For JT Shaffer as part of our ongoing Halloween celebration fulfilling your requests... Christabel is a long narrative ballad by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in two parts. The first part was reputedly written in 1797, and the second in 1800. Coleridge planned three additional parts, but these were never completed. Coleridge prepared for the first two parts to be published in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, his collection of poems with William Wordsworth, but left it out on Wordsworth's advice. The exclusion of the poem, coupled with his inability to finish it, left Coleridge in doubt about his poetical power. It was finally published in a pamphlet in 1816, alongside Kubla Khan and The Pains of Sleep.

The poem remained unpublished for several years. On his birthday in 1803, he wrote in his notebook that he intended "to finish Christabel" before the end of the year, though he would not meet his goal.

The transgressive plot of Christabel revolves around the relationship, implicitly sexual, of Geraldine and Christabel. Geraldine takes on a proto-vampiric role, with all the antecedent features that that necessitates: external beauty, a revelatory bodily mark, and a physical encounter (with the victims) that leaves them incapacitated. Percy Shelley, a friend of Coleridge's, after reading the poem, purportedly had nightmares and was obsessed with the poem; Epipsychidion, one of his later works, is partially inspired by it. Byron was similarly taken by the poem, and especially the relationship between the women, and wrote to Coleridge (on October 18, 1815): the description of the hall, the lamp suspended from the image, and more particularly of the girl herself as she went forth in the evening – all took a hold on my imagination which I never shall wish to shake off. Christabel, with its female-centric narrative became a symbol of female emancipation for early feminists and suffragettes.

In the Biographia Literaria, Samuel Taylor Coleridge sums up the attraction of great poetry: “Not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry”. With this declaration, Coleridge suggests that poetic experience, particularly meaningful poetic experience, is necessarily repetitive. Coleridge’s own enigmatic “Christabel” demonstrates this genuine power by inspiring readers to return to it despite its incongruities and the general perception that it is a failed poem. In identifying repetition as integral to poetic experience, Coleridge’s definition of essential poetry offers an important clue to the work’s central concerns. While the dramatic narrative seems disjointed, the poem maintains its coherence by making repetition its theme.

свернуть