Signifying Nothing: Coleridge’s Visions of 1816—Anti-allusion and the Poetic Fragment

Abstract

What does it mean when a text seems to confess, but exactly what it confesses to is not apparent? Many of Coleridge’s later poems present themselves as confessional pieces, in the manner pioneered by Coleridge and Wordsworth in 1797, but stop short of actually revealing the circumstances that generate the emotional states they explore. Cryptic suggestions, pregnant phrases, and arch hints substitute for plain exposition; the writer seems coy; readers feel tantalized or even cheated. The text has shifted under their gaze: what seemed as if it would be autobiographical turns out to be allusive—it hints rather than reveals, refers rather than details—but what it hints at and refers to is not within readers’ knowledge. There is no prior discourse available that, with some effort, a reader could locate and so resolve the present one: the poem raises the expectations of allusion but fails to fulfill them. The later Coleridge, it seems, operates by teasing— preparing to confess but confessing nothing, seeming to allude but alluding to nothing. His poems seem fragments severed from some larger context that the reader has no means of reading.