Biographia Literaria
By Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Classic work by Coleridge, Samuel Taylor.
Table of Contents
Motives to the present work--Reception of the Author’s first publication--Discipline of his taste at school--Effect of contemporary writers on youthful minds--Bowles’s Sonnets--Com...
Supposed irritability of men of genius brought to the test of facts--Causes and occasions of the charge--Its injustice. I have often thought, that it would be neither uninstructiv...
The Author’s obligations to critics, and the probable occasion--Principles of modern criticism--Mr. Southey’s works and character. To anonymous critics in reviews, magazines, and ...
The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface--Mr. Wordsworth’s earlier poems--On fancy and imagination--The investigation of the distinction important to the Fine Arts. I have wandered fa...
On the law of Association--Its history traced from Aristotle to Hartley. There have been men in all ages, who have been impelled as by an instinct to propose their own nature as a...
That Hartley’s system, as far as it differs from that of Aristotle, is neither tenable in theory, nor founded in facts. Of Hartley’s hypothetical vibrations in his hypothetical os...
Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory--Of the original mistake or equivocation which procured its admission--Memoria technica. We will pass by the utter incompatib...
The system of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes--Refined first by Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the doctrine of Harmonia praestabilita--Hylozoism--Materialism--None of the...
Is Philosophy possible as a science, and what are its conditions?--Giordano Bruno--Literary Aristocracy, or the existence of a tacit compact among the learned as a privileged order...
A chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude preceding that on the nature and genesis of the Imagination or Plastic Power--On pedantry and pedantic expressions--Advice to...
An affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel themselves disposed to become authors. It was a favourite remark of the late Mr. Whitbread’s, that no man does any thin...
A chapter of requests and premonitions concerning the perusal or omission of the chapter that follows. In the perusal of philosophical works I have been greatly benefited by a res...
On the imagination, or esemplastic power O Adam, One Almighty is, from whom All things proceed, and up to him return, If not deprav’d from good, created all Such t...
Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally proposed--Preface to the second edition--The ensuing controversy, its causes and acrimony--Philosophic definitions of a ...
The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a critical analysis of Shakespeare’s VENUS AND ADONIS, and RAPE of LUCRECE. In the application of these principles to purposes ...
Striking points of difference between the Poets of the present age and those of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--Wish expressed for the union of the characteristic merits of ...
Examination of the tenets peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth--Rustic life (above all, low and rustic life) especially unfavourable to the formation of a human diction--The best parts of la...
Language of metrical composition, why and wherein essentially different from that of prose--Origin and elements of metre--Its necessary consequences, and the conditions thereby imp...
Continuation--Concerning the real object which, it is probable, Mr. Wordsworth had before him in his critical preface--Elucidation and application of this. It might appear from so...
The former subject continued--The neutral style, or that common to Prose and Poetry, exemplified by specimens from Chaucer, Herbert, and others. I have no fear in declaring my con...
Remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals. Long have I wished to see a fair and philosophical inquisition into the character of Wordsworth, as a poet, on the evi...
The characteristic defects of Wordsworth’s poetry, with the principles from which the judgment, that they are defects, is deduced--Their proportion to the beauties--For the greates...
THE MESSIAH when he was seventeen; he devoted three entire years to the plan without composing a single line. He was greatly at a loss in what manner to execute his work. There wer...
Quid quod praefatione praemunierim libellum, qua conor omnem offendiculi ansam praecidere? [79] Neque quicquam addubito, quin ea candidis omnibus faciat satis. Quid autem facias is...
CONCLUSION It sometimes happens that we are punished for our faults by incidents, in the causation of which these faults had no share: and this I have always felt the severest pun...