47 pages • 1 hour read
Biographia Literaria
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Key Figures
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Author of Biographia Literaria and Wordsworth’s collaborator in writing Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge enjoyed a successful political and poetic career during his lifetime, which he describes in the text. Born in 1772, Coleridge was educated at Christ’s Hospital after the death of his father. He attended Jesus College, Cambridge, from 1791 to 1794, while Wordsworth attended St John’s College at the same university. Coleridge completed his education in Germany and is credited with founding the Romantic movement alongside Wordsworth, with introducing German idealist philosophy to the English-speaking world, and with influencing American transcendentalism. His best-known poems include “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Christabel,” and “Kubla Khan,” each of which are discussed in Biographia Literaria.
David Hartley
Like Coleridge, an alumnus of Jesus College, Cambridge, Hartley is best known for his philosophical ideas about psychology. Coleridge contends with Hartley’s theory of association in Chapters 5 to 7 of Biographia Literaria.
Immanuel Kant
The eminent German philosopher’s theory of transcendental idealism was tremendously influential in Coleridge’s ideas about transcendental philosophy (83). In Chapter 7 Coleridge writes that Kant’s ideas “took possession of me as with the giant hand” (46).
Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock
During his time in Germany, Coleridge converses with the family of famous German poet Friedrich Klopstock. Klopstock’s most famous poetic work is “The Messiah,” which influenced both Schiller and Goethe.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Coleridge refers to the work of literary critic and dramatist Lessing only indirectly, via a portrait he sees of Lessing at the home of Klopstock. However, Coleridge elsewhere spoke of Lessing in reverential terms, telling Josiah Wedgwood in 1799 that he wished to write a literary biography of Lessing because “it would give me an opportunity of conveying under a better name, than my own ever will be, opinions, which I deem of the highest importance.” This may have been the origin of Biographia Literaria.
John Locke
Coleridge affirms in his conclusion that he cleaves to the “established tenets of Locke,” the father of empiricism (222). Locke’s theory of mind influenced Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His influential writings on republicanism are reflected in the US Declaration of Independence.
William Wordsworth
Coleridge’s friend and collaborator on a joint poetry collection entitled Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth was Britain’s poet laureate and is widely considered a foundational figure in the English Romantic movement. Biographia Literaria contends with Wordsworth’s ideas about poetry, which Wordsworth controversially but influentially espoused in his famous preface to Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth’s seminal poem The Prelude, posthumously published in the year of Wordsworth’s death, is considered to have been addressed to Coleridge.
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By Samuel Taylor Coleridge
