Poet’s Corner: Coleridge’s Biographia 1

27 July 2026

(11 September 2015) Over the last two entries we have discussed Wordsworth’s preface, in which he tried to describe poet and poetry, without Coleridge’s advice or consent. Some ten years later, Coleridge finally responds to Wordsworth, in his “Biographia Literaria,” clarifying their original project, and telling us that they discussed two points of poetry: “the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination.” The first is what Wordsworth described in his preface, while the latter is, as we shall see, Coleridge’s part of this new form of poetry. Coleridge goes on in this fourteenth chapter of his “Biographia,” that one of them, he cannot recall which, suggested that the compose a series of poems from these two points:

“In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency.”

Coleridge tells us that one part of this original project, his part, would be to focus on things ‘supernatural,’ incidents that are beyond nature. We have looked at two of these, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which was included in the “Lyrical Ballads,” and “Christabel,” which he never finished. This half of the project was to create poetry so powerful that, although we recognize that they cannot be real, we are moved with emotions similar to Wordsworth’s poems of reality. Here, Coleridge admits that he did not succeed at his part of the project, and so, because there were comparatively few of his poems in the collection, his supernatural poems seemed out of place, or at least, out of balance with Wordsworth’s poetry of daily life. Remember that the Romantic project was to elicit emotions in the reader, whether it is sympathy for the plight of the old man gathering leeches, or fear and horror as the Mariner sees his dead crew stand up and work.

We will continue with Coleridge’s response on Wednesday, until then, good reading!