Copyright and collaboration : Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the debate over literary property

Macfarlane contends that ‘Romantic originality’ is a ‘misnamed idea’ and this essay has tried to demonstrate the cultural and legal process of simplification which has contributed to this somewhat erroneous view of Romantic authorship. Moreover, by focusing on the explicit and public collaborative relations of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the outwardly schizophrenic attitude that MacFarlane, amongst others, detects in Romantic pronouncements on literary originality and authorship, is here shown to be an internalised conflict between the known realities of compositional poetic techniques and the pressures of the literary marketplace. The financial and aesthetic posterity Wordsworth and Coleridge yearn for significantly downplays the ferocity of this intellectual battle in public by the poets’ more open and subsequently alleged favouring of individualistic notions of authorship and ownership on which such posterity relies. Wordsworth and Coleridge thus waver between acknowledging the artistic benefits of collaboration and being consumed by an anxiety that collaborative authorship, and even collaborative systems of creativity that operate within singular authorship, are not real authorship. By the early twentieth century, however, the tide had notably changed and, echoing Coleridge’s preface to ‘Kubla Khan’, T. S. Eliot confidently authenticated in 1919 the individual cognitive and emotional processes which the former poet had only anxiously been able to associate with creative thought: ‘[t]he poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together’. Notwithstanding such ideas, as well as the supposedly authorless postmodern world which we now occupy, it seems that we still struggle with an outmoded copyright system which often inhibits generation of the new literature it is designed to protect. In a digital society where democratic, non-linear, and collaborative norms of corporate and artistic productivity and knowledge sharing are gradually becoming the norm, copyright law begins to break down. Rather than apportioning culpability to our Romantic poets, however, it is perhaps to them and their own intricate and often contradictory aesthetics that we should look in order to better understand our contemporary legal system and find solutions to ease the concerns which we still share over originality and literary property with those same Romantic figures.