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reason, would have produced, not wild sublimity, but madness and frenzy"
(73); and Coleridge's friend George Dyer wrote in the Preface of his Poems
(1792), which Coleridge certainly saw: "The verse of Pindar is subject to
as strict rules, as the most accurate and methodical rhyme" (vii).
Only long after his schooldays, it would appear, did Coleridge perceive
the significance of this insight; and when he restated the principle in the
Biographia, he invested it with resonances and implications which made
its origin in a suggestive statement by an eighteenth-century poet scarcely
recognizable. And surely one of the unique impulses of Coleridge's genius
is his insistent quest for unifying principles governing the creation and
criticism of the arts and a philosophical system so embracing as to include
all thought and all phenomena. Always he had before him this fiery col­
umn as a guide. No man in England had so encompassing a vision of the
potential breadth of literary criticism and theory.
The tributes to Bowyer have found their way into many histories of
education and are constantly quoted when Coleridge's intellectual devel­
opment is discussed. Christopher North, in a Blackwood's review of 1817,
refused to "credit this account" of Bowyer, and noticed that "Mr. Cole-
ridge's own poetical practices render the story incredible."10 Leigh Hunt,
who arrived at Christ's Hospital the year Coleridge left for Cambridge,
wrote in his Autobiography, rather tartly, that Bowyer's "natural destina­
tion lay in carpentry."11 Hunt was well aware of Coleridge's tribute in the
Biographia, and he meets it head on: "Coleridge has praised Bowyer for
teaching us to laugh at 'muses' and 'Castalian streams'; but he ought rather
to have lamented that he did not teach us how to love them wisely, as he
might have had he really known anything about poetry . . . Even Cole-
ridge's juvenile poems were not the better for Bowyer's training" (108).
According to Charles Lamb, Coleridge's contemporary at Christ's Hospi­
tal, Bowyer's "English style was crampt to barbarism. His Easter anthems
(for his duties obliged him to those periodical flights) were grating as
scrannel pipes."12
Bowyer is said to have shown "no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image,
unsupported by sound sense, or where the same sense might have been
conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words" (i:5[i9O7]). One
might easily deduce that this obscure schoolmaster (and thus Coleridge)
had anticipated not only the basic principles of organic unity, but much of
Wordsworth's supposedly revolutionary argument about poetic language
in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. As Hunt and Christopher North acutely