”

Wordsworth was “stiff ... proud and prickly,” often melancholic and yet passionate enough to have (and then abandon) an illegitimate child in France after returning from a grand tour as a young man. His famous self-imposed exile in the English countryside in the company of his sister was not quite as idyllic as his poetry may suggest: “They ate so many cabbages, he joked, that ‘into cabbages we shall be transformed.... ‘ “ On the publication of “Lyrical Ballads” in 1798, the collection of poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge that would spark a revolution of its own in English poetry, Wordsworth was shockingly candid when he complained about a bad review written by a mutual friend. “He knew that I published these poems for money and money alone,” wrote Wordsworth about the reviewer. “If he could not conscientiously have spoken differently of the volume, he ought to have declined the task of reviewing it.”

Sisman is fascinated by the pair’s creative process. “Lyrical Ballads” was “to be published anonymously, as if by a single poet,” although it was obviously the work of two very different pens. Wordsworth alone collected the 30 guineas paid by the publisher even though one-third of the volume was devoted to Coleridge’s work, including “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Coleridge, Sisman writes, “disposed of his most substantial poem, the crowning achievement of his poetical career (and three lesser poems), for no payment at all.” And Sisman credits Coleridge with inspiring Wordsworth’s single most famous poem, “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”:

“From Coleridge ... he had learned a new type of poetry, the intimate, autobiographical style of the conversation poem. In this, the most personal of Wordsworth’s poems to date, he employed Coleridge’s techniques to express Coleridge’s ideas.”

But Sisman always widens the lens to take in the social, cultural and political environment in which Coleridge and Wordsworth found themselves, sometimes to comical effect. Their excursions with notebooks in hand, for example, did not go unnoticed by suspicious locals and were reported to British authorities on the watch for foreign terrorists infiltrating from revolutionary France. An informer reported that Coleridge, Wordsworth and “a woman who passes for his sister” were up to “very suspicious business,” and an undercover agent was dispatched to place them under surveillance.

“According to Coleridge,” Sisman writes, “the spy feared that he had been discovered when he overheard mention of the philosopher Spinoza -- which he interpreted as ‘Spy Nozy.’ ”

Sisman goes on to describe the time that the poets later spent together in Kendal and the Lake District, the period and the place that Van Morrison celebrates in song, but the friendship and Coleridge’s health were both in decline. To treat his pain and illness, he was dosing himself with brandy and an opium preparation called Kendal Black Drop. Perhaps that’s what Morrison means by “smokin’ up in Kendal,” and the consequences were dire: “[T]he Poet is dead in me,” Coleridge wrote at 28. He lived another 33 years, but he grew increasingly estranged from Wordsworth, and at 61, the Poet in Coleridge and Coleridge himself were both gone. *