Biographia Literaria

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 At age 24 Coleridge met Wordsworth and was particularly impressed by the unpublished poem “The Female Vagrant.”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.