‘The Poet, Described in Ideal Perfection’: Annus Mirabilis

Abstract

Charlotte Poole, who had disapproved of Coleridge from the beginning and been horrified at the thought of his living so close to her cousin Tom, was ‘shocked to hear that Mr Thelwall has spent some time at Stowey this week with Mr Coleridge, and consequently with Tom Poole’. ‘Alfoxden house’, she heard, ‘is taken by another of the fraternity’: ‘To what are we coming?’¹ To what indeed. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Thelwall might have thought of themselves as disaffected with politics in their different ways, but the report of the special agent, James Walsh, dispatched by the Home Office in August 1797 to investigate their activities saw them as ‘a mischiefuous gang of disaffected Englishmen’ and a ‘Sett of violent Democrats’.² Anxiety about a French invasion along the west coast was high after French ships landed 1200–1400 soldiers at Fishguard in Wales earlier in the year and rumours about the seditious activities of Poole’s friends’ were rife in the district.³ Thelwall, after all, had been arrested for treason and spent time in the Tower. In a largely comic account in the Biographia of the suspicions they aroused, Coleridge recalls that his topographical jottings for a long poem to be entitled ‘The Brook’ were misinterpreted as laying plans for an enemy invasion and that the ‘government spy’ misheard a reference to Spinoza in their conversation as ‘Spy nosey’ and took it as a reference to himself. If the paranoia they generated was more serious than Coleridge later allowed, it was certainly ironic, given that the three of them were seeking asylum in what Thelwall described to his wife as an ‘enchanting retreat (the Academus of Stowey)’.⁴