SOURCE: Sokol, B. J. “Coleridge on Charles Lamb's Poetic Craftsmanship.” English Studies 71, no. 1 (February 1990): 29-34.

In the following essay, Sokol examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge's revisions to a Lamb sonnet and notes Lamb's subsequent abandonment of verse composition.

Before twice printing it together with his own poems in 1796, Coleridge considerably modified Charles Lamb's sonnet beginning ‘Was it some sweet device of Faery’.¹ These unasked-for emendations are variously replied to in several of Lamb's letters to Coleridge of 1796 and 1797.² Since then a number of critics have expressed sympathetic indignation with Coleridge on Lamb's behalf.³ But if Lamb himself felt any injury on account of his poem's treatment, he largely disguised such reactions in the bantering and self-depreciatory tone of his letters.⁴

It is possible that Lamb did suffer a disguised hurt that contributed to the subsequent cooling of his relations with Coleridge. This is not made less possible because the...