Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

First published: 1817

Type of work: Literary criticism

The Work

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria begins as an account of the major influences on the development of the author’s philosophy and literary technique, but the total effect of the work is considerably less coherent than this plan would indicate. As he progresses, Coleridge apparently alters his purpose, and he discusses at considerable length intellectual problems of special interest to him and gives some of his standards of literary criticism, with comments on specific works. In his opening paragraph, he speaks of his work as “miscellaneous reflections,” and such a description seems appropriate.

The loose, rambling structure of the Biographia Literaria accords well with the picture of Coleridge that has been handed down: that of a man with great intellectual and poetic gifts who lacked the self-discipline to produce the works of which he seemed capable. Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt both characterized him as an indefatigable and fascinating talker, full of ideas; this trait, too, plays its part in the creation of the Biographia Literaria, which is, in essence, a long conversation ranging widely over the worlds of poetry, drama, philosophy, and psychology. The lack of a tight organizational plan in no way prevents the book from being both readable and profound in its content; Coleridge’s comments on the nature of the poetic imagination have never been surpassed, and his critique of William Wordsworth’s work is still perhaps the most balanced and judicious assessment available, a model for all scholars who seek to form general views on the basis of close examination of individual texts.

In the opening chapter, Coleridge pays tribute to his most influential teacher, the Reverend James Bowyer of Christ’s Hospital, who insisted that his students learn to think logically and use language precisely, in poetry as well as prose. Coleridge also discusses the poetry he preferred in the years when his literary tastes were being formed; he turned toward the “pre-Romantic” lyrics of minor writers rather than to the terse, epigrammatic intellectual poems of the best-known of the eighteenth century literary men, Alexander Pope and his followers. At an early stage, Coleridge developed sound critical principles, looking for works that gained in power through rereading and for words that seemed to express ideas better than any phrases substituted for them could. He quickly learned to distinguish between the virtues of works of original ideas and the faults of those that made their effect through novel phraseology. He confesses, however, that his critical judgment is better than his creative talent: His own early poems, though he thought highly of them when he wrote them, leave much to be desired.

The harshness of the critics of his time is a theme that recurs throughout Coleridge’s biography. In his second chapter, he ponders the tendency of the public to side with the critics rather than with the poets, who are considered to be strange, irritable, even mad. The greatest writers—Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton—seem to him unusually well balanced, and he suggests that the popular heresy results from the frustrations of the second-rate writer who pursues fame without real talent. These general comments are closely linked to Coleridge’s sense of outrage at the vituperative attacks on him that issued regularly from the pages of the popular reviews, partly as a result of his association with Wordsworth and Robert Southey. The three poets were accused of trying to revolutionize, to vulgarize, poetry; they were avowedly interested in freeing poetry from the limitations of the eighteenth century poetic tradition. Coleridge denies that they deserved the abuses hurled at them.

After commenting on the works of Wordsworth and Southey, Coleridge turns to a number of philosophical problems that fascinate him, among them questions of perception, sensation, and the human thought processes. It is this section of the work that provides the greatest difficulty for the uninitiated reader, for Coleridge assumes considerable familiarity with the works of German philosophers and English psychologists and mystics. He surveys the theories of Thomas Hobbes, David Hartley, Aristotle, René Descartes, and others as they relate to problems of perception and of the development of thought through the association of ideas, and he assesses the influence of Immanuel Kant on his own philosophy.

Coleridge digresses from the complex history of his intellectual growth to describe his first literary venture into the commercial side of his world, his publication of a periodical called The Watchman. His attempts to secure subscriptions were ludicrous, and his project met with the failure that his friends had predicted; one of them had to pay Coleridge’s printer to keep Coleridge out of debtors’ prison.

One of the most important episodes of Coleridge’s life was his 1798 trip to Germany, where he widened his knowledge of the literature and philosophy of that country. He returned to England to take a position with a newspaper, writing on literature and politics; he attacked Napoleon Bonaparte so vehemently that the French general actually sent out an order for his arrest while Coleridge was living in Italy as a correspondent for his paper. Coleridge evidently enjoyed his journalistic work, and he advises all would-be literary men to find some regular occupation rather than to devote all of their time to writing.

Returning to his philosophical discussion, Coleridge lists several of his major premises about truth and knowledge. He is particularly concerned about distinguishing between the essence of the subject, the perceiver, and of the object, that which is perceived. Related to this distinction is the nature of the imagination, which Coleridge divides into two parts. The primary imagination is the human power that perceives and recognizes objects; the secondary imagination acts on these initial perceptions to produce new thoughts: “It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create.”

Coleridge next turns to a presentation of his literary standards, referring especially to the Lyrical Ballads (1798), the revolutionary volume that contained much of Wordsworth’s poetry and some of his own. He tries to define poetry, pointing out that it has as its “immediate object pleasure, not truth,” and that it delights by the effect of the whole as well as of individual parts. In one of the book’s most famous passages, he discusses the function of the poet who, by the power of his imagination, must bring unity of diversity, reconciling “sameness, with differences; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgment ever-awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement.”

Coleridge applies these general tenets to specific works, analyzing Shakespeare’s early poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) to determine what in them reveals genius and what is the result of the poet’s immaturity. He praises particularly Shakespeare’s musical language and his distance from his subject matter, saying, with reference to the latter point, that the average youthful writer is likely to concentrate on his own sensations and experiences. Shakespeare’s greatness seems to him to lie, too, in the vividness of his imagery and in his “depth, and energy of thought.”

Although he was closely associated with Wordsworth, Coleridge does not hesitate to indicate the points at which he differed from his colleague. He takes issue most strongly with Wordsworth’s assertion that the speech of low and rustic life is the natural language of emotion and therefore best for poetry. Coleridge stresses rather the choice of a diction as universal as possible, not associated with class or region, and he says that it is this kind of language that Wordsworth has, in fact, used in almost all of his work. He argues that in the famous preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth was, to a certain extent, exaggerating in order to make clear the advantages of natural, simple language over the empty poetic diction typical of the poetry of the time.

Coleridge’s comments on Wordsworth lead him to an extended attack on the practices of the critical reviews, which published commentary on his friend’s works that seemed to him both biased and absurd. He ridicules the tendency of anonymous reviewers to offer criticism without giving examples to support their assertions; they hardly seem to have read the works they lampoon. To counteract their ill-tempered, inconsistent judgments, he sets down his own views on Wordsworth’s most serious flaws and outstanding talents. He criticizes Wordsworth’s “inconstancy of the style,” a tendency to shift from a lofty level to a commonplace one; his occasionally excessive attention to factual details of landscape or biography; his poor handling of dialogue in some poems; his “occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying instead of progression of thought” in a few passages; and, finally, his use of “thoughts and images too great for the subject.”

With these defects in mind, Coleridge commends Wordsworth’s work for the purity and appropriateness of its language, the freshness of the thoughts, the “sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs,” the accuracy of the descriptions of nature, the pathos and human sympathy, and the imaginative power of the poet.

The major portion of the Biographia Literaria ends with a final assessment of Wordsworth’s work; Coleridge thereupon adds a section of letters written to friends while he was traveling in Germany. The letters contain amusing accounts of his shipboard companions, a description of his meeting with the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, and some of his literary opinions. To show how little his critical standards had changed, he also includes a long and devastating critique of a contemporary melodrama, Charles Robert Maturin’s Bertram: Or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand (pr., pb. 1816). Coleridge’s concluding chapter, as rambling in subject matter as the rest of the book, treats briefly the harsh critical reaction to his poem Christabel (1816), then turns to his affirmation of his Christian faith and his reasons for holding it. He makes no attempt to summarize his volume, which has presented a remarkably full portrait of his wide-ranging, questioning mind.

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