The Unity of Coleridge’s Critical Theory

Abstract

The remarkable fact about Coleridge the critic, often regarded as the father of modern criticism, is not that many of his ideas are so highly derivative as sometimes to amount to plagiarism, nor that his most famous critical work, Biographia Literaria, is also one of the most disorderly books ever to be published in English, nor even that parts of it are written in a style almost unreadable. (Byron compared him in the Dedication to Don Juan to a hunting hawk released for flight with his hood still upon him, ‘Explaining Metaphysics to the nation — / I wish he would explain his Explanation.’ For Shelley in Letter to Maria Gisborne Coleridge was a ‘hooded eagle’, his mind ‘with its own internal lightning blind’ [ll. 208, 205].) No, the miracle of Coleridge’s critical theory lies in the small number of his seminal ideas, the internal consistency of those ideas, the remarkable flexibility with which they may be restated in numerous and quite different contexts, the extent to which the theory may be translated into practical criticism of such a poet as Wordsworth, and the firm philosophical and psychological base upon which all this rests.