comment-And Then There Were Three-1 And Then There Were Three

This reworked E2 is much more engaged with the assignment, and teases out much of interest in TA’s strange publication history. Though the report prompts unanswered questions about people’s motives, you move efficiently through a lot of encrusted legend regarding the genesis of LB and along the way hold interesting details up to the light.

The title refers to what seems like your most original emphasis: Joseph Cottle’s important role in assembling and distributing the LBs. The report, in this way, helps us realize that collaboration on LB extended beyond WW and STC – you treat JC as a full third agent, and the report mentions some interesting ways he may have manipulated the publication of LB for maximum profit. Though there’s some blurriness here: at what point did the “kindly” JC become so avaricious? What was his original hope in spurring on the poets to forego the newspapers and publish a volume instead? Why might it have been in JC’s interest to hold onto a copyright but squelch publication? And was Southey’s review really such a litmus of publication success?

More to the point, given your primary topic of research, did JC encourage WW to go behind Coleridge’s back to publish TA at the last minute? What was behind such a unilateral (or planned, with Cottle) act, one that seems to be such a betrayal of Coleridge? In general the report suggests a web of betrayal taking over a project that was originally so collaborative; one only wishes to know what might have ‘turned’ Cottle and, more importantly, WW against that original spirit.

Another interesting issue that is raised but left fairly mysterious here: what in fact was the difference between publishing in magazines and publishing in a volume? It seems to have been important to both WW and STC to regard the poems as interacting with each other, a dynamic that would have been lost if they’d been sent out to the presses individually, but was there a financial price to be paid for such control? Money seems to be a powerful force in this narrative: it makes WW overcome his fear of publishing and turns Cottle into something of a schemer. So one wonders all the more whether packaging the 1798 LB into one volume was another financially motivated act, or whether, to the contrary, it lost the poets money. More clarity about the financial stakes of this publication scheme might help to contextualize WW’s most individual decision to tack on TA.

Two other quick questions: if WW ‘stutters’ and ‘fusses’ over his poetry ( & the LB), how much did he revise TA from edition to edition – or did it settle into a fixed text early? And how much was TA differentiated from the other LB poems by critics? It seems (from the quote on the bottom of page 5) that it was held in higher regard at least by some critics.

All these questions are prompted by your terse but interesting roundup of a history that seems to clash quite interestingly with TA’s fantasy of simple, heart-felt, person-to-person transmission of learned truths. It seems that politics – at least on the level of “rash judgment” and maybe “greeting where no kindness is,” if not the “sneers of selfish men” – may not be so easily banished from TA.