Biographia Literaria

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1817

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-16

Chapters 17-19

Chapters 20-22

Satyrane’s Letters

Chapters 23-24

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 4 Summary

Coleridge proclaims Wordsworth a genius and takes up the subject of the preface he wrote for Lyrical Ballads and its challenges to critics. When Coleridge discovered Wordsworth’s poems during his last year at Cambridge University in 1794, he reflected that “seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced” (26). At age 24 Coleridge met Wordsworth and was particularly impressed by the unpublished poem “The Female Vagrant.” In this poem the “occasional obscurities” of Wordsworth’s earlier writing were almost entirely missing (26). Coleridge writes that the poem “made so unusual an impression on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my judgement” (27).

Finally Coleridge associates the Greek “phantasia” with the Latin “imaginatio,” and imagination with fancy. Wordsworth’s motivation in writing the preface was to explore imagination manifested in poetry, whereas Coleridge’s intention is to investigate “the seminal principle” (28) of poetic imagination. Coleridge asserts that the Biographia Literaria is an enquiry into the source rather than the obscurity of the poetic imagination, and he recommends that those who disagree not read on.

Chapter 5 Summary

Coleridge traces the law of “association” from Aristotle to Hartley. Sir James Mackintosh and Thomas Hobbes claimed that “original impressions formed the basis of all true psychology” (29), an opinion that Coleridge opposes: “I deny Hobbes’ claim in toto” (30). René Descartes wrote about the dissociation of mind from matter after observing that an amputee continued to complain of pain in his missing fingers. Hobbes observed that observation had materiality: “whenever the senses are impinged on by external objects […] there is also a corresponding motion in the innermost and subtlest organs” (30). Ludovicius Vives predated both, linking phantasia with comprehension, and imaginatio with the receptivity to impressions. Aristotle uses the word “kinaeseis” for mental representations, distinguishing them from materiality. According to Aristotle, the law of association depends on five factors: simultaneity, temporality, interdependence, likeness, and contrast. Coleridge notes a similarity between Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Parva Naturalia and Hume’s Essay on Association. In the following chapter, Coleridge expands his view that Hartley diverged from Aristotle in error.

Chapter 6 Summary

Coleridge is skeptical of Hartley’s notion that ideas pre-exist in association with one another. He considers cause and effect in the mechanics of perception. Applying Hartley’s theory, Coleridge concludes, would constitute “delirium” (33). He then embarks on an anecdote about the apparent possession of a German girl. Her seemingly inexplicable speeches in Hebrew were traced to “impressions made on her nervous system” (34) by readings by her uncle, a pastor. This provides “proof,” Coleridge claims, that “relics of sensation may exist for an indefinite time in a latent state” (35). Where they are recorded is a mystery that Coleridge refrains from delving into at this stage; instead, he submits that perception entails a “similarity” between the observer and the observed (35).

Chapters 4-6 Analysis

In the context of the “wilderness” of the literary world, Wordsworth’s “freshness” is as revitalizing as rainfall on “desert sands” (14). Coleridge writes of Wordsworth’s “words and images all aglow, which might recall those products of the vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms rise out of a hard and thorny rind and shell” (26). Thus, Wordsworth’s poetry refreshed Coleridge’s own source of inspiration and also precipitated a transformation akin to Coleridge’s subsequent image of the butterfly emerging from its chrysalis (27). Poetry is therefore spiritually edifying and alters both the poet and the sufficiently conscious reader. The transformation of Christ on the cross is a prominent religious parallel with Coleridge’s notion of poetic development.

The equivalence between the observer and the observed that Coleridge posits establishes memory as an essential component of his theory of poetry. From the interruption of the infamous “person from Porlock” that led Coleridge to forget the rest of “Kubla Khan” to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in which the mariner recounts his memory of the events on board an ill-fated ship, the prodigious nature of memory shaped Coleridge’s most famous poems. “Rime” is composed from the mariner’s memories, which now also haunt the reader. This dual nature of memory—both generative and destructive—is as integral to Coleridge’s own poetic practice as it is to his critical theory.

If poems can be said to read themselves, with form and content justifying one another as Coleridge argues in Chapter 2, then Coleridge’s poems are also a form of criticism. The wedding guest listening in on the mariner’s tale is a kind of critic, separate from the poetic voice, who is nonetheless embedded within the poem. Coleridge writes, “the man of genius lives most in the ideal world, in which the present is still constituted by the future or the past” (15). This sense of timelessness or prosopopoeia is common to other poems of the period. It is also discernible in 18th-century landscape architecture, which commonly featured the installation of artificial ruins as part of a widespread cultural interest in memorialization.