Biographia Literaria

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.

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.

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).