"Frost at midnight"

some Coleridgean intertwinings

pp. 167-182

in: Peter Larkin, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

How do readers greet a poem? Is there a literary equivalent? Rather than overwhelming it with critique, how does a poem bring us to a threshold of expectancy or what one critic has called a "neighborhood of the questionable"?¹ Greeting might be a trope for the poetic word, a word that as such remains precarious and questioning.² Where a greeting leads to a conversation, however, readers do not leave things as they were: we invite the poem to share its question with us so that questioning is not so much the ultimate word but a shared word—and as such the poem can move on with us.