It is very different with his poetry. Here, too, the disastrous, the almost ruinous results of his weaknesses appear. When one begins to sift and riddle the not small mass of his verse, it shrinks almost appallingly in bulk. _Wallenstein_, though better than the original, is after all only a translation. _Remorse_ (either under that name or as _Osorio_) and _Zapolya_ are not very much better than the contemporary or slightly later work of Talfourd and Milman. _The Fall of Robespierre_ is as absurd and not so amusing as Southey's unassisted _Wat Tyler_. Of the miscellaneous verse with which, after these huge deductions, we are left, much is verse-impromptu, often learned and often witty, for Coleridge was (in early days at any rate) abundantly provided with both wit and humour, but quite occasional. Much more consists of mere Juvenilia. Even of the productions of his best times (the last lustrum of the eighteenth century and a lucid interval about 1816) much is not very good. _Religious Musings_, though it has had its admirers, is terribly poor stuff. _The Monody on the Death of Chatterton_ might have been written by fifty people during the century before it. _The Destiny of Nations_ is a feeble rant; but the _Ode on the Departing Year_, though still unequal, still conventional, strikes a very different note. _The Three Graves_, though injured by the namby-pambiness which was still thought incumbent in ballads, again shows no vulgar touch. And then, omitting for the moment _Kubla Khan_, which Coleridge said he wrote in 1797, but of which no mortal ever heard till 1816, we come to _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_ and the birth of the new poetry in England. Here the stutters and flashes of Blake became coherent speech and steady blaze; here poetry, which for a century and a half had been curbing her voice to a genteel whisper or raising it only to a forensic declamation, which had at best allowed a few wood-notes to escape here and there as if by mistake, spoke out loud and clear.
If this statement seems exaggerated (and it is certain that at the time of the appearance of the _Ancient Mariner_ not even Wordsworth, not even Southey quite relished it, while there has always been a sect of dissidents against it), two others will perhaps seem more extravagant still. The second is that, with the exception of this poem, of _Kubla Khan_, of _Christabel_, and of _Love_, all of them according to Coleridge written within a few months of each other in 1797-98, he never did anything of the first class in poetry. The third is that these four--though _Christabel_ itself does not exceed some fifteen hundred lines and is decidedly unequal, though the _Ancient Mariner_ is just over six hundred and the other two are quite short--are sufficient between them to rank their author among the very greatest of English poets. It is not possible to make any compromise on this point; for upon it turns an entire theory and system of poetical criticism. Those who demand from poetry a "criticism of life," those who will have it that "all depends on the subject," those who want "moral" or "construction" or a dozen other things,--all good in their way, most of them compatible with poetry and even helpful to it, but none of them essential thereto,--can of course never accept this estimate. Mrs. Barbauld said that _The Ancient Mariner_ was "improbable"; and to this charge it must plead guilty at once. _Kubla Khan_, which I should rank as almost the best of the four, is very brief, and is nothing but a dream, and a fragment of a dream. _Love_ is very short too, and is flawed by some of the aforesaid namby-pambiness, from which none of the Lake school escaped when they tried passion. _Christabel_, the most ambitious if also the most unequal, does really underlie the criticism that, professing itself to be a narrative and holding out the promise of something like a connected story, it tells none, and does not even offer very distinct hints or suggestions or what its story, if it had ever been told, might have been. A thousand faults are in it; a good part of the thousand in all four.