The millions of materials in the Ransom Center are as diverse as they are interesting. But everything inside is united by one common focus, the humanities—the exploration of what it means to be human. The artists, writers, poets, musicians, filmmakers, and everyone else whose belongings and legacies live in the archives all captured different aspects of the human experience. They explored the essences of art, of beauty, of tragedy, and perhaps most importantly (especially if you trust John Lennon) of love. [Read more…] about Love letters from the archive
Valentine’s Day
Hartley Coleridge’s Valentine’s Day sonnet
As Elizabeth Bennet commented in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, poetry is not always the food of love. “If it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination,” she tells Mr. Darcy, “I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.”
For Hartley Coleridge’s sake, let us hope Ms. Bennet was wrong. Hartley, the eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, composed this sonnet for Valentine’s Day in 1810, at the age of 14. Throughout his youth he was considered a bright and imaginative child. In “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” William Wordsworth described six-year-old Hartley as the “best philosopher” who “read’st the eternal deep.”
Hartley led a troubled life, however. Estranged from his parents at a young age, he was raised by poet Robert Southey. He attended Oxford and went on to receive a scholarship from Oriel College. Although expected to excel, alcoholism and inattentiveness to his studies caused him to lose his scholarship. His sister Sarah dubbed him “our Trouble in the North.”
Soon after losing his scholarship Hartley moved to London, where he worked as a private tutor and published poetry in the London Magazine. He excelled at writing sonnets and published a short collection, Poems, in 1833. It was received positively, as was his collection of author biographies Biographia Borealis; or Lives of Distinguished Northerns, which came out the same year.
Hartley’s continued instability, however, cut short his literary career, forcing him to return home to the Lake District at Grasmere. Although this valentine hints at a romantic streak, he never married. Yet he occasionally wrote sentimental musings from the point of view of “a whimsical Old Bachelor acquaintance of mine,” and many of these bear a resemblance to this early sonnet.
Read more sonnets, as well as letters and other manuscripts by Hartley Coleridge, in his archive. The Ransom Center houses materials by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as well as Hartley’s siblings Sara Coleridge and Derwent Coleridge and other members of the Coleridge family.