Biographia Literaria

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge began this book as a preface to his poems and it grew into something else: an account of how he came to think as he did about poetry, running through his schooldays, his early reading, his debt to Wordsworth and his quarrel with Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction. Along the way he examines the philosophy of mind from Hartley to Kant and Schelling, borrowing freely, and arrives at his distinction between imagination and fancy. Chapter fourteen explains the plan of Lyrical Ballads and contains the phrase "willing suspension of disbelief." The later chapters are practical criticism of Wordsworth's poems. Published in 1817, the book is digressive and unfinished in places, and remains the central text of English Romantic criticism. Read it online in your browser on Vinteuil; the first chapter is free.