Of all the wide-ranging interests Coleridge showed in his career, religion was the deepest and most long lasting, and Beer demonstrates in this book how none of this work can be fully understood without taking this into account. Beer also reveals how Coleridge was preoccupied by the life of the mind and how closely this subject was intertwined with religion in his thinking.

"Best known as a romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge also mounted a strong challenge to the skepticism and relativism we inherit from the Enlightenment. Ronald C. Wendling shows Coleridge, modern in his critical spirit and chronic anxiety, nevertheless progressing toward a total head-and-heart acceptance of Church of England orthodoxy. The tension between Coleridge's poetic feeling for the divinity of the sensible world and his reverential sense of God's personality and transcendence stimulated this development." "Adopting a personalist approach to the study of Coleridge's thought, Wendling explains how the circumstances contributing to his addictive personality helped shape his spiritual and intellectual life."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Barbeau reconstructs the system of religion that Coleridge develops in Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840). Coleridge's late system links four sources of divinity the Bible, the traditions of the church, the interior work of the Spirit, and the inspired preacher to Christ, the Word. In thousands of marginalia and private notebook entries, Coleridge challenges traditional views of the formation and inspiration of the Bible, clarifies the role of the church in biblical interpretation, and elucidates the relationship between the objective and subjective sources of revelation. In late writings that develop a robust system of religion, Coleridge conveys his commitment to biblical wisdom.

Sublime Coleridge focuses on the role of the Opus Maximum in explaining Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ideas about religion, psychology, and the sublime. This book is an introduction, a reader's guide, and an interpretation of this central text in British Romanticism.