Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

   PDF

2. Prologue Literary Life, 1815

   • William Christie

   Pages 1-13

3. ‘The Discipline of His Taste at School’: Christ’s Hospital and Cambridge

   • William Christie

   Pages 14-34

4. ‘The Progress of His Opinions in Religion and Politics’: The Radical Years

   • William Christie

   Pages 35-58

5. ‘A Known and Familiar Landscape’: Conversations

   • William Christie

   Pages 59-84

6. ‘The Poet, Described in Ideal Perfection’: Annus Mirabilis

   • William Christie

   Pages 85-115

7. ‘The Toil of Thinking’: Private Notes and Public Newspapers

   • William Christie

   Pages 116-138

8. ‘To Rust Away’: The Lost Years 1800–6

   • William Christie

   Pages 139-164

9. ‘The One Proteus of the Fire and the Flood’: Critic for Hire

   • William Christie

   Pages 165-187

10. ‘To Preserve the Soul Steady’: The Sage of Highgate

    • William Christie

    Pages 188-211

11. Epilogue

    • William Christie

    Pages 212-214

12. Back Matter

    Pages 215-250

    PDF

The most sustained criticism and ambitious theory that had ever been attempted in English, the Biographia was Coleridge's major statement to a literary culture in which he sought to define and defend all imaginative life. This book offers a reading of Coleridge in the context of that culture and the institutions that comprised it.

• Coleridge
• poet
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• British and Irish Literature

Winner of the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Biennial Prize for Literary Scholarship.

'It is remarkable that there is anything new to say about the canonical figure of Coleridge. But in this 'literary life' William Christie says it...a brilliant, even dazzling contribution to international literary criticism.' - Judges' report, NSW Premier's Literary Awards

'This literary life will prove to be one of the most thoughtful, generous and entertaining books ever written on Coleridge.' - Professor Deirdre Coleman, author of Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery

'Christie is an exemplary companion, both for Coleridge and his readers, maintaining throughout a cheerful indulgence, tracing the suicidally depressive depths with gentle reminders that Coleridge somehow needed to face the very worst before he could revive self-belief, and reserving a skeptical distance even in the eddies of manically sustained activity he keeps us reading to the end, to see where the "wonderful" Coleridge had come from, and where he was to go.' Robert White, Australian Book Review, 2007

'The brevity and relative simplicity of this biography marks...a triumphant distillation of Christie's thought and research. His life of Coleridge merges a broad knowledge of the period and a close acquaintance with the personal documents of its main characters to explain Coleridge the individual: delineating his unique mental formation and foregrounding the diverse external forces that contributed to the 'self-fashioning' of his literary persona...This biography is the labour of empathy and love, a monument of dedication and commitment.' - Vrasidas Karalis, The Australian, 2009

WILLIAM CHRISTIE is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has taught and published extensively on Romanticism, and has published a wide range of articles on Coleridge and Wordsworth for journals such as Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Sydney Studies in English, Prose Studies and the British Journal of Aesthetics.

Policies and ethics