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Michael T. Simpson

American Literature 1

23 August 2010

Research on William Bartram’s Influence on Samuel Taylor Coleridge

When talking about William Bartram’s influence on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, almost everyone

cites John Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu. Lowes bases his analysis on a notebook Coleridge

kept between 1795 and 1798 that was published by a German professor in 1886. In his chapter “The

Sleeping Images,” Lowes spends several pages on passages from Bartram’s Travels that Coleridge was

“ardently transcribing” (365) into his notebook. Lowe’s basic argument is that certain passages from

Bartram’s Travels – his description of crocodiles, the Isle of Palms, and a fountain – coalesced with other

things Coleridge was reading to create key images in the poem “Kubla Khan.”

Another book I found on Bartram, this one by Bryllion Fagin, goes over the same passages but

suggests that the “influence of Bartram on Coleridge was even greater.” (148) Fagin points out that

“Bartram was still in Coleridge’s mind” as late as 1827 when Coleridge is quoted as stating, “the latest

book of travels I know, written in the spirit of the old travelers, is Bartram’s account of his tour in the

floridas.” (149)

I also discovered a short article published by John K. Wright in the American Quarterly in which

he identifies the fountains Bartram described (and Coleridge used) to be “the Blue Sink, The Manatee

Spring, and Salt Springs Run in Florida.” (2) In his article, Wright observes that in “pictures these springs

are hardly as impressive as one might expect from Bartram’s and Coleridge’s words.” (6) The most

current article I found, though not particularly useful, was a speech read at a SAMLA Luncheon in

Chapel Hill and printed in the South Atlantic Review in 1986. In his speech, Lewis Leary quips,

“William Bartram would be at home among us. He spent a lot of time at trading posts. And what, among

other things, is SAMLA but a trading post?” (4)

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When I did a Google search on the phrase “William Bartram” combined with the words “Kubla

Khan,” one the top results was Web Writing That Works, a website offering a “hyper-text” version of

“Kubla Khan” that “explores the links between text that Samuel Taylor Coleridge read, and the images in

his poem.” For key lines in the poem, the web site provides links to possible “influences.’ For example,

for the line “A might fountain momently was forced,” the page has 5 lines with Bartram’s name, but it

also has links to Herodotus, John Milton, Virgil, Seneca, and Mary Wollstonecraft. The references to

Lowes’s book are extensive; Jonathan Price, who maintains the website, states “I’ve created this hypertext

to honor Nelson’s vision of a web of associative links, Professor Lowes’s strange but intriguing book, and

Coleridge’s magical poem.

My Google search also brought up a long article on the website for the American Philosophy

Society. The title is lengthy, remarkable, and only partially related to Bartram and Coleridge: “Roaring

Alligators and Burning Tigers: Poetry and Science from William Bartram to Charles Darwin.” The article

intends to “offer several examples of the interconnections between science and poetry in the decades

represented” by an exhibit the Society was sponsoring. Bartram, Nichols says, was “important to

Romantic writers” because his prose:

“. . . is full of lyrical descriptions, sensuous language, and metaphors worthy of a poet. In

addition, his rhetorical technique combines remarkably accurate field observations with an ability

to link these details through imaginative and analogical thinking.” (306)

Unfortunately, Nichols goes on to relate Bartram more to Wordsworth than to Coleridge.

* * * *

What first interested me in the connection between Bartram and Coleridge was that Bartram was

a “scientist” observing nature for “scientific” research, cataloging and describing unusual plants and

animals that he encountered in the “wilds” of America. Coleridge, on the other hand, was the very

opposite of the scientist; he was the romantic poet addicted to drugs and more interested in “subjective”

experience than in the dry catalogues of science. Yet there was a kinship, and I decided it could have to

do with Bartram’s piety and reverence for nature. In the University of Georgia edition of Bartram’s

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Travels, the editor quotes Thomas Carlyle as saying that Bartram had “a wondrous kind of floundering

eloquence.” (Bartram, xxvii) What I might explore in my research is the difference between Bartram’s

“floundering eloquence” and Coleridge’s “poetry.” How did Coleridge change what Bartram wrote to

make it “great” poetry? What did he add, and what did he take away?

But my thesis could go in other directions too. For example, there is the paradox that Coleridge

wrote a romantic description of a landscape he never saw. The vivid landscape of “Kubla Khan” is made

up of words he has read and copied in his notebook from a book. There is also the fact that Bartram is a

certain type of scientist, an “innocent” scientist with a pious reverence for nature that we don’t see in all

scientists.

When I consider Bartram as a “scientist,” it leads me to questions of how nature is viewed

differently by Coleridge and Bartram. Coleridge wants to make a poem out of it. But what does Bartram

want? He seems content to catalog it, but at moments he tries to articulate the spell that nature weaves

around him when he is alone and immersed in it. One of the first notebook entries of Coleridge that

Lowes’ quotes in regard to “Kubla Khan” is this: “—some wilderness-plot, green and fountainous and

unviolated by man.” (364) For me, the key phrase is “unviolated by man.” What Bartram experienced

and Coleridge wanted to recreate was a single individual’s relationship to nature in contrast to our

collective approach to nature. As a species we routinely “violate” nature; we seem compelled to do it.

But as individuals . . . maybe that’s what impressed Coleridge about Bartram. In his Travels, Bartram

approached nature as an individual seeking the same kind of spiritual connection the romantics were so

keen on.

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Works Cited

Bartram, William. The Travels of William Bartram: Naturalist Edition. Ed. Francis Harper. Athens:

University of Georgia Press 1998.

Fagin, N. Bryllion. William Bartram, Interpreter of the American Landscape. Baltimore. 1933.

“Kubla Khan” Web Writing That Works. Ed. Lisa and Jonathan Price. 20 September 2006

http://www.webwritingthatworks.com/DXanSOURCE01.htm

Leary, Lewis. “Two to Remember: A Homily.” South Atlantic Review. Vol 51, No.2. May, 1986), 3-8.

Lowes, John Livingston. The Road to Xanadu. Boston. 1927

Nichols, Ashton. “Roaring Alligators and Burning Tygers: Poetry and Science from William Bartram to

Charles Darwin.” American Philosophical Society. Vol. 149, No. 3, September 2005.

http://www.asp-pub.com/proceedings/1493/490302.pdf

Wright, John K. “From ‘Kubla Khan’ to Florida”. American Quarterly Vol. 8, No. 1. Spring 1956. 76-80.