Reflections on the Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Résumé
Coleridge’s life story has done little to serve the reception of his work, whether in his own lifetime or in the eyes of posterity. It has even become a regrettably usual defect of too many authors writing about Coleridge to fall prey to the temptation of disparaging his character, and hence into the trap of sounding ever so slightly condescending with regard to his high achievements. This article has no hagiographic pretension, nor does it undertake an obviously superfluous attempt to defend Coleridge. True, the man had his own failings. But Biographia Literaria was arguably a successful attempt to redeem himself through literature. Coleridge’s particular genius was primarily of an oratorical nature, very much in the British dissenters’ tradition of lay sermons. His major contribution to literature, apart from a number of great canonical poems composed with the superior talent of an amateur in the noblest sense of the term, was not merely a popularisation of German idealist philosophy, but consisted in a deliberate ideological reconciliation of philosophy with religion, which exerted a decisive influence on the history of ideas.