As I always understood it, the glosses were added by Coleridge himself in the 1817 edition. If they are “pastiche” or “parody”, the pasticheur, the parodist, is STC. One thing I take away is how over the years he kept returning to what was his most celebrated poem and adjusting it. The glosses strike me as part of the same process — an effort at clarification and re-presentation. I wonder if this reflects a deep uncertainty about his own poetic genius. His reputation as a poet is based on a very small number of poems, as turning the more than 588 pages of his collected poems makes very clear. Why did he keep tinkering with it? At this point, I’ll defer to others: I certainly don’t regard myself as in any way as an expert on Coleridge, just an inveterate reader of poetry.
Clive
|