Pandaemonium: Fallen Angels of Romantic Poetry

A solemn Councel forthwith to be held
At Pandæmonium, the high Capital
Of Satan and his Peers …

John Milton, Paradise Lost

Romance is a loaded word. It probably has as many meanings as love or god. The original Old French word romanz originally meant “the speech of the people”, or “the vulgar tongue”, derived from the Latin, romanice. The first known use of the word was in the fourteenth century. Romance can suggest not only a “love story” but also a “love affair”. It once referred to a class of poet-musicians, or troubadours, from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, in the south of France and the north of Italy, whose major theme was chivalry and courtly love.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a group of poets were labelled Romantic partly because they addressed the themes found in the old romances—noble love, courage, and the supernatural. Romantic poetry included poetry of sentiments, personal emotions and imagination and opposed the objectivity of the neo-classical poetry that had preceded it. One of the ways William Wordsworth defined Romantic poetry was, “by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men”. This could also serve as a good definition for the modern folk and pop lyric.

Pandaemonium (2000) is a British dramatic film, part fact, part fantasy, directed by Julien Temple with a screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce and starring Linus Roache, John Hannah and Samantha Morton. It is my favourite film on the mysterious lives of poets and it focuses on the writing of the poetry collection Lyrical Ballads, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Wordsworth in Somerset in 1798. The book, first published anonymously, is considered to be the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. The film was shot on location in Somerset.

“’Tis a strange place, this Limbo.” It’s 1813. One of Coleridge’s poems is heard in voice­over as the acclaimed poet (played by Linus Roache) drinks from a glass of water laced with laudanum. Although he is practically catatonic from opium addiction, he shows up to support his fellow poet and friend, William Wordsworth (played by John Hannah), who is expected to be announced as the new Poet Laureate at a function at Carlton House.

Lord Byron (played by Guy Lankester) arrives at the event, to the screaming of young girls, with all the panache of a foppish rock star. Wordsworth introduces Coleridge to the gathering as an outstanding poet and “midwife to my own genius”. Byron formally offers him £100 for the privilege of publishing a poem that they have all heard about but no one has ever read: “Kubla Khan”. Clearly vexed, Wordsworth bustles the mumbling Coleridge into a private room and closes the door.

Flashback to 1790s Bristol where Robert Southey is addressing the masses at a dockyard political rally. Coleridge takes the podium and gives a rousing speech against the government and the slave plantations of the new world. Suddenly a brigade of soldiers arrives and begin firing into the people. The crowd scatters. The poets take refuge in a small room in a back street where an illegal printing press has been set up. Thousands of pamphlets of the seditious publication The Watchman have been printed and are in stacks ready to distribute. Wordsworth is introduced to the clandestine group who are at first suspicious of him. But he loudly declares himself a democrat.

The printing press is subsequently discovered by authorities and the printer, John Thewall, is arrested and confined to the Tower. The pamphlets are seized and destroyed in a public bonfire.

Tired of politics, Coleridge suggests he and Wordsworth move to the country to an idyllic life. He prefers America but they decide on Nether Stowey and Alfoxden in Somerset. Coleridge, his wife Sara and their young baby go on ahead to prepare the house. Soon Wordsworth and his younger sister Dorothy (played by Emily Woof) join them. Dorothy is free-spirited and considers Coleridge “the new Milton” but is critical of the way he is living. She becomes his muse. Coleridge’s plan is that, in this remote setting, he and Wordsworth will create a joint volume of “poetry like the world has never seen”.

On a picnic, they drink a soup made of thorn­apple weed from their garden that has unpredictable hallucinogenic properties. They wander about having visions, completely disoriented.

John Thewall is released from prison with his hands damaged from torture. Coleridge and Sara are conflicted as to whether it is safe to let him stay in the country with them and he is asked to leave.

Coleridge and Wordsworth begin working on Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth experiences severe writer’s block but Coleridge works all through the night under the influence of laudanum. One stormy night, in the middle of what is to become The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, he climbs a tree, lashing himself to the trunk in order to experience the fury of the storm.

Wordsworth is unable to understand why Coleridge would write about the killing of a bird by a sailor. But Dorothy sees something deeper in the imagery: the hubris of “man breaking his bond with nature”.

Coleridge is tormented by laudanum-addicted visions of his Mariner, the sole survivor, and is struggling with how to rescue him from the doomed death ship. Dorothy suggests the Mariner could “bless” something beautiful in nature. The albatross would then fall from his neck and he would be free.

Wordsworth is furious that he hasn’t been able to come up with anything while Coleridge has produced this masterpiece.

The Lyrical Ballads are published anonymously and become a great sensation, creating interest in the mysterious poets who wrote it.

Later, in another laudanum haze, Coleridge begins imagining Xanadu and Kubla Khan. But when Wordsworth barges in, interrupting him, the spell is broken and Coleridge is unable to finish the poem.

Wordsworth decides to marry his childhood friend Mary Hutchinson, and Southey and his family arrive to help Coleridge overcome his opium addiction. Mary suggests to her husband that Coleridge and his addiction will harm their own prospects. Southey writes the story “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”, which Coleridge assures him will live in the hearts of people long after his own work is forgotten. Southey warns Coleridge that his real addiction is to Wordsworth and he needs to distance himself from that “vampire”.

Coleridge shows the first draft of “Kubla Khan” to Dorothy. She embraces it, reading it out loud in front of her brother and his wife, who remain sceptical. Mary says she prefers Wordsworth’s poetry.

The group is beginning to fragment.

Sara asks Dorothy to stay away from Coleridge, afraid that her influence will be detrimental to his recovery. Wordsworth and his wife are keeping mostly to themselves now that they are married. Dorothy, becoming more isolated, begins taking laudanum.

The story returns to 1813, to the gathering at Carlton House for the announcement of the Poet Laureate. In a side room, Wordsworth is advising Coleridge that if he is indeed serious about overcoming his addiction, he needs to refuse Byron’s offer of publication and destroy “Kubla Khan”. He feels that, coming in the wake of their success with Lyrical Ballads, a poem with such dubious overtones would subject them to ridicule.

Dorothy Wordsworth is now in the grips of dementia, which her brother attributes to the opium. He blames irresponsible work like “Kubla Khan” for glorifying a road that leads to despair and death. He persuades Coleridge to throw his only copy of the poem into the fire.

The King’s messenger arrives to announce the startling news that Southey has been chosen as Poet Laureate over Wordsworth. Wordsworth storms out. He is overheard suggesting that there has been some kind of clandestine arrangement with the government.

Byron is outraged when he hears that Wordsworth has bullied Coleridge into destroying “Kubla Khan” and insults him publicly. When all appears lost, the infirm and weak Dorothy, in a wheelchair, proceeds to recite the lost poem from memory, astounding everyone and bringing Southey to tears.

Years later, we see a calm and sober Coleridge sitting surrounded by his children, reading his poetry to them.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the key founders of the English Romantic movement. It is speculated that in his youth he suffered from bipolar disorder. He was treated for rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses with laudanum, which initiated him into a lifelong opium addiction. After studying at Cambridge, he enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons under the name Silas Tomkyn Comberbache, but his brothers arranged for his discharge by reason of insanity.

He and Robert Southey at one stage planned a utopian commune called Pantisocracy, in Pennsylvania. The two poets married sisters, Sara and Edith Fricker.

Coleridge died in London in 1834 from heart failure and a lung disorder, attributed to complications from his chronic dependence on opium. At his worst, he was consuming two quarts of laudanum a week. Virginia Woolf said of him: “As we enter his radius, he seems not a man, but a swarm, a cloud, a buzz of words, darting this way and that, clustering, quivering, and hanging suspended.”

William Wordsworth visited Paris in 1791, falling under the spell of the Revolutionary movement. After Southey died, Wordsworth became Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death from pleurisy in 1850.

The older poet William Blake was impressed by the focus of Wordsworth’s poetry on the human mind. Blake once said that reading the following passage from The Excursion caused him to suffer a bowel complaint that nearly killed him!

Not Chaos, not
The darkest pit of lowest Erebus,
Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out
By help of dreams—can breed such fear and awe
As fall upon us often when we look
Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man—
My haunt, and the main region of my song
—Beauty—a living Presence of the earth,
Surpassing the most fair ideal Forms
Which craft of delicate Spirits hath composed
From earth’s materials—waits upon my steps.

Dorothy Wordsworth never married and died at eighty-three, in 1855, having spent her last twenty years battling a degenerative illness in, according to her biographer Richard Cavendish, “a deepening haze of senility”.

Robert Southey was an English poet of the Romantic school, and the British Poet Laureate from 1813 until his death in 1843. His first wife, Edith, gradually went insane and died. He then married a younger woman, the poet Caroline Ann Bowles, but soon became victim himself to dementia.

Lord George Byron, 6th Baron Byron, an English poet and peer, was also one of the key figures of the Romantic movement. His best-known works are Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Byron had the keenest wit of all the Romantics, often suggesting that of Mozart. In an essay for the Hudson Review, “Seven Takes”, David Mason writes:

The comic mode had certainly, by 1817 when he wrote Beppo in Venice, come to the fore. A jaunty narrative of adultery, Beppo is also a sort of love letter to Italy and its language,

that soft bastard Latin,
Which melts like kisses from a female mouth,
And sounds as if it should be writ on satin …

Byron was born with a deformed right foot and had a wild nature as a boy with, as his mother once said, a “reckless disregard for money”. Although admired for his good looks, which he enhanced by wearing curlers in his hair at night, he was a skilled boxer, horseman and extraordinary swimmer.

He was an admirer of the poetry of Robert Burns. Byron described Burns’s poems in his journal:

They are full of oaths and obscene songs. What an antithetical mind!—tenderness, roughness—delicacy, coarseness—sentiment, sensuality—soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity—all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!

In contrast to his aristocratic image of entitlement and privilege, Byron joined the Greek War of Independence to fight against the Ottoman empire. He died in 1824 at the age of thirty-six from a fever contracted while leading a campaign after the two sieges of Missolonghi. In Greece, he is regarded not only as a major poet, but as a folk and war hero.

The literary historian John Sutherland said about Pandaemonium in the Guardian: “It’s entertaining, nice to look at and, in a Ken Russell kind of way, thrilling film-making. But, regarded as literary history, [it] is pure travesty.” Lawrence van Gelder praised the film in the New York Times, saying, “As they have for centuries, writers like these make rewarding company.” Esther Rutter said, in Wordsworth Grasmere:

It is … a rare example of a film which details the process of literary composition (other notable examples are Jane Campion’s brilliant Bright Star and the popular Shakespeare in Love), and for that alone it is to be commended. It falls between the two stools of fantasy and biography.

Dennis Harvey wrote in Variety: “One of the most potent forms of opium and the one to which Coleridge was partial was from Kendal. The Kendal Black Drop was incredibly dense and was the crack cocaine of its day.” Byron mentioned it in Don Juan:

for Cupid’s cup
With the first draught intoxicates apace,
A quintessential laudanum or “black drop”,
Which makes one drunk at once.

Laudanum is a tincture of opium containing approximately 10 per cent powdered opium—the equivalent of 1 per cent morphine. Until the early twentieth century, laudanum was sold without a prescription.

Thornapple, the psychoactive weed referred to in the movie, is also known as jimsonweed and Datura stramonium. A poisonous flowering plant with a distinctive white trumpet-like flower, it is often used in traditional medicine. In 2022, David Caldicott of the Guardian reported that Datura stramonium had affected a local Australian spinach crop:

Multiple cases of poisoning, now extending into their hundreds, have been reported across numerous Australian jurisdictions in the past couple of weeks after the consumption of baby spinach. Symptoms include blurred vision, dry mouth, abdominal cramps—and quite significant hallucinations.

Was Kubla Khan’s Xanadu “stately pleasure-dome” located in heaven—or hell? Or somewhere in between? Xanadu, also known as Shangdu, actually exists in Inner Mongolia and is a World Heritage Site. It was the summer capital of the Yuan dynasty of China. Emperor Kubla Khan stayed there. In 1228, Marco Polo visited it and gave an account:

The construction of the Palace is so devised that it can be taken down and put up again with great celerity and it can all be taken to pieces and removed whithersoever the Emperor may command. When erected, it is braced against mishaps from the wind by more than 200 cords of silk. The Khan abides at this Park of his, dwelling sometimes in the Marble Palace and sometimes in the Cane Palace for three months of the year, to wit, June, July and August; preferring this residence because it is by no means hot; in fact it is a very cool place.

Coleridge wrote that he had been reading about Shangdu in Purchas his Pilgrimes (1613), by Samuel Purchas. Purchas was, in fact, quoting Marco Polo:

In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be moved from place to place.

Coleridge fell asleep and had an opium-inspired dream that became the poem fragment.

In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Pandæmonium, the Capital of Hell, was the work of the architect Mulciber, who had designed the palaces in Heaven before his Fall. (Mulciber is another name for the Roman god Vulcan.) Pandæmonium was built by the Fallen Angels.

So what an appropriate name for this chaotic, as Harvey calls it, “proto-summer of love” literary experiment. It seems that all these highly gifted friends and “citizens” of poetry eventually grew at odds with each other, openly criticising each other’s work and lives.

In a letter to Francis Hodgson, Byron referred to Wordsworth as “Turdsworth”. In Don Juan, Byron expresses his disdain for his old colleagues:

All are not moralists, like Southey, when
He prated to the world of “Pantisocracy;”
Or Wordsworth unexcised, unhired, who then
Season’d his pedlar poems with democracy;
Or Coleridge, long before his flighty pen
Let to the Morning Post its aristocracy;
When he and Southey, following the same path,
Espoused two partners (milliners of Bath).

Such names at present cut a convict figure,
The very Botany Bay in moral geography;
Their loyal treason, renegado rigour,
Are good manure for their more bare biography.
Wordsworth’s last quarto, by the way, is bigger
Than any since the birthday of typography;
A drowsy frowzy poem, call’d the “Excursion.”
Writ in a manner which is my aversion.

There are suggestions in the final part of the film that Wordsworth may have been in league with government authorities to keep an eye on his more radical associates. This theory did exist, in fact, for years, supported in The Hidden Wordsworth by Kenneth R. Johnston, but was soundly discredited by more thorough recent research. John Sutherland wrote:

The Wordsworths never betrayed Coleridge. Their relationship was vexed, but essentially civilised and creative. Mary was a good friend to Coleridge. It is true that Dorothy was a victim of senile dementia—but it was many years after Coleridge died, and not drug-related. Kubla Khan was published quite normally.

Harvey says, “as a paean to the power of imagination, Pandaemonium is an impressive work”. Sandi Chaitram of the BBC said, “Pandaemonium successfully gets to the heart of the obsessions that drive great writers—and will have you dusting down your old school copy of the Lyrical Ballads!”

Emily Woof, who plays Dorothy Wordsworth, is the daughter of the foremost authority on Dorothy, Pamela Woof. Her father was Wordsworth Trust director, Dr Robert Woof. Her recitation of “Kubla Khan” as Dorothy Wordsworth at the close of the movie is worth the price of attendance alone and is one of the most memorable performances of a poem you will ever see.

Joe Dolce adds: Special thanks to David Mason, 2010 Colorado Poet Laureate, Jennifer Harrison, winner of the 2011 Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry, and Emeritus Professor Kevin Brophy, for proof-reading the draft article and suggestions.