Fears in Solitude

Coleridge, a radical and Jacobin, was an early supporter of the French Revolution and believed that it would bring much-needed political change to Europe and to Great Britain.

[7] However, some of the British are like a plague that spreads their poor behavior to other nations:[8] [...] Like a cloud that travels on, Steamed up from Cairo's swamps of pestilence, Even so, my countrymen!

have we gone forth And borne to distant tribes slavery and pangs, And, deadlier far, our vices, whose deep taint With slow perdition murders the whole man, His body and his soul!

And grateful, that by nature's quietness And solitary musings, all my heart Is softened, and made worthy to indulge Love, and the thoughts that yearn for human kind.

[13] The gothic elements of the poem connect it to many of his other works, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, "Ballad of the Dark Ladie", France: An Ode, Frost at Midnight, The Nightingale, "Three Graves", and "Wanderings of Cain".

[17] Another review, in the January 1799 Monthly Mirror, claims, "The author's Fears are, perhaps, not highly honourable to his feelings as a Briton, nor very complimentary to the national character.

"[18] The Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, in the Preface to the 1875 edition of Christabel, argues, Compare the nerveless and hysterical verses headed 'Fears in Solitude' (exquisite as is the overture, faultless in tone and colour, and worthy of a better sequel) with the majestic and masculine sonnet of Wordsworth [...] for, great as he is, I at least cannot hold Wordsworth, though so much the stronger and more admirable man, equal to Coleridge as a mere poet – speaks with a calm force of thought and resolution; Coleridge wails, appeals, deprecates, objurgates in a flaccid and querulous fashion without heart or spirit.

[19]In a September 1889 Fortnightly Review article called "Coleridge as a Poet", Edward Dowden writes, "Coleridge still declaims against the sins of England, and protests against the mad idolatry of national wrong-doing [...] yet utters himself before the close with all the filial loyalty of a true son of England, and he declares in a noble strain of eloquence how the foundations of his patriotism have been laid in the domestic affections".

It is a shameless return to the older, effusive manner, evidently written in a white heat of patriotic indignation against the degradation of English public opinion during the French wars, and it is only by stretching charity that it can be considered a conversation poem at all.

"[22] Following this, Geoffrey Yarlott states, "though disproportionate in qualities of thought and feeling (and one of the less successful therefore of the major 'annus mirabilis' poems), [Fears in Solitude] exemplifies the problems Coleridge had to wrestle with in assimilating didacticism to the requirements of poetic organization.