Page:The Earliest English Translations of Bürger's Lenore - A Study in English and German Romanticism - Emerson (1915).djvu/69

above the original.^[1] While Taylor's first version was underrated by Southey, his translation of another of Bürger's poems was extravagantly praised. Taylor's later version of Lenore was highly regarded by Southey, and was thought of by him for Lewis's Tales of Wonder, possibly mentioned to Lewis himself.^[2] At least the two versions of Taylor led to correspondence, and the eventual meeting of Southey and the Norwich translator.

Neither Southey nor Wordsworth was to be directly influenced in his poetry by the Bürger translations. Southey was perhaps already too full of his own plans. Yet he was to pay tribute to Sayers, the friend of Taylor, for his meter of Thalaba, and he visited the two at Norwich in 1798. On the other hand, Wordsworth was too much of a realist, and too much occupied with his own theories of poetry, to be likely to follow Bürger in his gruesome use of the supernatural. Such subjects were wholly at variance with his conceptions of the poetic realm.

Not so with Coleridge, however. We do not know the latter's response to Lamb's enthusiastic letter. But his keen appreciation of Taylor's Lenora is evident from his letters to the translator while he and the Wordsworths were in Germany.^[3] In these years, too, Coleridge was particularly susceptible to external influences. Reading Bowles as a schoolboy had made him a poet and a sonneteer. He had imitated Ossian in prose and verse. The influence of Southey and Lamb and Wordsworth and Godwin is clear from his early poems. Now he was to be more profoundly affected by Taylor's translation than has yet been pointed out.

Professor Brandl, in first referring to this influence,^[4] called attention to several matters in Coleridge's poems of 1797 to 1799. He notes the line of Kubla Khan.

By woman wailing for her demon lover;

the sinking of the ship in the Ancient Mariner, like the disappearance of the horse under Lenore at the grave of William; the general likeness of Christabel, and the breaking off of the Dark Ladie from its perceived resemblance, he thinks, to the ballad of Bürger. In his later Life of Coleridge,^[5] Brandl has also connected parts of the Ode on the Departing Year with the Bürger influence, and asso-

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1. See p. 32.
2. See p. 33.
3. See p. 32.
4. Schmidt's Characteristiken, I, 247.
5. Compare pp. 200-04, and 174, 215.