The Poetics of “Divine Chit‐Chat”: Rethinking the Conversation Poems

This article focuses on the Romantic genre, pioneered by Coleridge in the 1790s, of the “conversation poem.” It provides a survey of influential twentieth‐century critics and criticism of the form; more to the point, however, it seeks to problematize our inherited ideas about the conversation poem by examining some of the assumptions (and mischaracterizations) that have informed the critical construction of this genre. In short, this article argues that the conversation poem's generic relationship to conversation has not been explained in sufficient depth. It attempts, in a preliminary way, to redress this insufficiency by outlining what its author calls a poetics of conversation – that is, the compositional techniques whereby a poet works out a fully‐realized conversational form – through a reading of the “original” conversation poem: Coleridge's “The Nightingale: A Conversational Poem” of 1798.