Samuel Taylor Coleridge and hurt/comfort fic

[marysutherland]

As a follow-up to 'By the Book', I can't resist quoting this bit from a biography of Coleridge I dipped into:

For Coleridge, the act of nursing or being nursed, and the intimacy of the sickroom, eventually became an emblem of true love and understanding. Sickroom incidents are frequent in his life, and gradually begin to pass into his poetry as a major theme, Psychologically this suggests something about his "dependent'' personality (of which dependency on opium was only one manifestation). For all his intellectual brilliance and daring, Coleridge was often drawn to this twilight state, in which the distinction between adult and child could be magically suspended, responsibilities waived and physical tenderness be freely exchanged without sexual guilt...Some of his best poetry concerns the visions of the sick, hallucinating, or fitfully dreaming hero or heroine. And in his affairs of the heart, the sickroom becomes a zone of almost erotic intensity. Though the letters of many Romantic writers - Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats - are surprisingly full of lurid details of medical complaints (anarchic bowels, treacherous lungs, seething bladders, and mutinous teeth, together with a catalogue of fevers, rheumatic, headaches, and of course consumptive fears), Coleridge outdid his friends in this as in most things.

Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (Hodder and Stoughton, 1989, p 15)

Comments

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Ah, you beat me to it, sort of. I fell asleep wondering if Coleridge's response to Sherlock's name was a Richard Holmes joke.

[fengirl88.livejournal.com]

as you said before, STC h/c slashfic has to happen! not sure if anyone's going to write it in time for Wordsworth's birthday, though.

disastrolabe has a video called "Competition Smile" which may be relevant to your interests...

rec post: other people's creations

[pingback-bot.livejournal.com]

User fengirl88 referenced to your post from rec post: other people's creations (http://fengirl88.livejournal.com/41132.html) saying: [...] (Sherlock, John, time-travel and jokes I wouldn't dream of spoiling for you) and her follow-up post [...]

[shezan.livejournal.com]

... written by a Holmes, too...