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In June 1797, Coleridge arranged for the Wordsworths to live at Alfoxden house, two miles walk from Nether Stowey. The new elements in Wordsworth's writing (a concern with mental process, and the sudden prominence of Milton) are mutually enhancing. As the poet turns inward, to observe the workings of his mind, his writing becomes more self-aware: producing its own greatness by reference to other poems. Kubla Khan, written the previous November, had enacted the same dual process, but Coleridge's influence is not so specific that it can be pinned down. What matters in this case is not the chronology of change so much as compatibility, despite difference, of the writers.

The Alfoxden period offers no actual collaborations. It was a time of sharing, but of a kind that nourished creative difference. The story of the two poets' formal attempts to co-operate, first on The Wanderings of Cain, then on The Ancient Mariner, is well known. According to Coleridge's affectionate account of 1828, the scheme for The Wanderings of Cain was abandoned almost at once because of Wordsworth's laughable inability to adapt himself. Writing joint poems could never have worked: the style of the two poets, as Wordsworth himself later put it; ‘would not assimilate’. It is in poems written alongside and against each other, not in so-called ‘collaborative schemes’, that one finds true language of allusion.

This chapter considers Wordsworth’s last revisiting. In 1841, in a tour that took in Alfoxden and sites associated with Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth crossed Salisbury Plain. He had first done so in 1793. The poem produced then, Salisbury Plain, was not published, nor was the revision of it, Adventures on Salisbury Plain. Now, after a lapse of 40 years, Wordsworth returned to it and revised it into Guilt and Sorrow; or, Incidents Upon Salisbury Plain. Examination of all versions of the poem brings out its significance for Wordsworth at various stages of his life and what the poem meant in the substantially revised version he was prepared to make public in 1842. Wordsworth’s place in early Victorian culture is once more stressed.

His early days in Bristol and collaboration with Robert Southey, followed by intimacy with William and Dorothy Wordsworth in Racedown and North Somerset. Speculation on the nature of life and interest in observation of all its manifestations. Awareness of recent scientific work, including the discovery of oxygen. The planning of Lyrical Ballads.

James Gillray’s ‘New Morality’ cartoon of August, 1798, illustrating George Canning’s poem of the same name in The Anti-Jacobin, is in effect a police line-up of many of the suspects, both ‘usual’ and ‘unusual,’ of the 1790s pro-parliamentary reform movement. It represents writers and intellectuals as leading a procession of British politicians in transports of enthusiasm for ‘French principles.’ The Home Office sent an agent to Nether Stowey in Somerset to investigate reports that Coleridge and Wordsworth, joined by the radical orator John Thelwall, were prospecting landing sites for a French invasion, supported by Thomas Poole, benefactor of a local Poor Man’s Benefit Club. Coleridge wrote a comic send-up of the incident for his Biographia Literaria (1817), by which he hoped to re-start his literary career after the defeat of Napoleon. He called the agent ‘Spy Nozy,’ claiming that he had misconstrued Coleridge and Wordsworth’s conversations on Spinoza.

Chapter 2 documents the place of the Moon and the night sky in the communal life of the Wordsworths and Coleridge at Alfoxden and Grasmere by tracing an interwoven series of scientific, natural, and typographical crescents in their poems, notebooks, and letters, before culminating in a reading of the 1802 revisions made to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. It shows that star-gazing, far from being injurious to their sensibilities, was most often a memorializing pleasure for the poets and their families in the absence of John Wordsworth. The chapter focuses on the workings of allusion and communal memory in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals; Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ‘A Letter to ——’, and ‘A Soliloquy of the Full Moon’; and Wordsworth’s ‘Peter Bell’ and ‘The Thorn’.