The Major Works

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, H.J. Jackson (Editor)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, critic, and radical thinker, exerted an enormous influence over contemporaries as varied as Wordsworth, Southey and Lamb. He was also a dedicated reformer, and set out to use his reputation as a public speaker and literary philosopher to change the course of English thought.

This collection represents the best of Coleridge's poetry from every period of his life, particularly his prolific early years, which produced The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan. The central section of the book is devoted to his most significant critical work, Biographia Literaria, and reproduces it in full. It provides a vital background for both the poetry section which precedes it and for the shorter prose works which follow. There is also a generous sample of his letters, notebooks, and marginalia, some recently discovered, which show a different, more spontaneous side to his fascinating and complex personality.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Fiction, Literary Criticism, Essays, Literature, Romanticism

752 pages, Paperback

First published September 28, 2000

About the author

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was an English poet, critic, and philosopher who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as his major prose work Biographia Literaria.

Reviews

[Jacob Aitken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is relevant to theology students in several ways. (1) William G.T. Shedd, the noted theologian, edited Coleridge's works and taught Coleridge studies at the college level. (2) Coleridge represents a sophisticated metaphysical response to Kant and Locke.

Further, this review might help those homeschoolers in high school who need a handle on Coleridge's more technical ideas.

Coleridge saw himself primarily as a metaphysician. He was known, rather, as a poet. His metaphysics is a reaction to, albeit never overcoming Kant. His primary target, though, is Locke.

Coleridge’s life was one of struggle. He struggled against unfulfilled dreams and physical pain (including a heavy use of Laudanum). He never achieved the manly power in writing that one finds in Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke.

Biographia Litteraria

This was similar to CS Lewis’s Experiment in Criticism long before Lewis wrote. In many ways it is even more practical. Coleridge gives his own impression, buttressed by a lifetime of poetry and criticism, on what makes for good (particularly English) poetry.

Volume 1 is difficult to read but there are a few things to keep in mind. Coleridge is attacking the tradition of Locke, which sees the mind as passive. He wants to argue for an active role in the mind. He comes close to Kant but I don’t think he ever really makes the jump.

Chapter 1

Keep words from getting too florid. He writes “The rule for the admission of double epithets seems to be this: either that they should be already denizens of our language, such as blood-stained….” (158).

His early mentor: “I learnt from him that poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science” (159).

While Pope is a genius, much of his power comes from acute observations on men. And when you read Pope, note the epigrammatic structure: look for the “punchy” conclusion at the end of the second line of the couplet.

Coleridge wanted to justify his own style of lines running into each other and of “natural language, neither bookish, nor vulgar….” (167). To do so he “labored at a solid foundation, on which permanently to ground my opinions, in the component faculties of the human mind itself.”

Conclusion: we must combine natural thoughts with natural diction (169).

Chapter 4

A “bull” as a literary device: “THere is a state of mind, which is the direct antithesis of that, which takes place when we make a bull. THe bull consists in bringing together two incompatible thoughts, with the sensation, but without the sense, of their connection” (196).

The Essence of Genius in Writing

was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying, the objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew drops.

“TO carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances...it is the merit of genius to ‘represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them and freshness of sensation” (202).

Translation: to make our experience of a universal be fresh and new.

Chapters 5ff

The law of association: what is the relationship between our perceptions and the objects themselves? Our answer to this question will assume a certain mode of knowing. Hobbes is wrong because because there is no reason to think that my seeing an object will produce bodily functions in me which secrete an idea (209).

Coleridge’s position: Ideas by having been together acquire a power of recalling each other; or every partial representation awakes the total representation of which it had been a part” (212).

Coleridge branches into metaphysics in chapter 12. He wants a metaphysical unity without “branching into Spinozism” (287). For him, subject = mind = sentient being. When we know something, subject and object are united by means of representation. At this unity we can’t abstract either and say which one came first. His theses on knowledge:

He mentions that he was a Trinitarian in philosophy (after the manner of Plato, but a Unitarian in religion (245).

Coleridge mentions that the held revolutionary principles in abhorrence (249).

I. Truth is correlative to being.

II. Truth is either mediate or immediate (the discussion about basic beliefs).

III. We must seek some absolute truth which grounds all other truths.

IV. It can’t be a mere object. Even if it were an object, it would still have to have a subject.

V. It must be an identity of subject and object.

VI. Self-consciousness is my knowing myself through myself. Identity of both subject and object.

Chapter 13:

If corporeal objects contain nothing but matter, then they are reducible to flux and have no substance (like modern art and literature--JBA). Primary imagination: agent of all human perception and repetition “in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (313). Fancy: a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.

Chapter 18

Essence is the principle of individuation. It is the possibility of a thing as that thing (348). That’s why with God essence and existence are the same thing.

Conditions for good metrical poetry: the elements of every metre must owe to some increased excitement. This means it must be accompanied by language of excitement. There must be a union of passion and will (350).

Coleridge makes some passing remarks on “Jacobinical drama,” the result of the Revolution. He notes that it consists in the confusion and subversion in the natural order of things in their causes and effects” (462). In other words, he has just identified and rebuked Cultural Marxism.

Coleridge argues that our words do not simply correspond to things. Rather, the words correspond to thoughts (537-538). What could this mean? I think Coleridge accidentally stumbled upon the ancient Patristic idea of symbolic theology. A symbol isn’t merely an allegory. “A symbol is characterized by a translucence” of the form within the particular (661). This is almost word-for-word from Ephrem the Syrian.

His Notebooks are almost incoherent. To be fair, it was probably intended as stream-of-consciousness and most people do the same when they journal.

His Marginalia contain several stunning insights on philosophy.

Table Talk

“All the external senses have their correspondence in the mind” (591). I think this is true; eye--faculty of sight; etc. Coleridge suggests a similar correspondence in the soul, which might explain why some Hebrew prophets needed music.

[John Hughes · Rating 5 out of 5]

S.T. Coleridge is one of the most versatile and fascinating minds in English literary history.

This book front loads all his major poetry - including such brilliant prices as the Christabel, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, and the Aeolian Harp.

Coleridge never felt himself mindfully secure in the position of a poet, particular once he glimpses the magnificence of Wordsworth in the role.

His Biographia Literaria is a confused work with hidden gems of Coleridge’s thought, as he figures out quite what he is, if not a poet.

Coleridge is at his best as theological philosopher, tinged with themes which underpin the best of his poetry. By the time we are concluding his work with “Lay Sermons”, “Aids to Reflection”, and “On the Constitution of the Church and State”, his maturity as a top tier lecturer and free thinker is obtained, with the latter containing passages of true interest in truths adherent to even our post-Industrial Society.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Romantic poets I have been reading over the past six months -- William Wordsworth, Percy Byshee Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats and now Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- poets who, original and creative in their writings, sought to re-configure the Shakespearean poetic voice for the 19th century and for a post-French Revolution world.  I recently read a volume of Coleridge's "Major Works" and I would like to give the following summary of my thoughts on the aesthetics of the Romantic poets, some of which is more or less freely adapted from other sources.

What strikes one about Coleridge poetry is that his poetic sense is derived from the works of the Bard of Avon, but he soon was to develop a unique poetic sensibility.  Beginning with his poem "Religious Musings", he proceeds to create poetic texts that, like his collaborator and joint author Wordsworth, posit the beauty of nature as the realization of the self in a shared nucleus of eternity, but was nonetheless centered around a rationalized axis that masked the Romantic's failed desire to understand the self the way Shakespeare did.  A reading of Coleridge's most celebrated work, the automatic poem "Kubla Khan", reveals that he was an opium addict who conceived the imaginary kingdom of Xanadu in order to praise the unencumbered soul of youth that sought out images of the self in nature, the most natural kind of expression to privilege himself.  The Romantic poets were convinced that nature was the eternal language God that, at once overpowered and intoxicated, framed itself in words; they conceived of a God whose utterances connected men, the natural world and the spiritual world together.  In his poems Coleridge uses nature to expose the pain of life, which runs parallel to how the Romantics used the timeless presence of nature to bridge the gap between ethics and aesthetics, developing an anxious gloom that continued to grow and, ultimately, to overflow in terms of the vitality and good spirits of the modern period.

Before the age of 19th century industrialization, the Romantics celebrated an English countryside whose natural beauty was sufficient to fulfill our moral needs and sought to awaken a sense of religious duties from its anthropological slumber.  This life is the divine life of love, the love of a heaven hidden from the human race, it contains the natural beauty of God.  However, the Romantics conceived the desire to prove God's existence as the presence of a Divine Father as absurd.  Every organ and viscera of the body has its own mode of being, every artery and every cell, is nature conceived as the origin of a divine will.  This, of course, incorporates the theistic belief that there is a deity that created the natural world and all of its laws and demands that we as human beings submit to these laws because it is the morally correct thing to do.  While the atheist believes that because of their ability to use reason, we have the ability to discriminate among these psychological laws and decide whether or not to accept them as being correct or not or in keeping with their moral character of their society or not, the poet seeks to conceal this disobedience.  It may be a fantasy of deep inward joy that closely clings to a projective yearning derived from a deep unhappiness in childhood, but Coleridge perceived nature as something surrounding man and said that it was his privilege to interpret it, to accept an invitation of fundamental importance.  The poet's birth and death, a change of air and surroundings....he accepted the uncritical adoption of 18th century conventional beliefs in the supernatural...he blamed his inability to enjoy nature in its myriad forms based on his own youthful experience of city life...he sees poetry as acting like nature which touches all living things and inspired and delights him, appeared tactful to the establishment of educational institutions...
Facing a moment of rigorous self-discipline, Coleridge states the case in poetical language that nature is God's intelligence, in distinct consciousness by occasion of experience is highlighted by the skillful flatteries and monkeying insolence of Kant's empirical I, the supple figure and conscious coloring for all concepts and judgments that followed in its wake...the bourgeois world designated by the cemetery, its individuals materially succumbing to the death imperative...  conscious of the practical wisdom and sorrowful puberty of the developing individuality of the subject, the individual poet cognizes the objects immediately present to us not as they are in themselves but only the way they appear to us under the conditions of our sensibility; truth accompanies me like a dog...there is a moral law within us the shapes our impressions and that there is an innate principle with reference to which the mind gives form to its perceptions and interprets life experiences; here Coleridge not Nietzsche lays the groundwork for Emerson's New England movement and the blessed abyss of a transcendent divine Logos; the revolutionary poetics of the Romantics explicitly aligned ethics with this transcendental aesthetics.

In a promise that would to curdle the blood of the ancients, the Romantics link the passion of artistic feeling to lived experience more closely to both "the undistorted expression of intense and genuine emotion". Wordsworth’s definition of poetry in the book he issued jointly with Coleridge, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” could be seen as applying not only to a new conception of poetry but a new conception of the self.  Now the production and expenditure beyond one's psychological needs is seen as  waste... In so doing, Wordsworth and Coleridge regulate poetic creations according to their simple obstinacy, and rearrange the Neoclassical standards about the artist and his role in society, and radically broadened the scope and the idea of artistic reception and the type of values it could transmit to the public.

Coleridge and Wordsworth chose their words with due consideration, for their goal was to create an artistic position that embraces spontaneity, a position that would no longer need to be demarcated by the confused and convoluted literary life of Neoclassical art, insofar as their resolved to sin no longer against the holy spirits of life.  If it springs from his imagination, then the artist is the most important part of the poetic process, since he’s the source of the overflow; the Romantic poem's representations of how feelings are produced and of their contexts–in nature as well as in emotional bonds of friendship or love–will affect how society perceives emotion.  In terms of portraying the poet’s imagination, then what matters most according to the Romantic poet is not how truthfully that reality is imitated but how he or she is permanently disqualified by an infirmity of the soul from employing the passionate of literary affluence, not as according the auxiliary motives of a vile race of culture-snobs, but as stated in a new frontier for the Romantics, literature and poetry are a socio-historical analysis of the persona of the poet; it exists as in the formation of emotions linking the personal of the poet to the medium of poetic expression.  They were extremely eager to settle down with the kindness of the faithful, but Coleridge exhibited in his poetry a chilling reluctance to allow someone to be forced into an act of politeness.

Like an innovation in medicine, Romantic poetry showed faint traces of the older fashion of literary production, synthetically produced modes of behavior.  Its constant promotion of conventional values suggesting those values have lost their authenticity.  The modern age signaled the immediate production of significant architects, painters and poets.  Perhaps it is this causal link between art and human emotion that contributes both to the splendor of Romanticism and to its vulnerability.  Modern and post-modern writers would attack precisely these intimate connections between human identity, emotions and their poetic and passionate expressions; they would suggest that it’s naïve and unfounded to assume that true emotions are the basis of human nature, that such a nature exists at all, that even if it exists, it can be communicated without distortion and, most importantly, that art should have anything to do with such lived experience.  The modernist valorization of women’s fashion and of the dandy, for example, offers a striking example of the assumption that it may be, in fact, the artificial constructions of art that guide the conventions we assume to be natural in life.  Once human identity becomes freed from our understanding of nature, the expression of emotion, poetic or not, can no longer make direct claims to sincerity and authenticity. The expression of emotion may be just rhetorical or imitative rather than conveying what we truly feel.
Located in the fiction of the work, a non-discursive signifier, was not so well-disposed to Christianity...  What we are witnessing is the still-nascent regime of mass-produced culture, yet at the level of environmental nuisances, 19th century aesthetics adopted from Immanuel Kant a thinking which united the empiricist and rationalist modes of conceiving art under a single synthesis.  The moral conscience of Romanticism was of an upright nature and was relieved to be rectified, the sense was the basis for knowledge according to empiricism, while aesthetics supplied the most immediate form of sense, which remained invisible even when looked at from the outside...  Whereas rationalists suggested that the prospects of sense without order was without meaning, rationalism made sense a sine qua non.  The total conception of all moral and theoretical concepts was understood as relying on the aesthetic understanding of the world.  Hegel took Kant's conception of logic and history and made it mental, Hegel's followers gave aesthetics an increasingly important role in his system.  Romanticism took up Kant's form of aesthetic intuition and his concept of genius and the imagination and developed them into a poetics which privileged feeling and sense as the fundamental character of personal experience.  Coleridge's poetry points to this trend and serves as a point of reference in the Romantic movement which came out of Kant's thinking...with the identical goal of breaking through, while remaining in total ignorance as to an immemorial insignia, the scentless froth or an ornamental pond...  brought up to observe the fixed rules of behavior of a society of people...

Coleridge, following Kant, separates aesthetics from the twin default positions of concepts and theory. After Kant, Romantic poets like Coleridge saw aesthetics as something to be seduced from the reader who, as an independent contributor opposed to the conceptual thoughts of the poet, stood for the very designation reflects the subterfuge of the poet's work, which is a form of intellectual sadism, a form of revenge on the beautiful and the brave.  The Romantics as a reaction to the French Revolution - from Auguste Comte to Michel Foucault - a society without families, a religion without a God, an experiment without an observer - the death of the subject and the disappearance of the author suitable for a society where work is the ultimate value a universe of nothingness not even stars in the sky however beauty is not mathematics harmony is not impersonal as the value systems of the masters would encourage us to believe the eternal return of the legend of the exiled god comes back to us at dawn: Coleridge Wordsworth and Shelley and their works are so sweet so wise they are ordained priests of the excessive poetic structure of the reflexive production relations of the residential literary world...an experiment without a crowd of visitors beholden to the scientific method...  just perceptively wrinkled with unchallengeable dignity...  God is a poet, not a mathematician...despite my tormented and unbalanced personality with unconscious heredity and misplaced sex-instinct and mental status I love them.

[Christopher Manieri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great edition of Coleridge’s work. A crucial poet of the Romantic movement, his poems are passionate and profound. He had a large influence on Wordsworth, among others. I love his ‘conversation poems’ as well as his sublime “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, which seems symbolic of the fall of man. His loneliness and sorrow is evident. Scholars have also pointed to the Neoplatonic influence on his work. The erudite and philosophical Coleridge suffered deeply in his life and yet he shows the deep strength of his Christian faith.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of course, Coleridge is one of the towering literary figures of history. His Rime of the Ancient Mariner deserves specific and detailed study. In the introduction to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge extolls curiosity and wonder, and one can no doubt trace his abundant creativity to such feelings. “But I do not doubt that it is beneficial sometimes to contemplate in the mind, as in a picture, the image of a grander and better world; for if the mind grows used to the trivia of daily life, it may dwindle too much and decline altogether into worthless thoughts.” The poem is replete with magnificent lines:

“Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.”

“He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.”

“Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.”

“Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.”



I love the entirety of the poem The Nightingale. It has a perfect lyric beauty to it, a combination of words and images that are quite unforgettable to me, a beautiful, mossy poem.

If I have one major criticism, it is that the remainder of the writings were so abundant. Not that they aren’t wonderful, but I found it very difficult to read straight there. There are flashes of Coleridge’s poetry in his prose, such as the following from the Biographia Literaria, “Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the deserving.” I just wish there were more of them amongst such a prolific set of writings.

Overall, you must read this collection to consider yourself a student of literature. If you read it for pleasure, you will find it.

See my other reviews here!

[Kelly Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be honest, you almost can't help reading this poetry in a grammar school voice. You can virtually imagine rosy cheeked young boys' lungs being expanded to bursting point in order to make the requisite explosive 'Oh!'.

Coleridge is a poet very much of his time and now his 'simple expression' and the ecstasy provided by nature seems either contrived or tame. It is hard to imagine him as a controversial figure or writer. Personally, I find a great deal of solace in nature and I feel spiritually energinsed by isolation, so I do enjoy many of Coleridge's flights of the sublime.

However, I am not a devotee of the tone of many of his poems. His inverted snobbery and occasional pomposity smacks too much of the bitterness of having to rely on patronage rather than being born to completely independent means. He reminds me of a second home owner who claims to be 'local' and desperately wants to be accepted by the yokels despite depending on Waitrose home delivery and asking what 'craft' ale the local pub serves.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

You will want to be a poet or a hardcore Coleridge fan in order to enjoy most of this. If you are, then add stars. Coleridge is greatly respected among writers.

I enjoyed his major poems, some of his literary criticism (except of poets other than Shakespeare), and some of the autobiographical writing, that from letters, mostly, and none of the philosophy or theology. His excessive precision hampers the flow of his writing so as to make reading it rather a nuisance too often. I sensed the opium working. Full disclosure: your reviewer does not generally appreciate most poetry or most philosophy, alas. Or theology.

Coleridge was extremely well-educated and showed a good sense of humor when he engaged it. He was highly perceptive and fiercely honest about his own motivations and in his writing. He was a Unitarian preacher for a while and wrote religious essays and sermons such that he was considered a major theologian. His philosophical and political ideas were influential as well. His lecture on "Hamlet" is still printed as a supplement to the play.

[Daniel Seifert · Rating 3 out of 5]

The text is filled with prose from pp. 155-686 with a gem in "Aids to Reflection". the poems are lengthy and in today's standards, way too long and wordy. However, I shall always be a fan of "Frost at Midnight" this is a good source to have around, since Coleridge lines are often quoted.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poetry is Romanticism par excellence. Coleridge clearly suffered from horrible bouts of anxiety and induced psychosis. Verses such as "Frost at Midnight" and "The Pains of Sleep" are the most poignant. Biographia Literaria is excellent for two books, then it's worth skipping until book 14.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite his unfortunate opium addiction and his tendency to leave works unfinished, Coleridge remains my favorite half of the Lyrical Ballads pair.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I blame Steve Coogan's movie THE TRIP for this new interest.

[Michael Ledezma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great autobiographical essay section in the back. Kubla Khan is retains it's haunting allure after so many reads.