Biographia Literaria

The Biographia Literaria is a critical autobiography by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published in 1817 in two volumes. Its working title was Autobiographia Literaria. The formative influences on the work were William Wordsworth's theory of poetry, the Kantian view of imagination as a shaping power (for which Coleridge later coined the neologism "esemplastic"), various post-Kantian writers including F. W. J. von Schelling, and the earlier influences of the empiricist school, including David Hartley and the Associationist psychology.

• Not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry.
  • Ch. I (p. 22)

• Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.
  • Ch. I (p. 26)

• Experience informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.
  • Ch. II (p. 30)

• Indignation at literary wrongs I leave to men born under happier stars. I cannot afford it.
  • Ch. II (p. 46)

• Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind.
  • Ch. IV (p. 88)

• An idea, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol; and, except in geometry, all symbols of necessity involve an apparent contradiction.
  • Ch. IX (pp. 146–7)

• Veracity does not consist in saying, but in the intention of communicating truth.
  • Ch. IX (p. 147)

• I sought for a subject, that should give equal room and freedom for description, incident, and impassioned reflections on men, nature, and society, yet supply in itself a natural connection to the parts, and unity to the whole. Such a subject I conceived myself to have found in a stream, traced from its source in the hills among the yellow-red moss and conical glass-shaped tufts of Bent, to the first break or fall, where its drops became audible, and it begins to form a channel; thence to the peat and turf barn, itself built of the same dark squares as it sheltered; to the sheepfold; to the first cultivated plot of ground; to the lonely cottage and its bleak garden won from the heath; to the hamlet, the villages, the market-town, the manufactories, and the seaport. My walks therefore were almost daily on the top of Quantock, and among its sloping coombs.
  • Ch. X (p. 189)

• Never pursue literature as a trade.
  • Ch. XI (pp. 222–3)

• “Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.”
  • Ch. XII (p. 235)

• During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs.
  • Ch. XII (p. 255)

• The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am.
  • Ch. XIII (pp. 295–6)

• The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.
  • Ch. XIII (p. 296)

• The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space.
  • Ch. XIII (p. 296)

• Our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination.
  • Ch. XIV (p. 1); on his friendship with Wordsworth

• That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
  • Ch. XIV (p. 2)

• The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of imagination.
  • Ch. XIV (p. 11)

• This power...reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry.
  • Ch. XIV (pp. 11–12)

• Our myriad-minded Shakspear.
  • Ch. XV (p. 13)

    Footnote: Ἄνης μυριονῶς, a phrase which I have borrowed from a Greek monk, who applies it to a Patriarch of Constantinople. I might have said, that I have reclaimed, rather than borrowed it: for it seems to belong to Shakespear, de jure singulari, et ex privilegio naturæ.

• It has been before observed, that images however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's own spirit.
  • Ch. XV (p. 18)

• No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.
  • Ch. XV (p. 21)

• Shakspeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration possessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge became habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class; to that power which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton аs his compeer not rival. While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of Milton; while Shakspeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself.
  • Ch. XV (p. 22)

• The best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself.
  • Ch. XVII (p. 51)

• In poetry, in which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style; namely, its untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning.
  • Ch. XXII (p. 160)

• And Coleridge too has lately taken wing,
  But like a hawk encumbered with his hood,
  Explaining metaphysics to the nation.
  I wish he would explain his Explanation.
  • Lord Byron, Don Juan (Halifax: Milner and Sowerby, 1837), Dedication, st. 2

• The author of Biographia Literaria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a ‘ruined man’ is itself a vocation.
  • T. S. Eliot, "Wordsworth and Coleridge" (9 December 1932); The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), p. 69

• Biographia Literaria (London, 1817), vols. 1 and 2