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Updated: June 17, 2025
Coleridge's description of Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction in the Biographia Literaria is famous. Walt Whitman's An American Primer, first published in the Atlantic for April, 1904, is a highly interesting contribution to the subject. No theoretical discussion, however, can supply the place of a close study, word by word, of poems in the classroom.
With naive sententiousness he warns the readers of the Biographia Literaria against trusting, in their own case, to such a guarantee as he supposed himself to possess.
How the original "possessor" of this apparently assignable security would have longed to "feel Mr. Allsop's head"! Life at Highgate-Renewed activity-Publications and re-publications The Biographia Literaria The lectures of 1818-Coleridge as a Shakespearian critic.
Coleridge gives in the Biographia Literaria a quaint statement of his own method. On every great occurrence, he says, he tried to discover in past history the event that most nearly resembled it. He examined the original authorities.
The boy took his first sip from Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria", that cracked Bohemian glass, which, handed in a golden salver that might have come from the cunning graver of Cellini, yet forces one to taste, over a flawed and broken edge, the sourest drop of ill-made vin du pays, heavily drugged and made bitter with Paracelsian laudanum.
The publication of the Lyrical Ballads in the spring of the year 1798 was, indeed, an event of double significance for English poetry. It marked an epoch in the creative life of Coleridge, and a no less important one in the critical life of Wordsworth. In the Biographia Literaria the origination of the plan of the work is thus described: "During the first year that Mr.
There was his Cave's "Historia Literaria," and Sir Walter Raleigh's "History of the World," and a whole array of Christian Fathers, and Plato, and Aristotle, and Stanley's book of Philosophers, with Effigies, and the Junta Galen, and the Hippocrates of Foesius, and Walton's Polyglot, supported by Father Sanchez on one side and Fox's "Acts and Monuments" on the other, an odd collection, as folios from lower shelves are apt to be.
Another strangely beautiful poem, Kubla Khan which came to him, he said, in sleep is even more fragmentary. And the most important of his prose remains, his Biographia Literaria, 1817, a history of his own opinions, breaks off abruptly. It was in his suggestiveness that Coleridge's great service to posterity resided.
They may profitably read, in connection with it, Professor Winchester's chapter on "Imagination" in his Literary Criticism, Neilson's discussion of "Imagination" in his Essentials of Poetry, the first four chapters of Fairchild, chapters 4, 13, 14, and 15 of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, and Wordsworth's Preface to his volume of Poems of 1815.
To the Wordsworthian, anxious for a full justification of the faith that is in him, the whole body of Coleridge's criticism on his friend's poetry in the Biographia Literaria may be confidently recommended.
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