Pandaemonium (film)

Pandaemonium is a 2000 film based on the early lives of English poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, in particular their collaboration on the "Lyrical Ballads", and Coleridge's writing of Kubla Khan.

Directed by Julien Temple. Screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• It's only a mite. It's not as though he created a fully grown Doctor of Philosophy or a strapping great plough boy.
• It's not the opium - it's my mind. I spend every day trying not to think.

William Wordsworth

• We came to create a revolution of the mind, not to canoodle on a hillock.
• Albatrosses have nothing to do with eel fishing! This is another distraction.
• You can feed him with ideas and images but I go hungry.

Robert Southey

• Sam, opium is not your worst addiction. Your worst addiction is to Wordsworth.

John Thelwall

• You have grown such pleasing huge breasts, Sara.

Dialogue

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Anonymous - like Homer, like the hills and clouds themselves!

Sara Coleridge: So long as Anonymous doesn't collect the fee.

---

William Wordsworth: [to Dorothy ] I wandered lonely as a cow ...

Dorothy Wordsworth: Perhaps "cloud" would be better, William.

---

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: They will always be remembered... when I am dead and all my words are dust.

Sara Coleridge: What is it? What have you written?

Robert Southey: It's a story for the children. Called "The Three Bears".

About Pandaemonium

• Well, as it happens, I care. Of course, you can't libel the dead. But this is dreadfully unfair to the Wordsworths. William never betrayed Coleridge. Their relationship was vexed, but essentially civilised and creative. Mary was a good friend to Coleridge. It is true that Dorothy was a victim of senile dementia - but it was many years after Coleridge died, and not drug-related. Kubla Khan was published quite normally. The Prelude is one of the two or three greatest poems in the English language. I know all this. Probably you do as well. But will those susceptible viewers, boning up the Romantics for their A levels, know it?
  • John Sutherland [1]

Cast

• Linus Roache as Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• John Hannah as William Wordsworth
• Samantha Morton as Sara Coleridge
• Emily Woof as Dorothy Wordsworth
• Samuel West as Robert Southey

External links

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2001/sep/07/poetry.artsfeatures