{"id":19622,"date":"2022-12-28T13:27:23","date_gmt":"2022-12-28T21:27:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=19622"},"modified":"2022-12-28T13:30:48","modified_gmt":"2022-12-28T21:30:48","slug":"coleridge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2022\/12\/28\/coleridge\/","title":{"rendered":"Coleridge"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>My random-book-picker recently picked a collection of Coleridge verse and prose from my unread-books shelves.<\/p>\r\n<p>It\u2019s a hardcover roughly the size of a mass-market paperback. It\u2019s 350 pages of Coleridge\u2019s writing, plus a hundred pages of notes at the end.<\/p>\r\n<p>But what makes it unusual is that the notes are in Russian. (The verse and prose by Coleridge are in English.)<\/p>\r\n<p>I bought this book during my high school trip to the USSR in 1985, in one of the foreign-currency stores (<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Beryozka_(Russian_retail_store)\">Beriozka<\/a>), and it\u2019s been waiting for me to read it ever since.<\/p>\r\n<p>I\u2019ve now finally skimmed it. Most of it didn\u2019t appeal to me. But there were a couple of things that I hadn\u2019t known about and that I thought were worth noting:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>There\u2019s a poem titled \u201cPantisocracy.\u201d I amused myself with guesses about what that might mean, then went and looked it up; turns out it\u2019s a utopian idea (that Coleridge advocated) involving (as I understand it) government in which everyone (<i>pan<\/i>) rules equally (<i>iso<\/i>). For more, see <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pantisocracy\">Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/li>\r\n  <li>There\u2019s a poem titled \u201cChristabel\u201d that \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Christabel_(poem)\">revolves around the relationship, implicitly sexual, of [the two main female characters,] Geraldine and Christabel<\/a>\u201d\u2014see, for example, the line \u201cin her arms the maid she took.\u201d It\u2019s also kind of a vampire poem (\u201cGeraldine, takes on a proto-vampiric role, with all the antecedent features that that necessitates: external beauty, a revelatory bodily mark, and a physical encounter (with the victim) that leaves them incapacitated\u201d). And: \u201cChristabel, with its female-centric slant, became a symbol of female emancipation. Emmeline Pankhurst, the renowned feminist and suffragette, named her daughter, Christabel Pankhurst after the eponymous character. <cite>L\u2019Etre Double<\/cite> by Ren\u00e9e Vivien, which is a work about a lesbian relationship between two women, is heavily inspired by \u2018Christabel.\u2019\u201d<\/li>\r\n  <li>A rhyme that amused me: <i>whole ridge<\/i>\/<i>Coleridge<\/i>. (From \u201cMetrical Feet.\u201d)<\/li>\r\n  <li>A line that amused me: \u201cAll nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair\u2014\u201d. (First line of \u201cWork Without Hope.\u201d)<\/li>\r\n  <li>Coleridge knew, and wrote <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/To_Godwin\">at least one poem about<\/a>, William Godwin. I had no idea who William Godwin was, but I chanced to look him up, and discovered that he was the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, and the father of Mary Shelley. This item isn\u2019t all that relevant to Coleridge, but it was the start of a coincidence that I shall detail in a later post.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,57,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-verse","category-writers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19622"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19625,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19622\/revisions\/19625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}