. .

Woke this morning and discovered I'd left the porch door wide open--discovered it because the birds and trains were so noisy out there/in here. I'd leave that door open year round all night if I could. So the house is cold this morning. So what. Why close off the best room in the house?

***

Mary has agreed to house-sit again all summer, so now I must make a decision. --Ohp. Hear that? Tea kettle calling. No, no coffee in the morning. Sweet earl grey with milk. Gallons.

***

from Alan Soldofsky's "The Lyric Self: Artifice and Authenticity in Recent American Poetry," Writer's Chronicle, volume 38 number 6:

It is my contention that the lyric self's emergence pre-dates Lowell and his confessional heirs, making its earliest and most influential appearance in English-language poetry in the Conversation Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge written at the end of the 18th century.

This is a contention? I thought it was a given. A long established given (that really needs undoing). That Coleridge stole it from Rousseau ("I have begun on a work which is without precedent, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I propose to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself.")? Who took his cue from Augustine? I mean isn't this how the term "confessional poetry" was coined?

BUT that by the way Charlotte Smith did it before Coleridge in The Emigrants (1793) AND in Elegiac Sonnets (1797)--AND that Coleridge AND Wordsworth both knew and admired her work--AND were in fact young fans--AND I don't see anyone giving her CREDIT for what women had been doing ALL ALONG in 18th century autobiographical writing. IN POETRY.

It was already popular when Coleridge did it. He was just being fashionable, and, as poets do, imitating poets he especially looked up to.

***

on Mary Darby Robinson:

...she would enjoy a most fruitful professional relationship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who described her as "a woman of undoubted genius" to Southey roughly a year prior to her death (Wu 177). Coleridge's interactions with Robinson should appear quite remarkable to the modern student of Romanticism. He sent her a manuscript copy of his as yet-unpublished Kubla Kahn in 1797; was influenced to write his poem The Snow-Drop after reading a poem of the same name by Robinson; and, perhaps most notoriously, openly borrowed the meter for his poem The Solitude of Binnorie from Robinson's The Haunted Beach (which, in turn, owes much in terms of its gothic aspects to STC's Christabel and Rime of the Ancient Mariner...

***

Bathtub epiphany: it is cold in here.

***