Two Wrote Together

John Ford--that poet of the Western movies--made a movie titled, TWO RODE TOGETHER, starring James Stewart and Richard Widmark. I here borrow, twist and adapt that movie's tiltle and write you this e-mail message titled: TWO WROTE TOGETHER, meaning William Wordsworth and ST Coleridge. So entwined were the two men that to talk about one, one cannot but mention the other. However, they were in certain essential aspects as different from each other as THE INTIMATION ODE is different from KUBLA KHAN. Bill was chilly, whereas Sam was warm. Bill was sensible and hard working, while Sam was feckless and lazy.
I still--since late 1960s-- recall a couple of bulky volumes on a stack in the Mosul University Library. They are the fully annotated, well edited and nicely introduced two-volume book titled, "Cloeridge's Notebooks" from whose introduction the editor says that Coleridge sought solace in two things: opium and his notebooks.
For the past 10 years, I have--still going on-- written over 4,000 pages of notes in notebooks; commonplace books, as they were practised and named by Elizabethan authors. They are half in half in Arabic and in English. I use 200-page school notebooks, from right cover to middle of the notebook , I write in Arabic and in the other half I write in English. My topics include everything under the sun. My notes are original, adaptations from materials I read and sometimes word for word copying from here and there. But the different elements are so adroitly mixed-- adapting other authors' writings is no picnic, and sometimes it is much more difficult to make adaptations than to do original writing-- that my editor and/or biographer will find it extremely difficult or even impossible to tell me from other authors. I myself find it impossible in 90% of the cases to tell me from the authors I used. I have come to call this kind of notes, readerly writings. Already back in early 1980s, my PhD supervisor in Exeter Dr Peter F Corbin, confused me with Shaw on whom I was doing my thesis. What with my notes and my letters, I am a prolific author. I have little to pride myself on, but I think I am a notable epistolarian
Apart from his literary oeuvre which amounts up to twenty times the size of Shakespeare's, Shaw's output of letters, post cards and messages amounts to one quarter of a million. Voltaire wrote at the average of 10 letters a day