359.)
* * * * *
The conventional view of Coleridge that opium killed the poet in him
does not commend itself to the scientific consciousness. Opium has the
tendency to stimulate rather than to deaden the poetic imagination, as
the history of De Quincey can testify; and one of Coleridge's most
imaginative pieces, "Kubla Khan", is said to have been occasioned by an
overdose of the drug.
The poet in Coleridge was extinguished by a very different thing than
opium. Coleridge's poetic faculty was suspended by the loss of hope and
also by the growth of his intellect, by the development of his reasoning
and philosophic powers, and by the multiplication of the interests which
appealed to him, and the many problems which presented themselves for
his solution. He was, constitutionally, the most comprehensive mind of a
new age, and just because he was its greatest thinker he was perplexed
and attracted by the majority of the problems which arose around him,
and which he himself helped to raise. Poetry, the poetry of the Romantic
Movement, in which he far excelled all his contemporaries, was no longer
capable of grappling with the philosophic, theological, political and
social questions now on the horizon or which Coleridge felt would soon,
by the development of international affinities, be on the horizon of the
English mind.
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