Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 2: being The Biographical Supplement of Coleridge's Biographia LiterariaColeridge, Samuel Taylor
General
Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 2: being The Biographical Supplement of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834 -- Correspondence
Coleridge has been charged with plagiarism from Schelling, in composing
his _Biographia_, by Ferrier in _Blackwood's Magazine_ of 1840, and by
others.[93] Some others complain that Coleridge has no formal scheme of
philosophy of his own. But this is merely saying it was never written
down in its entirety, not that he did not have a philosophy. One of the
features of Coleridge is that he was never without a Philosophy, and
could not speak without betraying the fact that he judged all things
from a standpoint which was the centre of a large planetary system of
dependent and interdependent ideas. Coleridge's philosophy is a
combination of parts of the philosophies of Plato, Plotinus, Giordano
Bruno, Vico, Berkeley, Herder, Kant, Maas, and Schelling; he took
freely from all his predecessors, as every new philosopher is bound to
do, and has done, before him. Nor is he merely eclectic; his borrowings
are fused together into a system. His originality consists not in the
ideas which he entertains in his system, but in the reconstellation of
these ideas. To charge Coleridge with plagiarism for having appropriated
certain trains of thinking from others is on a level with the brilliant
discovery which finds that Shakespeare pilfered some of his plots and
stories from Italian novels, or that Molière took his own where he found
it (_Je prend mon bien où je le trouve_).
The valuable parts of the _Biographia_, however, are not the
philosophical, but the critical and biographical portions. The Critique
on Wordsworth's poetry will always be reckoned as the finest of our
literary criticisms on Wordsworth. We may object to Coleridge's
strictures on _The Daffodils_ or _Alice Fell_, but lovers of Wordsworth
will give general acquiescence to the contentions of Coleridge's
discriminating criticism. Coleridge stands in the front rank of those
great exponents of Poetry and Art who, from Aristotle to Sainte-Beuve,
have guided the taste of the nations.
The contention of the closing paragraph that Faith is but the
continuation of Reason is founded on a saying of his early love, Mary
Evans, that "Faith is only Reason applied to a particular subject"
(_Letters_, 88). It was written in her farewell letter in 1794.
Among the works of Coleridge undertaken at Calne was the drama of
_Zapolya_, in which the character of Sarolta, an offshoot from the
Christabel idea, appears.
These works were composed by Coleridge to tide over the necessities of
the time, but the Morgans and he were unable to hold together, and
Coleridge came once more to London at the beginning of 1816. Morgan fell
into ill health. Mrs. Morgan latterly had to take a situation as teacher
of a charity school; Charles Lamb and Southey got up a subscription
annuity of £25 for Morgan, who did not live long to enjoy it, dying in
1820 (_Southey's Life and Correspondence_, iv, 361); and after 1823
Charlotte Brent disappears from the arena of literary history
(_Letters_, 722).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account