The Poet 209
want to embrace it. Hart Crane writes: “The bells, I say, the bells
break down their tower.” The bells, one might imagine, are the po-
et’s lyric power— which he acquires when he succeeds in marrying
love and imagination. But even at its best— even when the bells ring
most beautifully— there is a cost. The intensity the poet seeks can
weary the body and taint (and sometimes even overthrow) the ra-
tional mind. “We poets in our youth begin in gladness.” Some of
Coleridge’s best poems are farewells to his powers to love and
imagine. Though he fi nds the fusion of love and the shaping power
for a moment in his early “Aeolian Harp,” he quickly loses it and
descends into an abyss, unable to love, unable to create what he
might have. In time, he comes to see that he has no force of imagi-
nation to send out into Nature. “O Lady, we receive but what we
give and in our life alone does nature live,” he chants in the mor-
dant Dejection, An Ode. We receive but what we give and Coleridge,
alas, has nothing to give. He has failed in love. His own marriage is
a shambles and the woman he adores, Sara Hutchinson, the sister
of Words worth’s wife, will not have him.
For the High Romantic—as against the common man or woman
who is mesmerized by romantic hope—it is not enough simply to
fall in love and to live happily in private bliss. This is the indolent
mode of being that Blake associates with Beulah, the false paradise
where all contraries are true. Blake believes that creation arises from
strife. Remaining too long in Beulah restores the Self rather than
nurturing the Soul. The true poet knows love is au then tic because
it makes him stronger— more inventive, more humane, and better
able to keep on contending with the spirit of Jupiter, who, though
he may be defeated from time to time, will never die. Love inspires
creation for the Romantic, and it is creation that produces good for
other men and women. Shelley asserts as much when Asia, Pro-
metheus’ Soulmate, looks back at the achievement that she and
Prometheus enjoyed together: