Nonfiction · 1817
Biographia Literaria
Coleridge builds toward a full theory of the imagination in Chapter Thirteen, then interrupts himself with a "letter from a friend" — his own invention — warning that the chapter will lose its readers, and cuts the argument short just as he reaches it. A chapter later he coins the phrase that outlived nearly everything else in the book: a "willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith."
Published in 1817 as Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, it mixes memoir with criticism — his friendship and collaboration with William Wordsworth, a critique of the poetic theory behind Lyrical Ballads, and reflections on the German philosophy that had reshaped his thinking. Dictated in haste to meet a publisher's contract, it became a founding text of English literary criticism anyway.
Bibliomancer restores the 1817 text exactly as Coleridge wrote it.
Contents
- Epigraph
- Chapter I
- Chapter II
- Chapter III
- Chapter IV
- Chapter V
- Chapter VI
- Chapter VII
- Chapter VIII
- Chapter IX
- Chapter X
- Chapter XI
- Chapter XII
- Chapter XIII
- Chapter XIV
- Chapter XV
- Chapter XVI
- Chapter XVII
- Chapter XVIII
- Chapter XIX
- Chapter XX
- Chapter XXI
- Chapter XXII
- Letter I
- Letter II
- Letter III
- Chapter XXIII
- Chapter XXIV
- Footnotes
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1772–1834 · Romantic
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, and studied at Jesus College, Cambridge, before leaving in 1794 without a degree. With William Wordsworth he published Lyrical Ballads (1798), which opened with his poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and helped launch English Romanticism; "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel," both written years earlier, appeared together in a pamphlet in 1816. Addicted to opium from the 1790s, he wrote his critical and philosophical study Biographia Literaria (1817) while living under a doctor's care in Highgate, London, where he spent his last eighteen years. He died there at sixty-one.
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