Autobiography/Philosophical Collection: Biographia Literaria

Overview
Published in 1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria blends autobiography with speculative criticism to trace his formation as a poet and philosopher while advancing a Romantic theory of imagination, language, and poetic form. The book moves from narratives of early reading and friendships to dense engagements with British empiricism and German idealism, culminating in a revisionary account of how poetry is made and how it should be judged. It also offers a searching assessment of William Wordsworth’s poetic principles, at once admiring and corrective, and articulates concepts that became central to English Romantic aesthetics.

From Life to Thought
Coleridge recounts his schooling, his youthful enthusiasms, and the hopes and disillusionments of the 1790s, including unrealized communal schemes and shifting political ideals. He describes the poetic apprenticeship that led to the Lyrical Ballads partnership with Wordsworth and details his intensive study of Kant, Schelling, and contemporary science. The narrative shows how personal crises and intellectual discoveries redirected him from associationist psychology toward a philosophy of mind capable of grounding poetry in a living, creative power rather than in mere habit or sensation.

Understanding, Reason, and the Imagination
A central distinction structures the book: understanding versus reason. Understanding analyzes, classifies, and manages facts; reason intuits necessary truths and unifies experience. From this basis Coleridge develops his signature theory of imagination. The primary imagination is the living power in perception itself, the mind’s participation in the world’s ongoing creation. The secondary imagination echoes this power under the control of the will, dissolving and reuniting images to generate form and meaning in art. Fancy, by contrast, is a mechanical faculty that aggregates by association without transformative synthesis. To name the fusing activity of imagination he coins the term esemplastic, emphasizing the power to shape disparate elements into an organic whole.

Organic Form and Symbolic Thinking
Against models that treat poems as contrived assemblages, Coleridge argues for organic form: a poem grows from an inward principle, like a living thing, and its parts are reciprocally determined by the whole. He distinguishes symbol from allegory, preferring the symbol because it embodies an idea within the concrete particular, uniting sense and thought without reducing one to the other. The highest poetry mediates between subject and object, mind and nature, creating unity without erasing difference.

Poetry, Language, and Meter
Coleridge scrutinizes poetic diction and the role of meter. He supports purging artificial ornament but denies that poetry can be simply the language of ordinary life. Meter introduces expectation and counterpoint, providing a pleasurable constraint that harmonizes strong emotion and reflective control. Because meter alters reception, the poet’s language cannot be identical with prose; it must be chosen and shaped to sustain that rhythmic contract with the reader.

Wordsworth: Admiration and Dissent
The chapters on Wordsworth weigh the claims of the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge praises the moral seriousness and imaginative sympathy of the poetry while challenging theoretical overstatements about rustic language and the sameness of poetic and prosaic style. He catalogs specific faults alongside high commendation of Wordsworth’s achievements, aiming to clarify principles rather than diminish his friend’s stature.

The Supernatural and Poetic Faith
Reflecting on the original division of labor for Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge explains his use of the marvelous and preternatural, relying on the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief, a voluntary trust that enables poetic faith. By naturalizing the supernatural through consistent psychological and aesthetic laws, he seeks to awaken the mind to its own creative energies.

Style and Legacy
Digressive, argumentative, and self-reflective, the book moves by leaps and parenthesis, interweaving confession with philosophy. Though later accused of borrowing from German sources, Coleridge’s synthesis proved generative: his distinctions among faculties, his defense of organic form, and his account of imagination reshaped literary criticism and influenced poets and thinkers well beyond his era.