Abstract
Aherne discusses the importance of Coleridge’s role in creating the critic (wherein they gained more intellectual power than the artist), and how it is one of the most prominent aspects of his legacy (in part thanks to the rise of Cambridge English), and also the most erroneous, because this success ultimately marginalized his intellectual significance. The chapter concentrates on the role and fate of the Romantic poet, and how Tennyson was judged against their standard, before examining how the durability of these Romantic notions combined with Coleridge’s influence on religious culture in the Aesthetic Movement; lastly the revival of Coleridge as the ancestor of modern criticism during the first decades of the twentieth century is discussed, and his place in the critical theories of Eliot, Richards, Collingwood and Dewey in considered.
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Aherne, P. (2018). The Power of Criticism: Poetry, Aestheticism, and Literary Criticism. In: The Coleridge Legacy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95858-3_4
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