Biographia Literaria, whereas the poet imitates the divine creativity by the power of
primary Imagination. This is the centre of Coleridge’s critical thinking, in which
literature is less a work of art than a natural product of the imagination. His applied
criticism is philosophical and comprehensive, as when in Biographia Literariahe
enlarges Wordsworth’s ideas of poetic diction and rhythm. It can be psychological,
as in his notable Shakespeare criticism. Most branches of knowledge contribute to
Coleridge’s criticism, which he carried on endlessly in letters, notebooks, lectures
and in the margins of books.
Biographia Literaria is an attempt to give his ‘literary life and opinions’ on poetry
more systematically. Intended as an autobiographical preface to his Christabel and
Other Poems(1816), it outgrew its function. Too long for a preface, it was too short
for the two volumes allotted by the publisher. Masterly pages on, for example, ‘The
Poets before and since Mr Pope’, are filled out by secondary matter. He has often
been blamed for unacknowledged borrowing from the German Romantic thinkers
whom he had studied at Göttingen in 1799. Coleridge’s criticism is never uninterest-
ing though it can be frustrating: autobiographical, speculative, comprehensive,
unpredictable and enriched by his range of reading. He thought aloud, and his writ-
ing resembles his talk, which, as Hazlitt and Carlyle testify, was marvellous and
boundless. His later works on social and religious questions combine Romantic
conservatism with Christian radicalism, and had a lasting effect. As J. S. Mill wrote,
‘By Bentham [the founder of Utilitarianism], beyond all others, men have been led
to ask themselves, in regard to any ancient or received opinion, Is it true? and by
Coleridge, What is the meaning of it?’ STC’s insights into symbol, understanding
and development influenced John Henry Newman; his cultural criticism, Matthew
Arnold. Modern criticism of poetry begins with Coleridge.
The musical and psychological modulation ofFr ost at Midnight and Dejection is
found in impro vised epistolary poems such as This Lime-tree Bower my Prison, but
also in his ‘demonic’ poems, of which only The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere is
co mplete. It is an experimental ballad narrative of a voyage to the South Pole, of the
mariner’s arbitary killing of an albatross, and of psychic punishment, a death-in-life,
which lifts when the beauty of nature suddenly impels the mariner to bless God’s
creation.This symbolic supernatural romance was decorated with archaisms. When
he later took out the ‘medieval’ spelling, Coleridge substituted the archaic marginal
glosses sometimes found in manuscripts and early printed books. The poem’s popu-
lar success is due to its narrative drive, and its packing of nightmarish images and
homely morals into a rhymed doggerel hard to forget: ‘Water, water, everywhere, /
Nor any drop to drink’ and ‘A sadder and a wiser man / He rose the morrow morn.’
The completed poem has weak passages, unlike Kubla Khan and Christabel.These
are the first entirely successful experiments in modes which had been attempted for
halfa century: the imaginary exotic and the medieval romance. ‘In Xanadu did
Kubla Khan’ is an incantation; each name says backwards the vowels of the other.
The magic mounts as the rhythm rises. Then (as his headnote tells), STC was inter-
rupted in writing down this vision he had had in a dream by the call of ‘a person on
business from Porlock’. The breaking-off improves the mystery. If Coleridge had
never touched opium, this symbolic account of poetic possession shows that he had
‘drunk the milk of Paradise’ – and that such intense experience was a burden. This
is the first supra-rational poem in modern English, what De Quincey called a poem
of power rather than a poem of knowledge, though its fuel is STC’s extraordinary
reading.Christabel, his most organized and sinister Gothic poem, breaks off: he
THE ROMANTIC POETS 235