Biographia Literaria

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1817

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-16

Chapters 17-19

Chapters 20-22

Satyrane’s Letters

Chapters 23-24

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary

In Chapter 1 Coleridge gives his motives for writing Biographia Literaria. The work addresses the commentaries on his work and defines his philosophical and poetic principles. The favorable reception of a 1796 volume of poems was tempered by excessive ornamentation. At Christ’s Hospital school, Coleridge says he admired the “manly simplicity” of Greek poetry, in which every poetic choice “had a logic” (2). Coleridge’s severe schoolmaster, Reverend James Bowyer, gave him a firm grounding in classical languages.

The literary canon exerted a profound influence on the youthful poet’s mind. Coleridge admired Bowles’s sonnets, which he claims saved him from less wholesome rumination about metaphysics. The young Coleridge undervalued yet appreciated Pope, and he preferred Collins to Gray, whose imitations of Shakespeare he found derivative. “How completely all the propriety was lost in the transfer,” Coleridge scoffs at Gray on Page 6.

Conversations with his friend and contemporary William Wordsworth further enhanced Coleridge’s appreciation for classical poetry. The young poet sought “a solid foundation, on which permanently to ground my opinions” (7). Here Coleridge sets out two initial rules of poetics: that “the greatest pleasure, possesses a genuine power” (7), and that the sentiment expressed should have value in itself. Coleridge claims his earlier “florid” poetic style has evolved and concludes the chapter with an anecdote about mischievously impersonating his own poetry under the pseudonym Nehemiah Higginbottom (7).

Chapter 2 Summary

Coleridge asks why readers side with critics. Primarily, he claims they do so out of “a debility and dimness of the imaginative power” (10). True genius, Coleridge argues, entails both imagination and creativity. Literary geniuses like Chaucer and Shakespeare are marked by their “tranquil temper” (11). Therefore, the common conception that geniuses are irritable is unfounded. These literary geniuses have shaped the English language such that even those without genius may communicate deftly. Critics are motivated by their own literary failure. Another component of genius is sensitivity that extends beyond the author’s self. Coleridge asserts that he does not care about public opinion of his works: “I have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion” (16). Those of Coleridge’s creations that are not forgotten are either plagiarized or criticized.

Chapter 3 Summary

Coleridge questions why he is critiqued so harshly. Critics’ attacks cannot be attributed to “personal dislike” (17) or envy. Coleridge surmises the answer is his affiliation with fellow writers Wordsworth and Robert Southey. Coleridge turns to an appraisal of the latter, in whom he finds some useful folly but compares to Sir Philip Sidney. Southey’s recent works, Coleridge argues, are characterized by a “greater splendour,” yet this has gone unrecognized by readers “delighted with calumny” (19). Respect for books and writers in general has declined. Responding to this atmosphere, Southey has published several witty poems. Criticisms “flutter and buzz in the ear of the public” (20) and focus on irrelevant details. Critics wearing “petulant sneers” support their judgments with pedestrian ideas and are unjust, comparing new literature with canonical work (20). Swift’s lesser works do not diminish Gulliver’s Travels or the Tale of a Tub (21). Southey “stands second to no man” in wisdom and morality, and is “a poet eminently inventive and picturesque” (22), who works tirelessly at his craft. Coleridge praises his friend for his virtue, concluding the chapter with the rebarbative statement that “quacks in criticism where his only enemies” (24).

Chapters 1-3 Analysis

In Chapters 1 to 3 Coleridge sets out his ideas about poetics in the context of traditional debates about the relationship between art and nature, and the canon of poetry and criticism. Coleridge regularly uses gardening metaphors in relation to his poetic practice. His flowery juvenile style was, in retrospect, plagued by “parasite plants,” he writes in Chapter 1, so that he “was often obliged to omit disentangling the weed, from the fear of snapping the flower” (1). The image is of weeds interrupting the Edenic paradise of poetic harmony. The biblical sense of “weed” refers to moral failure, and Coleridge describes his youthful interest in “metaphysic law” as “unwholesome” on Page 5. Yet, he reflects that he developed during “a long leisurely interval, during which my natural faculties were allowed to expand. […] My fancy, and the love of nature, and the sense of beauty informs and sounds” (5). Thus, his poetry grew in proportion to his own growth in awareness and consciousness.

The connection between consciousness and poetic achievement persists throughout Coleridge’s thought. He states on Page 15: “there is no professional nurse, which requires an attention so early, so long, or so unintermitting as that of poetry.” Coleridge was initially moved to write out of “a desire of giving a poetic colouring to abstract and metaphysical truths, in which a new world then seemed to open upon me” (2). Birth is the second pervasive metaphor Coleridge uses for poetry. He describes his works as “eggs” on Pages 13 and 14. From these Lear-like poetic eggs, Coleridge implies, new worlds may hatch. The territory to be explored is for Coleridge an inner one.

Coleridge’s most striking metaphor for poetry is an “ostrich egg” (14). The decorative ostrich eggs brought back from the colonies lacked their original generative ability. So too, in Coleridge’s opinion, does the literary world lack originality. “At present they seem degraded” (19), Coleridge writes of books and writers in his scathing representation of the reception of new literature by critics. He also claims that the “difference indeed between these and the works of genius is not less than between an egg and an eggshell; yet at a distance they look alike” (14). Biographia Literaria is thus devoted to revivifying what Coleridge perceives as an ossified literary world.