Work record

Biographia Literaria

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1817 · 19th Century · Essays · English

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Abstract

Written: Written 1815-16; published in two volumes, 1817
Setting: Coleridge's life and thought from the 1780s to 1815; England (Calne, Wiltshire, where it was written)
Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Country: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
Language: English
Genre: Literary autobiography and criticism
Form: Prose in twenty-four chapters, two volumes
Recommended: Grades 11–12 (Dense philosophy; assign chapters IV, XIII-XIV, XVII-XXII.)

Background. In his forties, deep in debt and addiction, Coleridge set out to write a preface to his collected verse; it swelled into a two-volume account of the opinions that had formed him, borrowing heavily from German thinkers.

Content. He recalls a rigorous schoolmaster, early sonnets and his discovery of a new poetic power in his friend's verse. He dismantles the mechanical psychology of associated ideas, defines the creative faculty that unifies experience in contrast to mere fancy, tells how he and his friend divided the labour of their 1798 volume, and then contests that friend's theory of rustic diction while praising his genius.

Form. Digressive chapters mix memoir, philosophy, polemic and close reading.

Themes. Mind as living power, imagination as an echo of divine creation, the duties of the critic and the right language for poetry run through the book.

Reception. Victorian readers mined it for critical terms, while later scholars documented how much of the philosophical middle derives from Schelling. Its chapters on Wordsworth remain among the most searching assessments one major poet ever wrote of another, and its vocabulary still frames classroom talk about imagination.

For students. Assign selected chapters (IV, XIII, XIV, XVII, XXII) with guidance.

Key figures

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Author and subject
William Wordsworth: Poet whose work Coleridge analyses
James Bowyer: His schoolmaster at Christ's Hospital
David Hartley: Psychologist whose theory he rejects
Immanuel Kant: German philosopher who shaped his thought

Summary

Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions is Coleridge's sprawling, brilliant and frustrating account of his development as a poet and critic, published in two volumes in 1817. It is not a full autobiography but a book about ideas, held together loosely by his life. The first volume begins with his schooling at Christ's Hospital under the demanding master James Bowyer, who taught him to prize logic in poetry, and with the influence of William Lisle Bowles's sonnets. Coleridge then defends himself against hostile reviewers and turns, in chapter IV, to his first reading of Wordsworth, whose poems awakened in him the distinction between fancy and imagination. Chapters V to IX examine and reject the associationist psychology of David Hartley, which explained the mind as a chain of mechanical associations, and trace Coleridge's turn to Kant, Fichte and Schelling. Chapter X is a miscellany of his journalism and political life. After several chapters of difficult German-inspired philosophy, chapter XIII gives his famous definitions: the primary imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception, a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM; the secondary imagination dissolves and recreates; fancy merely assembles fixed memories. The second volume begins, in chapter XIV, with the origin of Lyrical Ballads, in which Coleridge was to write of the supernatural so as to win from readers that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith, and Wordsworth was to give the charm of novelty to everyday things. Chapters XVII to XXII then criticise Wordsworth's Preface: Coleridge rejects the claim that poetry should use the real language of rustic men, and offers a balanced estimate of Wordsworth's faults and excellences. The book ends with critiques of a drama and a statement of faith. For students it is the source of key critical terms and an example of Christian philosophical criticism.

Virtues in this work

Justice: Coleridge weighs Wordsworth's faults and excellences fairly in the closing chapters.
Prudence: The book models careful distinctions between faculties of the mind and kinds of poetry.

Plot or Argument

Chapters I-IV: education and Wordsworth
Schooling under Bowyer, early poems, reviewers, and the discovery of Wordsworth's imagination.
Chapters V-IX: against mechanism
A critique of Hartley's associationism and the turn to German idealist philosophy.
Chapters X-XII: life and philosophy
Journalism, political life and the theses on knowing and being.
Chapter XIII: imagination
The definitions of primary and secondary imagination and of fancy.
Chapters XIV-XVI: Lyrical Ballads and poetry
The plan of the 1798 volume, the willing suspension of disbelief, and definitions of a poem.
Chapters XVII-XXII: Wordsworth's theory and practice
Coleridge disputes the rustic-language theory and weighs Wordsworth's defects and beauties.
Chapters XXIII-XXIV: conclusion
A critique of Maturin's Bertram and a closing defence of faith and reason.

Lessons

Imagination and fancy
Coleridge distinguishes the shaping, unifying imagination from fancy, which only rearranges. The distinction is still used in criticism.
- How does Coleridge define fancy?
- Why does he link the primary imagination to the infinite I AM?
- Can you give an example of each from a poem?
Related across the library
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  The emperor's gout and the pain that crippled his hands and feet.
- Love's Labour's Lost, Act I, Scene 1
  The mind shall banquet, though the body pine Longaville signs cheerfully, treating the fast as a simple trade of body for mind.
- Novum Organon Renovatum, Book I, Aphorism CIV
  Distinction between voluntary, reflex and instinctive motions in terms of sensations, ideas and actions.
- 12 Years a Slave, Lesson: Slavery is bodily theft
  Slavery is bodily theft. Northup's freedom is stolen through drugging, chains, beatings and legal fraud. The memoir insists that slavery is not an abstraction but control of bodies, names, movement and pain.
- A Clergyman's Daughter, Lesson: Education
  Education. Mrs. Creevy cares only for appearances and fees, never for what the children actually learn.
Against mechanism
Coleridge rejects the idea that the mind is only a machine of associations. He insists on will, reason and a living soul.
- What does Hartley's theory claim?
- Why does Coleridge think it fails?
- How do modern debates about the mind echo this?
Related across the library
- Six Metaphysical Meditations, with Hobbes's Objections and the Replies, Full Text
  the Shape of a Chiliogone without the help of Imagination but I can also imagine it by applying the Eye of my Mind to its Five sides and to the Area or space contained by Them And herein I manifestly perceive that there is required a peculiar sort of Operation in the Mind to imagine a Thing which I require not to Understand a Thing which New Operation of the Mind plainly shews the difference between imagination and pure Intellection Besides this I Consider that this Power of Imagination which is in me as it diff...
- On the Making of Man, Summary
  On the Making of Man is Gregory of Nyssa's theological anthropology, written as an extended reflection on Genesis and the claim that human beings are made in the image of God. Gregory combines scriptural exegesis, Platonizing philosophy, and late antique physiology to ask why humanity is embodied, rational, sexual, mortal, and capable of divine likeness. He treats the human being as a microcosm, joining intelligible and sensible creation. The upright posture, hands, senses, speech, mind, and capacity for contemp...
- The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, THE EMOTIONAL COMPLEX AND ITS GENERAL ACTION ON THE
  to environment of his personality Time generally takes care of that Frequently however arti- ficial aid must be invoked so as to help the individual rid himself of an obsessing complex Transference we have learned to know as a very frequent help One is wont to grasp at something new especially something which strongly contrasts with the complex masturbatic mysticism An hysteric can be cured if one is able to produce a new complex which will obsess her Soko- Arch f iir Krim Anthropol Hysteria makes use of all sor...
- The Problems of Philosophy, Full Text
  a closer scrutiny are found to be so full of apparent contradictions that only a great amount of thought enables us to know what it is that we really may believe In the search for certainty it is natural to begin with our present experiences and in some sense no doubt knowledge is to be derived from them But any statement as to what it is that our immediate experiences make us know is very likely to be wrong It seems to me that I am now sitting in a chair at a table of a certain shape on which I see sheets of pa...
- The Gay Science, Lesson: The Gay Science complicates mind and body
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Fair criticism of a friend
His chapters on Wordsworth name defects and excellences together. Criticism can be honest and generous.
- What faults does Coleridge find in Wordsworth?
- What excellences?
- How should we criticise those we admire?
Related across the library
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  Cripples and a hunchback ask Zarathustra to heal them; he replies with folk sayings on the costs of cure and describes 'reversed cripples' who are all ear or all eye.
- Science and the Modern World, Lesson: Faith in an ordered nature
  Faith in an ordered nature. Whitehead argues that scientists work in hope only because they believe every event has definite antecedents, and that Europe acquired this instinctive belief from centuries of medieval faith in a rational, personal God. He offers this as a historical explanation, not as proof of God, and he admits the belief is not logically justified even by its own theology. The claim invites careful thinking about how belief shapes inquiry.
- 12 Years a Slave, Lesson: Sexual violence is central, not incidental
  Sexual violence is central, not incidental. Patsey's story shows slavery's sexual coercion and gendered torture with devastating clarity. The memoir teaches that any account of slavery that omits sexual violence is incomplete.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Source
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Context

Coleridge wrote the book at Calne in 1815 while struggling with opium addiction and debt, partly as a preface to his collected poems that grew into two volumes. He drew heavily, sometimes without acknowledgment, on Schelling and other German writers.

Composition

Published in two volumes by Rest Fenner in 1817, alongside Sibylline Leaves. The charge of plagiarism from Schelling was raised in 1840 by J. F. Ferrier and is discussed by every modern editor.

Reception

Reviews were mixed, but the book became a foundation of English literary criticism; its terms imagination, fancy and willing suspension of disbelief are still standard.

Art / Creation Language / Storytelling Science / Knowledge Faith / Religion Identity Self Education

Comparisons

Lyrical Ballads
The 1798 volume whose plan chapter XIV explains.
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
Wordsworth's poem, an example of the imagination Coleridge praises.
Critique of Pure Reason
Kant, whose philosophy Coleridge absorbed and adapted.

Quotes

Frequently cited

“The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIII (Gutenberg #6081: Biographia Literaria).Quote card

Essays, High Admiral Of England
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Legal Tender Cases, Full Text
is but part of a system a constituent of one whole No single power is the ultimate end for which the Constitution was adopted It may in a very proper sense be treated as a means for the accomplishment of a subordinate object but that object is itself a means designed for an ulterior purpose Thus the power to levy and collect taxes to coin money and regulate its value to raise and support armies or to provide for and maintain a navy are instruments for the paramount object which was to establish a government sove...
Lemon v. Kurtzman, Medical lens
The case concerns state payments for secular instruction in church-related schools and has no medical content.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Chapter XIII, The Church and Slavery
There is a great difference between Christianity and religion at the south. Her judgment on churches that accepted slaveholding.
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, Lesson: Unity by persuasion or by force
Unity by persuasion or by force. Jackson does not doubt the value of national unity; he doubts that compulsion produces it. He surveys efforts from Rome's campaign against Christianity to the totalitarian regimes then at war with America, and concludes that coercion fails. Frankfurter, in turn, warned that judges who substitute their own views for a legislature's endanger democratic self-government.

Frequently cited

“that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV (Gutenberg #6081: Biographia Literaria).Quote card

The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1783 (Aetat. 74), letter to Mrs. Thrale on the stroke
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The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate, Background (Darwin's absence)
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The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Full Text
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Sense and Sensibility, Chapter L
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The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Full Text
manner And the discussion of a knotty point in the court of conscience Chapter xiv A short chapter containing a short dialogue between Squire Western and his sister BOOK VII CONTAINING THREE DAYS Chapter i A comparison between the world and the stage Chapter ii Containing a conversation which Mr Jones had with himself Chapter iii Containing several dialogues Chapter iv A picture of a country gentlewoman taken from the life Chapter v The generous behaviour of Sophia towards her aunt Chapter vi Containing great va...

“It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIII (Gutenberg #6081: Biographia Literaria).Quote card

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Chapter XIV, Another Link to Life
Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Her reflection when told that her newborn child is a girl.
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Personal Memoirs, Source
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The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Full Text
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For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

The schoolmaster Bowyer in chapter I and his lessons in logic.
The turn from Hartley's mechanism to living will and reason.
The definitions of imagination and fancy in chapter XIII.
The plan of Lyrical Ballads in chapter XIV.
Coleridge's balanced verdict on Wordsworth in chapter XXII.

Key terms and names

Imagination: For Coleridge, the unifying, creative power that echoes God's act of creation.
Fancy: The lesser faculty that combines fixed memories without transforming them.
Esemplastic: Coleridge's coinage for the shaping, unifying power of imagination.
Associationism: The theory, associated with Hartley, that mental life is built from linked sensations and ideas.
Willing suspension of disbelief: The reader's voluntary acceptance of the impossible for the sake of a poem.
I AM: The divine name of Exodus 3:14, which Coleridge uses for the infinite Creator.

Seminar Questions

Comprehension What did Coleridge learn from James Bowyer?
Comprehension How does Coleridge define the primary and secondary imagination?
Comprehension What was the plan of Lyrical Ballads according to chapter XIV?
Interpretation Why does Coleridge reject Hartley's psychology?
Interpretation Why does he disagree with Wordsworth's theory of poetic language?
Interpretation How does Coleridge's theology shape his theory of imagination?
Big Question Is human creativity an image of God's creating?

Faith Connections

Exodus 3:14 (Scripture)
God names himself I AM; Coleridge grounds human imagination in this eternal act of being.
Genesis 1:27 (Scripture)
Man made in the image of the Creator: the root of Coleridge's view that imagination echoes creation.
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (Great Conversation)
A later Christian account of human creativity as an image of the Trinity, indebted to Coleridge.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: The mind is not a mechanism of associations but a living power; imagination, unlike fancy, unifies and creates in the image of God's creative act; poetry depends on this power and on the reader's poetic faith; therefore criticism must judge poems by their imaginative unity, as Coleridge does with Wordsworth.

Rhetorical device: definition. Chapter XIII defines primary imagination, secondary imagination and fancy in a few compressed sentences.

Debate: Resolved: that Coleridge's distinction between imagination and fancy is still useful.

Memory Work

that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
Chapter XIV. The source of a phrase every student will meet.

The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.
Chapter XIII. Coleridge's theological definition of imagination.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Explain Coleridge's distinction between imagination and fancy and apply it to two poems in this library.

Comparison with Lyrical Ballads: Compare the plan of Lyrical Ballads in chapter XIV with the 1798 Advertisement and the poems themselves.

Medical Lens

Chapters V-VII critique David Hartley's associationist psychology, an important episode in the history of theories of mind. The book was written during Coleridge's opium addiction, though it does not discuss it directly.

Psychology Unconscious Mind Body

Chapters V-VII
Coleridge's account and rejection of associationism and of Hartley's vibration theory of the nerves.
Psychology Unconscious Mind Body

Creative Prompts

Classroom
Make a three-column chart: imagination, fancy, and an example of each from poems in this library.
Essay
Is Coleridge right that poetry should not use the real language of rustic men? Weigh chapters XVII-XX against Wordsworth's poems.
Essay
Explain the phrase willing suspension of disbelief and test it on a fantasy story you know.