The Integrity of Biographia Literaria

C’est l’indiligent lecteur qui perd son subject, non pas moy.  Montaigne.

“So immethodical a miscellany,” Coleridge calls the Biographia Literaria in a deprecatory aside; “the greatest book of criticism in English,” says Arthur Symons, “and one of the most annoying books in any language”.  It has become fashionable in recent years to speak of the Biographia as one of the great germinal books, and to quote – or misquote – detached fragments as though they were gnomai from some hermetic text.  A few have shown respect in handling extracts from the text, but nobody seems ever to have sought the integrity of the book itself.  The general impression is that the book is incorrigibly diffuse, fragmentary, and obscure.  Coleridge foresaw these charges and tried to obviate them; but the book, like much else he wrote, has been “condemned beforehand, as predestined metaphysics”.

It is tempting to sidestep the question of integrity by explaining why the book cannot be expected to have any unity, because of the circumstan­ces in which it was composed.  There are indeed defects in construction and emphasis, and when, after prolonged and ominous preparation Coler­idge approaches the crucial distinction between Imagination and Fancy he has a bad attack of nerves: these are facts that nothing can argue out of existence.  Those who wish to condone the defects introduce a story that runs something like this.  In the spring and summer of 1815, when he was writing the Biographia, Coleridge was struggling against illness, indecision, poverty, and the importunities of well-meaning friends.  For months he had been clambering up from suicidal depths of drug-addiction and shattered hopes; furthermore he was constantly nettled by the delays, inaccuracies, and economic intransigence of his printer.  The marvel is
that he contrived to write anything at this time.  He started by collecting his poems for publication and felt that some sort of Preface – possible in the manner of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads – was needed.  The Preface grew under his pen, eventually ran into a second volume, and separated itself completely from the volume of poems it belonged to.

A certain amount of this is supported by Coleridge’s own corres­pondence; for example, in August 1815 Charles Lamb gave Sara Hutchinson just such a story.

Your old friend Coleridge is very hard at work at the preface to a new Edition which he is just going to publish in the same form as Mr. Wordsworth’s [i.e. the poems grouped according to subject and not chronologically] – at first the preface was not to exceed five or six pages, it has however grown into a work of great importance.  I believe Morgan has already written [i.e. transcribed or taken from dictation] nearly two hundred pages.  The title of it is “Autobiographia Literaria:” to which are added “Sybilline Leaves,” a collection of Poems by the same author.  [Lamb Letters, ed. E. V. Lucas, II, 172.]

This story is accurate enough in detail; but there are two strong objections to it.  It does not go far enough back in time; and it helps to support a fallacious notion that Biographia Literaria was a whimsical and absent-minded improvisation, a mushroom growth in which toughness of fibre is scarcely to be expected.  We have only to recall the intermittent prodigies of improvisation that produced the Friend to see that in Cole­ridge’s case improvisation does not necessarily mean chaos.

Looking through Wordsworth’s Prefaces to see how he had revised them and why, I was struck by the fact that the topics he revised most carefully were those which Coleridge later examined in the Biographia.  I recalled that Coleridge had had in mind since 1802 – if not earlier – just such a book as the Biographia, that by 1802 he felt impelled to clarify his disagreement with Wordsworth on certain points of critical theory, and that before his departure for Malta in 1804 he had settled in outline his distinction between Fancy and Imagination.  Was it credible in any case that, with his capacity for sustained reflection, with his poetic and critical insight, with his “capacious and systematizing” memory, Coleridge could have written – no matter what the state of his health – a book in which no coherent thread of thought or purpose could be distinguished?

A pathfinder, I take it, has little or no interest in paths as such.  What he is interested in is tracing a path and getting somewhere: and he follows a path on the not fantastic assumption that whoever made the path was going somewhere.  A good reader working through a difficult or elusive book is in this sense a pathfinder—or so Coleridge evidently thought, for his golden rule was: “until you understand a writer’s ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding”.  And there are some sugges­tive passages in the essays “On Method” in the Friend.  “Method,” he says, “becomes natural to the mind which has become accustomed to contemplate not things only, or for their own sake alone, but likewise and chiefly the relations of things, either their relations to each other, or to the observer, or to the state and apprehension of the hearers.” Mental con­fusion arises in “the absence of the leading thought”; to avoid confusion we need “a staple, or starting-post” from which “things the most remote and diverse in time, place, and outward circumstance, are brought into mental contiguity and succession, the more striking as the less ex­pected”.

In search of a leading thought, I proposed these questions.  How long had Coleridge contemplated the theme of the Biographia? To what extent is Wordsworth “in the background” of the book to offer a “starting-post”? Wordsworth’s Poems of 1815, with a new Preface, were published shortly before Coleridge started to write the Biographia: did this affect Coleridge’s book? From these it might be possible to attempt the question: how clearly did Coleridge announce his theme and how steadily prosecute it?

The second volume of the Biographia is almost wholly devoted to an examination of Wordsworth’s poems and poetical theory.  Coleridge’s tone, however, is coloured from time to time by a polemical note harsher than one would expect in a professed admirer of Wordsworth’s.  This polemical atmosphere leaves the unfortunate impression that the Preface to Lyrical Ballads was entirely Wordsworth’s work and that Coleridge was attacking it vigorously because it was not his own.  The truth of the matter is that the book was not addressed to a sympathetic élite.  Coleridge was speaking to people who had shown themselves incapable of the most rudimentary critical discrimination; he could not afford to cloud his issues by announcing how large a part he had played in the conception of the Preface.  The Preface was partly his own work; yet the differences between himself and Wordsworth, though subtle, were radical and of long standing.

Wordsworth’s witness to the part played by Coleridge in the Preface is well known since Mr. Robert Sencourt published a Wordsworth marginalium of late date written on Barron Field’s unpublished manuscript Life of Wordsworth.

In the foregoing [Wordsworth writes] there is a frequent reference to what is called Mr.  Wordsworth’s theory and his Preface.  I will mention that I never cared a straw about the theory, and the Preface was written at the request of Mr. Coleridge out of sheer good nature.  I recollect the very spot, a deserted quarry in the Vale of Grasmere, where he pressed the thing upon me, and but for that it would never have been thought of.

Whether or not Wordsworth cared about the theory, he cared straw enough about the Preface to go on revising it and to attach it to all collected editions of his poems.  His waiver of responsibility has a familiar ring to it; morbidly sensitive to adverse criticism, he was some­times prepared to say that he cared nothing for work that had been harshly criticized.

Coleridge’s story of the collaboration is very much closer to the event and leads directly into the origins of Biographia Literaria.  Shortly after the third edition of Lyrical Ballads had been published with a revised version of the Preface and an Appendix on Poetic Diction, Coleridge wrote to William Sotheby on 13 July, 1802.

I was much pleased with your description of Wordsworth’s char­acter as it appeared to you… The word “homogeneous” gave me great pleasure, as most accurately and happily expressing him.  I must set you right with regard to my perfect coincidence with his poetic creed.  It is most certain that the heads of our mutual conversa­tions, etc., and the passages, were indeed partly taken from note[s] of mine; for it was at first intended that the preface should be written by me.  And it is likewise true that I warmly accord with Wordsworth in his abhorrence of these poetic licenses, as they are called, which are indeed mere tricks of convenience and laziness. ... In my opinion, every phrase, every metaphor, every personification, should have its justifying clause [? for cause] in some passion, either of the poet’s mind or of the characters described by the poet.  But metre itself implies a passion, that is, a state of excitement both in the poet’s mind, and is expected, in part, of the reader; and, though I stated this to Wordsworth, and he has in some sort stated it in his preface, yet he has not done justice to it, nor has he, in my opinion, sufficiently answered it.  In my opinion, poetry justifies as poetry, independent of any other passion, some new combinations of language and commands the omission of many others allowable in other compositions.  Now Wordsworth, me saltem judice, has in his system not sufficiently admitted the former and in his practice has too frequently sinned against the latter.  Indeed, we have had lately some little controversy on the subject, and we begin to suspect that there is somewhere or other a radical difference in our opinions.  [Letters, ed. E. H. Coleridge, I, 373-5.]

A fortnight later, writing to Southey about a projected work “Concern­ing Poetry”, Coleridge goes over the same ground again but in more exact detail.

Of course [Erasmus] Darwin and Wordsworth having given each a defence of their mode of poetry, and a disquisition on the nature and essence of poetry in general, I shall necessarily be led rather deeper, and these I shall treat of either first or last.  But I will apprise you of one thing, that although Wordsworth’s Preface is half a child of my own brain, and arose out of conversations so frequent that, with few excep­tions, we could scarcely either of us, perhaps, positively say which first started any particular thought (I am speaking of the Preface as it stood in the second volume [i.e. second edition, of 1800; the 1798 edition had only a brief “Advertisement”]), yet I am far from going all lengths with Wordsworth.  He has written lately a number of Poems…the greater number of these, to my feelings, very excellent compositions, but here and there a daring humbleness of language and versification, and a strict adherence to matter of fact, even to prolixity, that startled me.  His alterations, likewise, in “Ruth” perplexed me, and I have thought and thought again, and have not had my doubts solved by Wordsworth.  On the contrary, I rather suspect that somewhere or other there is a radical difference in our theoretical opinions respecting poetry; this I shall endeavour to go to the bottom of, and, acting the arbitrator between the old school and the new school, hope to lay down some plain and perspicuous, though not superficial canons of criticism respecting poetry.  [29 July, 1802; Letters I, 386-7.]

He goes on to mention the new (1802) edition of Lyrical Ballads, to praise the appendix and the additions to the Preface; but he finds all the latter part of the Preface “obscure beyond necessity, and the extreme elaboration and almost constrainedness of the diction contrasted… somewhat harshly with the general style of the Poems, to which the Preface is an introduction”.

This letter of 1802 is virtually a sketch for the Biographia; it also shows why Coleridge should feel for the Preface a sensitive personal responsibil­ity and the kind of impatience we sometimes feel for our own offspring.

In this same letter Coleridge says that in the work “Concerning Poetry and the characteristic merits of the Poets, our contemporaries”, his object “is not to examine what is good in each writer, but [what] has ipso facto pleased, and to what faculties, or passions, or habits of the mind they may be supposed to have given pleasure”.  This certainly looks forward to his criticism of Wordsworth in the Biographia; it also looks backwards (I suggest) to the abortive study of Lessing which occupied much of Coleridge’s time and energy in Germany (1798-9), and which thereafter afflicted his spirits with a sense of having failed to repay his moral debt to the Wedgwoods.  In Germany Coleridge worked at the Lessing scheme just about as hard as he told the Wedgwoods he had.  But when the materials were collected he found that his interest lay, not in making a biographical study of Lessing, a detailed critical appraisal of his work, or even in the interwoven account of the “true state of German literature in its rise and present state”, but in the “Essay on Poetry” which was to serve as introduction to the work.  As far as I can determine, he never drafted that essay; but I suspect that his enthusiasm for the subject, combined with his veneration for Wordsworth, is what led him to urge Wordsworth to write the 1800 Preface.

His mind seems to have been turning steadily towards a personal statement of his poetic theories ever since his vestigial account of the Doctrine of Dramatic Illusion in his review of Lewis’s The Monk in 1796.  This original fruit of his discussions with Southey in Bristol in 1795 was soon stimulated by his discussions with Wordsworth during the annus mirabilis in Somerset (1797-8).  The various modifications of the Lessing scheme, the talks with Wordsworth that produced the 1800 Preface, and the attempts to resolve the “radical difference” that he mentioned to Southey in July 1802, made the need for a personal statement imperative.  A few weeks later (20 October, 1802) he was discussing this project with Tom Wedgwood, and again the connection with Wordsworth is clear.

...in point of poetic Diction I am not so well satisfied that you do not require a certain Aloofness from the language of real Life, which I think deadly to poetry.  Very shortly however, I shall present you from the Press with my opinions in full on the subject of Style both in prose and verse – and I am confident of one thing, that I shall convince you that I have thought much and patiently on the subject, and that I understand the whole strength of my Antagonist’s [? Wordsworth’s] Cause.  [Unpublished Letters, ed.  E. L. Griggs, I, 217.]

At the beginning of next year, he continues, he proposes to “put together my memorandum Book on the subject of poetry” and assures Wedgwood that he “will never give anything to the world ... in my own name, which I have not tormented with the File”.  Fifteen years passed before Coleridge fulfilled this promise; and it is generally conceded that the result seems not to have been much tormented by the file.  But the Biographia has many indelible marks of prolonged, patient, and mature consideration.  To confirm the guess that his deliberations had matured along a single line, we find a note-book entry written in August 1803 shortly before he set off on the sombre Scotch Tour with the Wordsworths.

Seem to have made up my mind to write my metaphysic[al] work, as my Life, & in my Life – intermixed with all the other events or history of the mind & fortunes of S. T.  Coleridge.

The biographical thread which Lessing was to provide for “conveying opinions [on History, Poetry & Metaphysics][1] which I deem of the highest importance” had now become an autobiographical thread.

“Were it in my power,” Coleridge wrote to Britton in 1819, “my works should be confined to the second volume of my ‘Literary Life’, the Essays of the third volume of the ‘Friend’ [i.e. the essays ‘On Method’], with about fifty or sixty pages from the two former volumes, and some half-dozen of my poems.”  [Shakespearian Criticism, ed. Raysor, II, 326.]

The second volume of the Biographia – except for evident digressions and make-weight matter at the end – is devoted to a detailed criticism of Wordsworth’s work.  What is the connection between the critique of Wordsworth and the distinction between Fancy and Imagination which Coleridge thought was his most original contribution to critical thought?

In March 1815, after nearly two years’ strenuous and humiliating struggle to break his addiction to opium and alcohol, Coleridge accepted an offer of financial help from a group of his Bristol friends.  They paid his outstanding debts, accepted his manuscripts as security, and undertook to help him complete them for the press.  Coleridge had been gathering his poems together and offered these as his first project for publication.  For this volume, he told Byron on 30 March, 1815, he would write

A general Preface ... on the Principles of philosophic and genial criticism relatively to the Fine Arts in general, but especially to Poetry: and a Particular Preface to the Ancient Mariner and the Ballads, on the employment of the Supernatural in Poetry and the Laws which regulate it. [UL II, 133.]

(The Essay on the Supernatural was to be in answer to Sir Walter Scott; it is mentioned in the text of the Biographia but was never written.) Before he had finished collecting the poems for Sibylline Leaves, and evid­ently before he had begun the Preface, he wrote to Lady Beaumont (3 April, 1815) to ask her for the copy of the poem To William Wordsworth, written at Coleorton in January 1807 to celebrate the completion of Wordsworth’s Prelude.  Lady Beaumont referred the matter to Words­worth and repeated from this letter some ambiguous critical reflections of Coleridge’s upon the Excursion.  Within less than a year Wordsworth had published the Excursion (July or August 1814) and the first collective edition of his Poems (early April 1815).

On the last day of 1814 he wrote to Catherine Clarkson: “I smiled at your notion of Coleridge reviewing the Ex[cursion] in the Ed[inburgh Review].  I much doubt whether he has read three pages of the poem.”

Picking up from Lady Beaumont’s letter the scent of adverse com­ment, Wordsworth wrote Coleridge a short letter (22 May) – the first for years – in which he asked him to refrain from publishing the poem ad­dressed to himself, and asked for his views on the Poems; but more par­ticularly he wished a detailed elucidation of his perplexing “comparative censure” of the Excursion.  Coleridge replied quickly (30 May).  He had never intended to publish the poem but wished only to have a copy of it.  (Nevertheless he did include it in Sibylline Leaves under the title To a Gentleman.) As for the Excursion – the letter unfolds its involute length while Coleridge attempts honestly to express his judgement and still soften the hurt that he knew his disappointment would cause Words­worth.  [Letters II, 645-50.]

It is not the Excursion, but the more recently published Poems that con­cern us.  It would be interesting to know precisely when Coleridge received a copy of the 1815 Poems; his own copy has not been identified and it is not clear whether Wordsworth sent him one.  The Biographia concentrates upon Wordsworth’s Preface of 1800 (revised 1802, 1805) and the Appendix added in 1802.  But Coleridge also mentions the 1815 Preface and so early in the book that he may well have read it before he started his own composition.  Remembering that the 1815 Preface was published before Coleridge had started seriously to work upon the Biographia, one is immediately struck by the prominence Wordsworth gives to a distinction between Imagination and Fancy.  Wordsworth acknowledges his debt to Coleridge: he had drawn (as Coleridge records in the Biographia) upon a note of Coleridge’s in Southey’s Omniana (1812).  Coleridge, who wished to establish his primacy in making the distinction, may well have been nettled to have to swim in the wake of his more reputable friend.  Perhaps that is why he wrote down sadly in his second chapter a relic of the Friend:

I have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this wilderness the world! with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion.  The greater part in­deed have been trod underfoot, and are forgotten; but yet no small number have crept forth into life, some to furnish Feathers for the caps of others, and still more to plume the shafts in the quivers of my ene­mies, of them that unprovoked have lain in wait against my soul.

By July, if not before, Coleridge’s design was clear; for he told Dr. Brabant that his “Autobiographia Literaria” would give his own views on poetry and criticism, an account of the controversy over Wordsworth’s poems, and “a disquisition on the powers of association and on the generic difference between the Fancy and the Imagination”.  In October he told Byron something he had already written in the Biographia: he had found his own convictions about Imagination and Fancy “unexpectedly … [and] widely different from that of Mr. Wordsworth as explained in the new Preface...”  His dissatisfaction with Wordsworth’s theories may have strengthened his impulse to prepare throughout the first part of the book a careful and meticulous philosophical groundwork for his own version of the distinction.  A substantial part of the book was to be devoted to Wordsworth’s work – a critical appraisal and exposition, not an attack.  He knew that Wordsworth would not like it.  And yet (as he told Sotheby in January 1816) he also knew that “a true philoso­phical Critique [of Wordsworth’s poetry] was wanting, and will be of more service to his just reputation than twenty idolaters of his manner­isms”.  Unfortunately the “idolaters” have exerted far more influence in the last one hundred and thirty-five years than Coleridge has.  Too seldom has it been noticed that the centre of the philosophical critique – the distinction between Fancy and Imagination – arose from Words­worth’s poetry and was intended to elucidate it.  When we trace back the history of that distinction, we are led to Wordsworth again.

There is, as far as I can discover, only one early statement of the distinction – in a letter of January 1804 written to Richard Sharp.

Wordsworth is a poet, a most original poet.  He no more resembles Milton than Milton resembles Shakespeare – no more resembles Shakespeare than Shakespeare resembles Milton.  He is himself and, I dare affirm that, he will hereafter be admitted as the first and greatest philosophical poet, the only man who has effected a complete and constant synthesis of thought and feeling and combined them with poetic forms, with the music of pleasurable passion, and with Imagination or the modifying power in that highest sense of the word, in which I have ventured to oppose it to Fancy, or the aggregat­ing power – in that sense in which it is a dim analogue of creation – not all that we can believe, but all that we can conceive of creation. – Words­worth is a poet, and I feel myself a better poet, in knowing how to honour him than in all my own poetic compositions, all I have done or hope to do; and I prophesy immortality to his “Recluse”, as the first and finest philosophical poem, if only it be (as it undoubtedly will be) a faithful transcript of his own most august and innocent life, of his own habitual feelings and modes of seeing and hearing.  [Letters II, 450.]

In the Biographia Coleridge records some details of the history of this idea; and these, placed beside the letter of July 1802 to Southey and the letter of January 1804 to Sotheby, show that the idea had arisen from thinking strenuously about Wordsworth’s poetry.

This excellence [of endowing universal truths with the strongest impressions of novelty], which in all Mr. Wordsworth’s writings is more or less predominant, and which constitutes the character of his mind, I no sooner felt, than I sought to understand.  Repeated meditations led me first to suspect (and a more intimate analysis of the human faculties, their appropriate marks, functions, and effects matured my conjecture into full conviction) that fancy and imagina­tion were two distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being, according to the general belief, either two names with one meaning, or at furthest, the lower and higher degrees of one and the same power.  [BL, ed. J. Shawcross, I, 60-1.]

This appears in Chapter 4; a few pages later he contrasts his version of the distinction with Wordsworth’s.

The explanation which Mr. Wordsworth has himself given will be found to differ from mine, chiefly perhaps, as our objects are different.  It could scarcely indeed happen otherwise, from the advantage I have enjoyed of frequent conversation with him on a subject to which a poem of his own [Ruth] first directed my attention, and my conclusions concerning which, he had made more lucid to myself by many happy instances drawn from the operation of natural objects on the mind.  But it was Mr.  Wordsworth’s purpose to consider the influences of fancy and imagination as they are manifested in poetry, and from the different effects to conclude their diversity in kind [in order to establish a classification for his own poems]; while it is my object to investigate the seminal principle, and then from the kind to deduce the degree.  My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage.  I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift themselves above ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our common consciousness.  [BL I, 64.]

When these hints are carried to the text of the Biographia the pattern of the “immethodical miscellany” becomes clear; we can discern not merely the surface of the words, but the author’s “make of mind”, and the nisus, the intension, the impulsive sense of an end-in-view that commands and guides an unfolding if elusive pattern.  First of all we may neglect the 110 pages (1817 edition) sandwiched between Chapter 22 and the Con­clusion: the text (considerably revised) of some letters written from Ger­many 1798-9, and an ill-tempered critique of Maturin’s Bertram reprinted from the Courier of August-September 1816.  Coleridge is not wholly responsible for these flaccid interpolations.  The Bristol printer had made a blunder in estimating the copy and set up the type for two volumes.  The cost of resetting 180 pages to alter the foliation to a single-volume plan would be prohibitive.  The sheets, after long delay, were sold to a London publisher; the second volume had to be filled out somehow, and Coleridge put in whatever was at hand.  More remarkable than the presence of this irrelevant material is Coleridge’s refusal, in an extra-literary crisis, to fill the space by “blowing up” his own text.  The actual text in the 1817 edition, then, consists of pp. 296 (Vol. I) + 182 (Vol. II to the interpolations) + 17 (Conclusion).

Volume II, in Coleridge’s view the best part of the book, being homo­geneous and firmly directed requires no detailed comment.  His purpose is to set forth what he and Wordsworth had discovered to be the true nature of poetry, and to reinstate it against the attacks of meretricious criticism.  In an introductory chapter he states his doctrine; two chapters provide historical perspective; four chapters examine his disagreements with Wordsworth’s theory; two chapters – one of them unusually long – is given up to “fair and philosophical inquisition into the character of Wordsworth, as a poet”.  The Conclusion, in no sense a summary of the book, reaffirms his reason for vindicating himself in public, and rests his hopes upon Christian belief and the goodness of God.

The first volume closes with Chapter 13, the terse account of Imagina­tion and Fancy.  This is an unhappy division; for it suggests that Volume II is attacking a series of questions more or less distantly related to the matter in the first volume.  When we turn to the first volume with our central theme in mind we find that Coleridge has stated it clearly in the opening paragraph.

...It will be found, that the least of what I have written concerns myself personally.  I have used the narration for the purpose of giving a continuity to the work, in part for the sake of the miscellaneous reflections suggested to me by particular events, but still more as introductory to the statement of my principles in Politics, Religion, and Philosophy, and the application of the rules, deduced from phil­osophical principles, to poetry and criticism.  But of the objects, which I proposed to myself, it was not the least important to effect, as far as possible, a settlement of the long continued controversy concern­ing the true nature of poetic diction: and at the same time to define with the utmost impartiality the real poetic character of the poet [Wordsworth], by whose writings this controversy was first kindled, and has been since fuelled and fanned.  [BL I, 1-2.]

The book is in part an Apologia pro Vita Sua, but we must not expect something like the Confessions of St.  Augustine or of Rousseau; the em­phasis is to fall upon the word Literaria.  Coleridge traces first the development of his poetic tastes, his steady withdrawal from his early “laborious and florid diction”, and the dawning of his individual poetic vision.  In the first four chapters he presents his poetic credentials and attacks the malice and wrongheadedness of the uncritical.  At first his attack takes the positive form of asserting that poetry is a difficult and noble craft: “There is no profession on earth, which requires an attention so early, so long, or so unintermitting as that of poetry.” He is hacking away the undergrowth of irrelevance and prejudice so that the work to be criticized may stand forth clearly – so that the criticism may begin.  Attacks on himself, Southey, and Wordsworth have been arbitrary, abusive, and personal, have had little to do with their poetry.  “In all perplexity,” he observes, “there is a portion of fear, which predisposes the mind to anger.” He implies that reviewers and men of ill-will would much rather wrangle over the bone of some theoretical statement than settle to the exact and humbling task of grasping a poem for what it is.  Coleridge presents more credentials: his discovery of Wordsworth’s work, his friendship with him, and how the peculiar originality of his work had brought him to distinguish between Fancy and Imagination.

The rest of the volume (Chapters 5-13) is usually represented as a gratuitous piece of metaphysical embroidery.  What has a theory of association to do with the matter in hand? Wordsworth looms in the background again.  Most of the weak spots in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (judging from the pattern of revisions) are dealt with in the second volume – the theories of diction and metre.  But another point of attack was Wordsworth’s theory of association, indistinct in outline and encumbered by the doctrine of Hartley.  In the Prospectus to the Excursion (composed ? 1798) Wordsworth had stated the central preoccu­pation of his poetic life: he wished to proclaim

How exquisitely the individual Mind

(And the progressive powers perhaps no less

Of the whole species) to the external World

Is fitted: – and how exquisitely, too –

Theme this but little heard of among men –

The external World is fitted to the Mind;

And the creation (by no lower name

Can it be called) which they with blended might

Accomplish: – this is our high argument.

If Wordsworth was to secure philosophical sanction for this “deep impres­sion of certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it, which are equally inherent and indestructible”, he needed an adequate theory of association.  This Coleridge hoped to supply; and confronted by an instance of Wordsworth’s jejune thinking along these lines in the poem Ruth he had been led to see the difference between Fancy and Imagination.  This explains the abrupt and apparently wanton transition from an agreeable passage of critical talk to a long section of compact philosophical exposition.

With becoming modesty and humour Coleridge apologizes for the rigours of what is to come; but his purpose is fundamental and grave.

...it is my object to investigate the seminal principle,... I would gladly... spare both myself and others this labor, if I knew how with­out it to present an intelligible statement of my poetic creed; not as my opinions, which weigh for nothing, but as deductions from established premis[s]es conveyed in such a form, as is calculated either to effect a fundamental conviction, or to receive a fundamental confutation.

Whether or not the attempt was successful – in the sense of being impreg­nable, definitive, systematic, or any of the other tilings pedants expect of other people’s performances – these chapters show historically what pro­cess of philosophical obfuscation in England had run parallel to a period of poetic inanition.  They are impressive also as recording the stages by which a fearless mind had struggled alone through the jungle of interests vested in pseudo-philosophy; for, Coleridge noted, “the worst and widest impediment” to poetry was “the predominance of a popular philosophy, at once the counterfeit and the mortal enemy of all true and manly metaphysical research”.  We must at least respect the fact that Coleridge found it necessary to take such a journey and to report upon it: he had long known that the results would have to form the bed-rock, not only for his poetical theory, but for whatever of value he had to say upon psychology, philosophy, theology, politics, ethics, metaphysics.

Throughout these nine chapters the pattern is distinct even though the transitions are sometimes abrupt.  Four chapters on association lead to a chapter on the possibilities of philosophy; he traces some of his more notable discoveries and debts, and points out that one cannot always tell the contents of a book by the label on the binding.  A long digression (in the manner of the “Landing-places” in The Friend) offers a rest before entering upon the philosophic hard core of Chapter 12, the bed-rock promised at the start.  This chapter (I feel), and not Chapter 13, is the centre of gravity of this volume and of the whole book – even though in the last year of his life Coleridge proclaimed that it was “unformed and immature”, containing “the fragments of the truth, but…not fully thought out”.  From this point he moves outward again, diffracting his conclusions into the sphere of poetry by drawing the distinction between Fancy and Imagination.  At the beginning of this chapter – and here alone – Coleridge falters; he renounces the effort of providing an ade­quate transition, and ends by setting down one of the most brilliant pages he ever wrote.  Elsewhere there are ellipses; nowhere else is there a sign of uncertainty in the unfolding of his thought; even the spacious digres­sions are an earnest that his goal is always plainly in sight.  From Chapter 13 he passes directly to the long examination of Wordsworth’s work, as promised from the beginning; and the Biographia Literaria comes full circle, spun upon the firm centre of Coleridge’s poetic and philosophic life, his admiration for Wordsworth’s work, his need to utter forth an intuition that had long haunted and enlightened his thinking.

Coleridge was blazing a trail when he wrote Biographia Literaria.  Conscious of that fact, he was not steadily confident that he could make it easy for anybody to follow him; he gave advice, warnings, admonitions on this subject; he even suggested that only a few might be fit for the journey.  One person he did count on was William Wordsworth; in Chapter 12 he mentioned his name and cried, “Would to heaven, I might meet with many such readers.” Coleridge had not used his erstwhile friend as a man of straw, nor seized upon critical differences as occasion to vent the bitterness that had fallen between them; if at times a note of asperity vibrated in his voice, it came rather from the sorrowful integrity of critical purpose that makes his letter about the Excursion such a moving document.  But Wordsworth was no more than human; he could no more see beyond the adverse criticism than John Murray could see the book as a publishable proposition.  “I have not read Mr. Coler­idge’s ‘Biographia’,” Wordsworth wrote shortly after its publication, “having contented myself with skimming parts of it.” Only one other comment of his is preserved – this time in Crabb Robinson’s diary (December 1817).

Coleridge’s book has given him no pleasure, and he finds just fault with Coleridge for professing to write about himself and writing merely about Southey and Wordsworth.  With the criticism on the poetry too he is not satisfied.  The praise is extravagant and the censure inconsiderate.

Coleridge’s prayer that he might have many readers like Wordsworth was answered almost to the letter.  Ignored by the Quarterly Review, and made by Blackwood’s the occasion for libellous abuse, the book sold poorly and was not reprinted during his lifetime.  It did not, like the Wallenstein translations, come to serve as “winding sheets for pilchards”; but even his daughter’s fervent and learned editing, thirty years after its first publication, failed to rescue the book.  From the start Biographia Literaria was doomed to be misinterpreted; for a superstition about its obscurity and fragmentariness was immediately circulated and has never been dispelled.  That prejudice has worked steadily against Coleridge’s reputa­tion as thinker and critic; it has also helped to conceal the precise nature of his and Wordsworth’s poetic achievement.  For a poet’s work will always suffer damage when approached through a misunderstanding of his critical theory.