Creative geniuses are often tortured by obsessive impulses. No greater example can be found in the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who is at the center of Pandaemonium, a BBC film directed by Julien Temple. When the film begins, we see Coleridge (played by Linus Roache) entering a reception for poets, collapsing on the floor, then helped to his feet by William Wordsworth (played by John Hannah), and importuned by Lord Byron (played by Guy Lankester) to publish his long-awaited masterpiece Kubla Khan. The movie then reverts to 1795, when Coleridge is delivering a speech to a crowd in which he opposes England’s war with France and favors the abolition of slavery. Since the speech is viewed by authorities as subversive, soldiers stop the rally, and Coleridge flees to a "New Eden" in the Somerset countryside joined by Wordsworth, who met him at the rally. Presumably, the two poets were to collaborate, with the help of their girlfriends, spouse Sara Coleridge (played by Samantha Morton) and sister Dorothy Wordsworth (played by Emily Woof), and they finish Lyrical Ballads, at first pseudonymously, by 1798 while discovering that they are temperamentally ill-mated. Wordsworth gravitates to Coleridge because only the latter understands and adopts his innovative blank verse poetry, though we hear little of his verse in the film. Instead, the voiceover text of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a portion of Lyrical Ballads, occupies much of the film, and we receive an explanation that the symbolism means that chaos results when humans defy nature. What was the secret of Coleridge’s creativity? Opium. Stimulated by tincture of opium, an analgesic that was readily available at the time, Coleridge’s genius flowed for hours until he conked out. As in the case of the psychotropic "thorn apple," which the four principal characters consume one afternoon, the movie goes surreal to portray how images must have spun around Coleridge’s head while under the influence of opium. Wordsworth, who refused to touch opium, was so intimidated by the outpouring of Coleridge’s verse that he got writer’s cramp and even discouraged Coleridge from publishing Kubla Khan within Lyrical Ballads (which did not appear until 1816, the year when he finally overcame his addiction through the help of a friend). The twists and turns of the mutually unhelpful contact between Coleridge and Wordsworth occupy much of the film, but the best parts are the poetic voiceovers, the lush spring vegetation of the southern English countryside, and the mood-enhancing film score. Pandaemonium, whose title refers to the capital of Hell in Paradise Lost (1667), cultivates in filmviewers a desire to enjoy poetry as never before. MH

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Lyrical Ballads
by by W. J. B. Owen (Editor), William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, W. J. Cwen (Editor)

This collaboration between Wordsworth and Coleridge signaled the beginning of Romanticism in English poetry and announced all the important themes and techniques of the movement: the healing power of nature and art, the importance of "ordinary" man and woman, the pervasiveness of the supernatural in everday life, etc. The book also broke old rules by incorporating prosaic, common language in the poems.

Paradise Lost
by John Milton, John Leonard (Editor)

Long regarded as one of the most powerful and influential poems in the English language, Paradise Lost still inspires intense debate about whether it manages "to justify the ways of God to men" or exposes the cruelty of Christianity or the Christian God. John Leonard's illuminating introduction is fully alive to such controversies; it also contains full notes on language and many allusions to other works.