Biographia Literaria

Biographia Literaria
Samuel Taylor Coleridge · Public domain · source
Name	Biographia Literaria
Author	Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Language	English
Country	United Kingdom
Published	1817
Genre	Literary criticism, philosophy

Contents

Biographia Literaria Biographia Literaria is a critical and philosophical work by Samuel Taylor Coleridge published in 1817 that combines autobiography, literary criticism, and metaphysical argument. It engages with contemporaries and predecessors such as William Wordsworth, William Blake, Lord Byron, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley and dialogues with figures like John Keats, Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The book intervenes in debates involving institutions and periodicals such as the Westminster Review, the Edinburgh Review, the London Magazine and the Morning Chronicle, while addressing the works of dramatists and poets including William Shakespeare, John Milton, Homer, Virgil, Dante Alighieri and Geoffrey Chaucer.

Background and Composition

Coleridge wrote the work against the background of the late Georgian literary scene, responding to movements and events associated with figures like George III, George IV, Napoleon Bonaparte, Lord Castlereagh, William Pitt the Younger and the aftermath of the French Revolution. The composition reflects Coleridge’s intellectual networks that included Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronisław Szolc-Rogoziński and correspondents such as Thomas Poole, Joseph Priestley and John Thelwall. Coleridge’s philosophical labors drew on lectures and manuscripts debated in salons and societies like the Royal Society, the British Museum reading rooms, and literary circles around periodicals such as the Monthly Magazine and the Quarterly Review. The book’s mise-en-scène intersects with cultural sites—London, Bristol, Somerset—and engages legal and political figures including Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham insofar as their ideas shaped public discourse.

The work is organized into chapters that mix personal narrative with theoretical exposition, invoking canonical authors and their texts such as Paradise Lost, The Tempest, Beowulf, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Coleridge references classical and modern luminaries like Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke while treating modern poets and critics including William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, John Wilson Croker, Edmund Kean and F. J. Furnivall. The chapters integrate discussion of aesthetic examples from Ossian, Folios, theatrical productions at the Drury Lane Theatre and print cultures managed by publishers such as John Murray, F. C. and J. Rivington and Longman. Coleridge also alludes to continental literature and intellectual currents via figures like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Alexander Pope, Molière, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Coleridge articulates a philosophy of imagination and fancy indebted to epistemological debates among René Descartes, George Berkeley, Benedict de Spinoza and David Hume, and he situates his aesthetic theory with reference to Immanuel Kant’s critical system and later commentators such as F. H. Bradley and G. W. F. Hegel. He contrasts conceptions of poetic creation attributed to William Wordsworth and contemporary practice in the light of Aristotelian and Platonic models, invoking thinkers like Plotinus and Proclus for metaphysical support. Arguments engage with rhetorical and hermeneutic traditions represented by Horace, Quintilian, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Blaise Pascal, and they anticipate later criticism by figures such as Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, I. A. Richards and Harold Bloom. Coleridge’s critiques of imagination and cognition also converse with scientific names and laboratories—Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Watt—as metaphors and intellectual contrasts to poetic methods.

The text draws on a wide constellation of sources, from classical authors like Homer and Virgil to Renaissance minds including Sir Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe. It acknowledges modern philosophers and critics—John Stuart Mill, Augustus De Morgan, Charles Darwin (later reception), Herbert Spencer—as part of its intellectual afterlife, and cites theological and biblical traditions via figures such as St. Paul, King James VI and I (for the translation), Martin Luther and John Calvin. Coleridge’s own reading lists and marginalia signal debts to editors and scholars like Thomas Warton, Samuel Johnson’s biographical method, William Hazlitt’s essays, and continental commentators including Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin in retrospective influence. The work also responds to literary controversies involving Edmund Burke’s aesthetics, the reception of Ossian and the philological labors of Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm.

Initial reception involved reviewers and editors of the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review and publishers such as John Murray and provoked responses from contemporaries including Hazlitt, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s own circle—Charles Lamb, Robert Southey and John Keats (in subsequent poetic thought). Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it informed criticism by Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis and theorists in universities like Oxford University, Cambridge University, Harvard University, Yale University and Princeton University. The work shaped literary studies across movements linked to Romanticism, Victorian literature, Modernism and Postmodernism, and it became a touchstone for scholars citing Northrop Frye, Edward Said, Hans-Georg Gadamer, M. H. Abrams and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Its influence extends into comparative and critical traditions involving New Criticism, Structuralism, Deconstruction and Reception theory, and it appears in curricula, collected editions and critical histories produced by institutions like the British Library and university presses.

Category:Books by Samuel Taylor Coleridge