15 h 36 minAudiobook14 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What happens when a poet turns his searching eye on poetry, friendship, and the workings of his own mind?
In Biographia Literaria, Samuel Taylor Coleridge blends memories of his life with literary criticism and philosophy. He moves from school days under James Bowyer to arguments about how the mind makes meaning. His aim is personal and demanding: to show how his opinions take shape, and why good criticism needs firm principles.
At the heart of the book is poetry itself. Coleridge explores imagination, fancy, and poetic faith, then brings his ideas to the work of his friend William Wordsworth. Their shared Lyrical Ballads becomes a starting point for questions about belief and poetic language. Friendship does not keep him from weighing a poet's faults alongside his gifts.
What you’ll discover
- Imagination and fancy Explore Coleridge's distinction between the power that creates and the faculty that rearranges.
- A poet reads Wordsworth Watch close attention and unusual honesty shape a friend's assessment of poetic faults and gifts.
- The choice to believe Consider poetic faith through Coleridge's account of the plan behind Lyrical Ballads.
- The mind makes meaning Follow his turn toward German philosophy as he seeks principles for judging poetry.
- An education in judgment Meet the schoolboy and stern teacher at the beginning of Coleridge's history of his opinions.
Who will love it
For readers who love poetry and want to know how a poet thinks about it, and anyone curious about Romantic ideas of mind and art.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Good taste in poetry is trained early
- Critics owe writers fairness and reasons
- Association alone cannot explain the mind
- All knowing begins with the knowing self
- Imagination creates and fancy only rearranges
- Poetry asks us to believe by choice
- Poetic language is not simply country speech
- Judge a poet by faults and by gifts
- A book of flaws that still shaped criticism
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- 15-minute summary
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Biographia Literaria
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 1817
Coleridge explores imagination, fancy and poetic faith to show what the mind brings to a poem.
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In short
Biographia Literaria is a book Samuel Taylor Coleridge published in 1817, near the end of his most productive years. It began as a short preface to a collection of his poems and grew into two volumes.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Good taste in poetry is trained early
Coleridge opens with his own education. He was a pupil at Christ's Hospital in London, and he gives special thanks to the headmaster of the upper school, James Bowyer. Bowyer was strict, and he scorned loose, showy verse. He taught his boys that poetry has a logic of its own, as firm as that of science, and that every word in a good poem must have a reason to be there.
Bowyer made his pupils translate and examine the great Greek and Latin poets, and he made them ask why a poet chose one word over another. He mocked the stock phrases of the day, such as invoking the Muses or Pegasus, the winged horse of poetry. He preferred the plain strength of Shakespeare and Milton to the polished manner of the eighteenth century. Coleridge says this training gave him a habit he never lost, which was to test a line by asking whether it would still make sense if you changed its words.
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What is Biographia Literaria about?
It is Coleridge's mix of memoir, philosophy and criticism. He tells how his tastes and opinions formed, argues for a theory of imagination, and examines Wordsworth's ideas about poetic language and his poems.
What is the difference between imagination and fancy in Coleridge?
Coleridge says imagination is a creative power that dissolves and reshapes material into a living whole, while fancy only rearranges fixed images taken from memory, without changing them.
What does willing suspension of disbelief mean?
It is Coleridge's phrase for the reader's choice to accept an unreal or supernatural story for a time. The poet gives it human truth, and the reader grants poetic faith in return.
The author
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1772–1834 · English Romantic poet and critic
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher. He was born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, and died in Highgate, London. He published Lyrical Ballads with William Wordsworth in 1798. His Biographia Literaria appeared in 1817. He also lived in Somerset and the Lake District.
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