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

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