Biographia Literaria

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.

Top Lessons

• Imagination and fancy

  Coleridge distinguishes the shaping, unifying imagination from fancy, which only rearranges. The distinction is still used in criticism.

• Against mechanism

  Coleridge rejects the idea that the mind is only a machine of associations. He insists on will, reason and a living soul.

• Fair criticism of a friend

  His chapters on Wordsworth name defects and excellences together. Criticism can be honest and generous.

Verified Quotes

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.

• Chapters V-VII

  Coleridge's account and rejection of associationism and of Hartley's vibration theory of the nerves.