Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge isn’t pitching poetry as a career move or a social virtue; he’s framing it as a self-contained payoff, an inner wage that can’t be audited by critics or markets. “Its own exceeding great reward” has the ring of biblical cadence, but it’s also a defensive maneuver from a Romantic who watched reputation, money, and even sobriety slip out of reach. If the external life is unstable, the art becomes a kind of private pension: not fame, not applause, but a durable way of perceiving.

The sly pivot is from poetry as product to poetry as habit. He’s not claiming poems make you good; he’s claiming the practice trains your attention. That matters in the Romantic context, where imagination isn’t decorative - it’s an engine that re-enchants a world newly described by industry, empiricism, and political disillusionment. To “wish to discover” is telling: the good and beautiful aren’t guaranteed facts, they’re pursued. This is optimism with teeth, less “everything happens for a reason” than “I will keep looking until the world yields something worth loving.”

There’s subtext, too, about survival. Coleridge’s life was marked by illness and opium dependence; this line reads like a quiet argument for why the mind’s discipline still counts when the body and public life don’t cooperate. Poetry, for him, is a technology of noticing - a way to refuse the deadening default of cynicism by making perception itself a moral practice.