Success Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge lands the insult with the cool precision of someone who knows the ecosystem from the inside. The line pretends to diagnose a personality type - the reviewer as the would-be poet who missed his calling - but its real work is territorial. It draws a bright border around “making” versus “judging,” and then loads the second category with failure, envy, and a kind of spiritual fraudulence.

The phrasing matters. “Would have been” and “if they could” turn ambition into a permanent condition: the reviewer isn’t simply someone with a different skill set, but someone stalled at the gates of real achievement. “They have tried... and have failed” offers no evidence because it doesn’t need any; it’s not an argument so much as a status move, a way to preempt criticism by delegitimizing the critic’s authority. It’s also a subtle performance of Romantic-era genius culture, where authentic art is imagined as organic and inspired, while criticism reads as parasitic and secondhand.

Context sharpens the edge. Early 19th-century Britain had a booming periodical press, and reviewers could make or break reputations quickly, often with snark and factional politics. Coleridge, frequently reviewed, sometimes harshly, had every reason to distrust the new class of professional tastemakers. His jab doubles as self-defense: if the reviewer’s motive is resentment, then the review can be dismissed as autobiography.

The subtext is anxious, not just arrogant. Coleridge senses that the power to define literature is shifting from poets and patrons to print intermediaries. Calling critics failures is a way to deny that shift, to insist creation remains the only legitimate credential.