Long celebrated as a great aesthetic idealist and champion of the imagination, Coleridge is now beginning to be understood as a literary critic with many other dimensions, with exciting and far-reaching insights into language, and with detailed notions about the psychological, historical, and linguistic demands of the literary experience. In this study, Timothy Corrigan sees Coleridge's criticism as "the product of an actively self-conscious reader, of a precise user of language, and, most of all, of a historical man involved with the demands of his day." Specifically he studies the relationship between the language of Coleridge's criticism and his interests in politics, psychology, science, and theology. Corrigan concludes that Coleridge's work is not a closed and strictly defined system but an extraordinarily diverse one that responds sympathetically to new angles of research. His study is first and foremost an investigation of Coleridge's criticism based on Coleridge's own ideas about language and reading. While taking its particular direction from a variety of contemporary literary theories, the book is most concerned with how Coleridge's critical prose and theoretical positions anticipate these in an exceptionally complex way.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's prose has long confounded its critics. In Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language, Jerome Christensen offers a reading of the prose which captures its pious, perverse vitality and characterizes its rhetorical form. Coleridge sought "to expose the folly and legerdemain of those who have... abused the blessed machine of language." Christensen develops a framework for reading Coleridge's language by first exploring Coleridge's critique of David Hartley's philosophy of associationism. Although Coleridge discredited Hartley's system, he failed to devise a coherent alternative. Lacking a firm grounding for his philosophical method, Coleridge wrought a mobile, fragmentary discourse which, Christensen asserts, is important to the Romantic tradition not because it is central, but because it is brilliantly eccentric. Christensen navigates the complexities of Coleridge's language in prefaces, guides, marginalia, notebooks, letters, essays, and manuals, but chiefly in the Biographia Literaria and The Friend, his major works in prose. The Biographia, he argues, is best conceived of as marginal discourse—a category that subsumes not only Coleridge's criticism of association but also the mix of deference and dominance in his engagement with Wordsworth's genius. In The Friend, Coleridge appears as the figure of the Friend, mediator between the extremes of principle and prudence. These extremes do meet in Coleridge's prose, but the moral force of the encounter is vitiated by Coleridge's purely rhetorical resolution in the figure of chiasmus. The chiasmus, Christensen concludes, is the trope that both shapes The Friend and propels the blessed machine of Coleridge's language.

This carefully edited collection has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. He coined many familiar words and phrases, including suspension of disbelief. He was a major influence on Emerson, and American transcendentalism. Coleridge is one of the most important figures in English poetry. His poems directly and deeply influenced all the major poets of the age. He was known by his contemporaries as a meticulous craftsman who was more rigorous in his careful reworking of his poems than any other poet, and Southey and Wordsworth were dependent on his professional advice. Table of Contents: Introduction: The Spirit of the Age: Mr. Coleridge by William Hazlitt A Day With Samuel Taylor Coleridge by May Byron The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge by James Gillman Literary Essays, Lectures and Memoirs: BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA ANIMA POETAE SHAKSPEARE, WITH INTRODUCTORY MATTER ON POETRY, THE DRAMA AND THE STAGE AIDS TO REFLECTION CONFESSIONS OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT AND MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS FROM "THE FRIEND" HINTS TOWARDS THE FORMATION OF A MORE COMPREHENSIVE THEORY OF LIFE OMNIANA. 1812 A COURSE OF LECTURES LITERARY NOTES SPECIMENS OF THE TABLE TALK OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE LITERARY REMAINS OF S.T. COLERIDGE Complete Letters LETTERS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE BIBLIOGRAPHIA EPISTOLARIS

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