“Prose = words in their best order; — poetry = the best words in the best order.”

Most of the best-known quotes by the British poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge come from his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and Kubla Khan (1816).

But one of his most famous quotations is not something he wrote.

It’s a remark he made in a conversation that was jotted down by his nephew and son-in-law, Henry Nelson Coleridge.

Yes, it is a little strange that he was both Samuel’s nephew and son-in-law. Apparently, the Coleridges were a very tight knit family.

Anyway, from 1822 to 1834, Henry took notes about things he heard Samuel say at gatherings of family and friends, figuring they might someday be worthwhile biographical records about the life of his famous father-in-law/uncle.

In 1835, a year after Samuel died, Henry published a two-volume collection that included his notes, under the title Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

These volumes, usually referred to as Table Talk for short, include an oft-cited quotation by Samuel about prose and poetry.

Henry recorded it in written form like this, using an equal sign for the word equal:

       “Prose = words in their best order; — poetry = the best words in the best order.”

According the Henry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge spoke those words on the night of July 12, 1827 during a wide-ranging conversation about a number of famous writers, including Sir Walter Scott, John Dryden, Algernon Sydney and Edmund Burke.

Presumably, Samuel said the word “equal” where the equal signs appear in Henry’s written version.

Coleridge made this remark after saying that Edmund Burke’s popular essay “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” was “neither profound nor accurate” and making an equally snarky comment about a poem by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto.

Samuel’s complete quote about prose vs. poetry, as recorded in Table Talk, is:

“I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; — poetry = the best words in the best order.”

Some people find Coleridge’s definitions of prose and poetry to be quite profound.

Others may find them a bit pompous and question whether they actually make sense. Who decides what the “best order” and “best words” are? And, why shouldn’t prose use the “best” words?

Nonetheless, Coleridge’s pithy comment about prose and poetry is one of the best known quotes from Table Talk.

Another is something Coleridge said about the actor Edmund Kean: “To see him act, is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.” You can read the backstory on that quote by clicking this link.

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The secret behind the famous phrase “the heart is a lonely hunter”…

On June 4, 1940, Houghton Mifflin published the first novel by the American writer Carson McCullers, a sensitive story about misfits and social outcasts in a Southern mill town titled The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

The success of McCullers’ book made its title a familiar and oft-quoted phrase.

The novel was later adapted into an excellent movie, as were McCullers’ other best-known works, Reflections In a Golden Eye and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe.

McCullers took the title of her first novel from an old poem by the Scottish poet Fiona Macleod.

This sad, dreamy poem, called “The Lonely Hunter,” is about a girl who mourns her dead lover and thinks about joining him.

It was published in 1896 in the book From the Hills of Dream, a collection of Macleod’s Celtic-flavored poetry.

The line in the poem that inspired McCullers’ book title is the last line in the third verse:

“Green wind from the green-gold branches, what is the song you bring?
What are all songs for me, now, who no more care to sing?
Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,
But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.”

Between 1894 and 1905, many readers in Scotland and Europe loved the romantic poems, novels and stories of Fiona Macleod. She was celebrated as one of the greatest writers associated with the revival of Celtic literature, along with poets like W.B. Yeats.

Oddly, Fiona never made any public appearances. She declined interviews and speaking engagements.

All communications and business with Macleod were conducted through her agent, the Scottish literary critic and biographer William Sharp.

It wasn’t until Sharp died in 1905 that the truth was revealed.

William Sharp was “Fiona Macleod.”

He apparently created his secret identity, in part, to protect the credibility of his more scholarly (and snootier) works — the collections of poems by famous poets that he edited and his series of biographies about poets such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Heinrich Heine and Robert Browning.

Sharp’s deception may also reflect the fact he was, in general, a pretty strange dude.

For example, he is said to have been a member of “The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,” a little-known cult whose beliefs combine a belief in the “divine feminine” with elements of magic, astrology, Egyptian mysticism, the Qabalah, Gnosticism, Rosicrucianism and other mystic stuff.

When Sharp died, he left behind a letter revealing he wrote the literary works attributed to Fiona Macleod.

When the letter was made public, it sorely distressed “Fiona’s” fans and damaged the reputation of all of Sharp’s books and poems for a while.

But, starting in the 1920s, poems and novels by “Fiona Macleod” steadily became popular again in the UK. Awareness of them also spread to other countries, where they were read by literature buffs like Carson McCullers.

Today, thanks to McCullers’ use of a line by “Fiona” as a book title, most Americans have heard at least one line of his/her poetry.

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“Coffee, Tea or Me?” – the catchphrase popularized by a hoax based on a joke...

Back in the 1960s, when air travel was more pleasant and our culture was less politically correct, airline stewardesses were hot – at least in terms of their popular image.

Most stewardesses were young and single. In the media, they were often portrayed as both desirable and attainable – as women who liked to fool around with pilots, passengers and lucky local citizens at stops along their routes.

The airlines tried to cash in on and promote this image in the mid-Sixties with ads that featured beautiful stewardesses and taglines like “I’m Cheryl. Fly Me.”

Then, on November 21, 1967, the Bantam paperback edition of the book Coffee, Tea or Me? was published, about a month after the hardcover edition had been released by Bartholomew House.

Subtitled The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses, this widely-distributed, wildly successful paperback further popularized the stereotypical image of fun-loving, promiscuous stewardesses.

It also made the sexually provocative phrase “Coffee, Tea or Me?” a familiar saying.

The book was portrayed as a humorous but fact-based memoir co-written by two stewardesses named Rachel Jones and Trudy Baker.

When it was published, two young women using those names went on a media tour to promote it.

Soon, Coffee, Tea or Me? became a national best seller, then an international best seller. 

Three sequels were published and credited to Rachel and Trudy.

In 1973, Coffee, Tea or Me? was even made into a TV movie starring Karen Valentine and Louise Lasser.

Decades later, it was revealed that the real author of the Coffee, Tea or Me? books was Donald Bain.

Bain was working as a public relations man for American Airlines when he wrote Coffee, Tea or Me?  

Thanks to its success, he went on to become a prolific full-time novelist and ghostwriter who has since penned dozens of popular books (including many of the Murder She Wrote novels).

“Trudy Baker” and “Rachel Jones” never existed.

The women who went on the book tour were two actual Eastern Airlines stewardesses, but they were hired by the publisher’s publicity agent to pose as Trudy and Rachel.

It was a supremely well-executed hoax that generated a ton of money for Bain and a memorable phrase that’s still used and lampooned today.

In the introduction to later reprints of the book, Bain wrote that the title Coffee, Tea or Me? came to him halfway through writing it after he heard someone recite an old airline joke that used the phrase.

If you’re old enough, you might remember the joke: A stewardess enters the cockpit of a commercial airplane and asks the pilot, “Coffee, tea or me?” The pilot says, “Whichever is easier to make.”

Bain says in his intro:

"Little did I know in 1967 that the book I was writing with a title lifted from a lame old joke would go on, along with its three sequels, to sell more than five million copies, be translated into a dozen languages, cause anxious mothers to forbid their daughters from becoming stewardesses, spawn airline protest groups, have its title inducted into the public vocabulary and be republished thirty-six years later, branding me the oldest, tallest, bearded airline stewardess."

Speaking of lame jokes, there’s a funny coincidence about the illustrations used on the covers and interior pages of the Coffee, Tea or Me? series. They were drawn by Bill Wenzel, one of the greatest of all adult cartoon artists.

Cartoons featuring Wenzel’s bosomy, airheaded babes, typically accompanied by classically lame and sexist captions, appeared in countless men’s girlie and humor magazines from the late 1940s into the early 1980s. He also did many paperback covers.

You can read more about Wenzel in the excellent book about him that was published in 2000 and in the authoritative posts done about him by vintage paperback and magazine maven Lynn Munroe. You can also see scores of his cartoons in this Google image search.

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