SOURCE: Bidney, Martin. “Refashioning Coleridge's Supernatural Trilogy: Sherwood Anderson's ‘A Man of Ideas’ and ‘Respectability.’” Studies in Short Fiction 27, no. 2 (spring 1990): 221-35.

In the following essay, Bidney examines Anderson's retelling of the supernatural poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The poet-philosopher Joe Welling, solipsistic yet inspired, and the monstrously ugly yet mysteriously attractive Wash Williams, courtly lover turned morose misogynist, are two of the most profoundly conceived visionary grotesques in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. They are almost antitypes of human nature: Joe, shielded in his private world of enthusiastic self-absorption from all disappointment or dismay; Wash, so vulnerable in his self-abasingly idealistic wife-worship that a sudden revelation of the facts of life induces a lifelong trauma. At a deeper level the antithesis between self-absorption and self-abasement is greatly qualified: Joe and Wash turn out to be alike in surprising ways. The two men are both inspired seers, for even...