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Kubla Can: Wordplay in Coleridge's Poetry

Summarizing Coleridge's attitude towards the pun, Syl van Bamet notes three separate strains: "As a man in social situations he enjoyed puns and punning; as a philosopher he detested distortions of language; as a student of Shakespeare he found explanations for some puns and ignored others" ("Coleridge on Puns," JEGP 56 [1957] 602-609). Published more than thirty years ago, Barnet's article and subsequent scholarship only tells part of the story. As the work of James McRusick in Coleridge's Philosophy of Language (1986), and of Timothy Fulford's Coleridge's Figurative Language (1991) has shown, Coleridge's attention to the pun is in fact central to his lifelong interest in language, an interest that cannot be totally separated from his wider religious and philosophical concerns. As I will show in this paper, the pun is the site of a particular tension in Coleridge's work. Ultimately, this ten sion sets pleasure and truth against each other, dividing what ought to be united. To flesh out the causes and characteris tics of this opposition I turn first to an examination of the way in which wordplay actually functions in his poetry.