The Poet of Fear: John Cowper Powys on Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge - that thwarted, baffled, verbose, moribund, fish-cold Phantasmalest and maudlin-dismalest of our poets, had never, until then, materialized for me out of his West Country fog. Powys follows Pater and Swinburne - who had exalted 'Kubla Khan' and Christabel above the Ancient Mariner - in finding in Coleridge art for art's sake avant la lettre. By contrast, Powys tends to see Coleridge's kind of art as intertwined with a commitment to a scarier, less psychologically realised supernaturalism than the sort identified by Pater. At the age of 28, on 12 April 1901, he lectured on 'Coleridge, the Poet' at a fundraiser for the 'Re-Hanging of Montacute Church Bells', an event that he did not choose to mention in his Autobiography, possibly because of its implicit support for the Anglican status quo.