Coleridge, Frontiersman

I'm currently reading Heavens on Earth, Mark Holloway's fascinating study of American utopian colonies through the 19th Century. It was interesting to note that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an aspiring, and ultimately unfulfilled, utopianist. Coleridge, along with fellow poets Robert Southey and Robert Lovell, planned a communistic settlement on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania.

While the men worked the soil, the ladies would care for the children and keep house. Life would not be strenuous--the men, it was thought, would have to work only two or three hours a day to maintain the colony; for the rest of the time, they would pay the greatest attention to the cultivation of their minds, indulging in much study and discussion on the basis of a small but comprehensive library.

Coleridge thought so fervently of their scheme that he revised his Monody on the Death of Chatterton to include an ode to Susquehanna:

O Chatterton! that thou were yet alive!
Sure thou would'st spread the canvas to the gale,
And love with us the tinkling team to drive
O'er peaceful Freedom's undivided dale;
And we, at sober eve, would round thee throng,
Would hang, enraptured, on thy stately song,
And greet with smiles the young-eyed Poesy
All deftly masked as hoar Antiquity.

Alas, vain Phantasies! the fleeting brood
Of Woe self-solaced in her dreamy mood!
Yet will I love to follow the sweet dream,
Where Susquehanna pours his untamed stream;
And on some hill, whose forest-frowning side
Waves o'er the murmur of his calmer tide,
Will raise a solemn Centotaph to thee,
Sweet Harper of time-shrouded Minstrelsy!
And there, soothed sadly by the dirgeful wind
Muse on the sore ills I had left behind.

The colony never materialized, due to financial constraints and ideological differences between the planners. Which was probably a good thing, as Holloway wryly notes.

Perhaps it is fortunate that the scheme failed, for it is difficult to picture Coleridge swinging an axe or Southey driving a plough with any success--even for "two or three hours a day."

Coleridge lived for another thirty-nine years after the scheme failed. It's unlikely he would have lived as long trying to live off the land, while simultaneously striving to maintain lofty intellectual pursuits, in the wilds of Pennsylvania in the late 18th Century.