Biographia Literaria

Anyone interested in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's work could not receive better advice than to buy the Princeton University Press paperback edition of Biographia Literaria (1817), the closest thing that this most brilliant but also most erratic of all the English romantic poets produced by way of a summa of his life and critical theories. If you've tried it in a cheap edition (e.g., the Modern Library) and set it aside scratching your head over the constant flow of obscure allusions, untranslated quotations in Latin, Greek, and, especially, German, and hundreds of references to other writers, now is the time to give it another shot. The editors, James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, have meticulously glossed every one of these obscurities in footnotes (not endnotes)that are a model of clarity and concision. The volume has everything you need to appreciate this great work: a thorough and highly readable editors' introduction, a chronology of Coleridge's life, appendices on related correspondence and on passages Coleridge appropriated from the German philosophers, and a complete index. This edition is not, by ordinary standards, new: as volume 7 of Princeton's Collected Works of STC, it's been around as a two-volume hardcover since 1983 and a single volume paperback since 1984. But considering how long it took to produce a usable version for the ordinary reader, it might as well have come out yesterday.

I am almost as much in awe of the erudition of the editors (James Engell and W Jackson Bates of the Bolingen edition) as that of Coleridge himself. I think it is often easier to parade one's own wide reading than to recognize someone elses's references. These editors track down the most obscure of Greek, German and Latin quotations and it's an education to read their notes. There are really three themes in the book. One part is philosophy, one is literary criticism, and one is straight autobiography. These are dispersed throughout. As regards the philosophy I am probably what he would have called "ignorant of his understanding." Coleridge shows a remarkable knowledge of German philosophy, read in the original language. As far as I know his philosophical ideas have not been highly regarded by pure philosophers. The literary criticism is the most powerful and original part although the texts he uses will be unfamiliar and even anaccessible to most modern readers. The fragments of autobiography such as chapter 10 and the first of the Satyrayane's Letters are the most readable. While this is an unboubted work of genius I have denied it the fifth star because of a certain lack of redability. It is not, for the modern reader, a page-turning work of entertainment. It contains many gems, and much wit, but is one of those we take up today for instruction rather than diversion.

Bede Griffiths, in his book The Golden String, referred to STC as "one of the most universal minds in English literature."I don't know of anything comparable to Biographia Literaria. At times it's the narrative of a great poet's life. He may veer off into literary criticism or even parody (see the, to me, hilarious section in which he gives "The House that Jack Built" in the rhetorical manner of a recent poet). He powerfully attacks the positivism of his age (and ours). He evokes the wonder of being human.This scholarly edition is the one to get, if you're going to put in the time to read this rich classic at all.

Coleridge is a writer/thinker whose own life and works, particularly the later ones, seem to defy the eye of future standard, especially in an age of slick convenience. He is looking for "the vast," does not ignore German idealism like so many other Brits, nor philology, and seeks the vast from the socio-political context of a well-booked, if ne'er-do-too-well, remote, clergy-trained, English townsman. Some chapters are almost unbearably (to our age) slow, but don't forget this was the era of the triple decker, and Coleridge's reading (as was his library) was varied and vast. In all it may serve best the reader who keeps STC's religious and political anachronisms in context without relinquishing their flavor. Although this is another one of those disappearing (if at times arcane) gems by dead, white, European males whom we are obliged to ignore these days, yet Coleridge's romanticism, honest pessimism, and philosophical searching will never be passe for the thoughtful. And inasmuch as this title includes some of his lesser known mature work, the rich surpise implicit in that description will happen, recurrently and rewardingly, on the thoughtful reader.