Time to Retire? Coleridge and Wordsworth Go to Work

First there was the militia escapade, then Pantisocracy and his marriage with gentle Sara, toward whom he felt a strong physical attraction and with whom at least at first he shared an easy rapport. The themes are familiar: the rise of new skills and professions under the division of labor celebrated by Adam Smith; the doomed resistance to the commodification of the products of one's labor under capitalist pressures; the securing of the scribal professions, including poetry, as masculine preserves in the face of the rise of the novel and the success of women in that mode; the rethinking of vocation as career against the backdrop of widening print cultures and the drift of the public sphere away from the coffee house and toward the tea table. [...]with the city-spire or city-as/raVation of Bristol in view, Coleridge informs the dell, the cottage, and the local mountain that it's time to go. [...]the conversation he conducts in this longest of all conversation poems, The Prelude, takes place at long range, and Coleridge's remoteness, with his continued silence about just what Wordsworth is supposed to say in The Recluse, occasions a false note from time to time in Wordsworth's intended genial tone, as in the nervously patronizing fiat at the end of Book II: "Healfli and the quiet of a healthful mind/ Attend thee" (Ibid II, 480-81; italics mine).