Sacred Fire: The Language of Poetry

Abstract

From his earliest notebooks, Coleridge’s observations on language are associated with the art of poetry. As an aspirant poet, he had a special interest in current means of literary expression. The verse of Thomas Gray and William Collins represented the significant legacy of English poetry to his generation, as he would consider it. His long struggle with their idiom touches on problems of language as a medium of expression. The contexts are impacted, but the earlier notes were to prove important for modern thinking about the condition of poetry.¹