Revision of author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Chicago, 2008 under title: The word made flesh and the mazy page: symbol and allegory in Coleridge's philosophy of faith.

A study of the philosophical thought of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with a focus on the central philosophical views and their underlying metaphysic that Coleridge strove to achieve and refine over the last three decades of his life.

This is Dr Wheeler's analysis of the Biographia Literaria, one of the central prose texts of the Romantic period.

Coleridge's relation to his German contemporaries constitutes the toughest problem in assessing his standing as a thinker. For the last half-century this relationship has been described, ultimately, as parasitic. As a result, Coleridge's contribution to religious thought has been seen primarily in terms of his poetic genius. This book revives and deepens the evaluation of Coleridge as a philosophical theologian in his own right. Coleridge had a critical and creative relation to, and kinship with, German Idealism. Moreover, the principal impulse behind his engagement with that philosophy is traced to the more immediate context of English Unitarian-Trinitarian controversy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book re-establishes Coleridge as a philosopher of religion and as a vital source for contemporary theological reflection.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is best known as a great poet and literary theorist, but for one, quite short, period of his life he held real political power - acting as Public Secretary to the British Civil Commissioner in Malta in 1805. This was a formative experience for Coleridge which he later identified as being one of the most instructive in his entire life. In this volume Barry Hough and Howard Davis show how Coleridge's actions whilst in a position of power differ markedly from the idealism he had advocated before taking office - shedding new light on Coleridge's sense of political and legal morality.

Coleridge and Contemplation is a multi-disciplinary volume on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, founding poet of British Romanticism, critic, and author of philosophical, political, and theological works. In his philosophical writings, Coleridge developed his thinking about the symbolizing imagination, a precursor to contemplation, into a theory of contemplation itself, which for him occurs in its purest form as a manifestation of 'Reason'. Coleridge is a particularly challenging figure because he was a thinker in process, and something of an omnimath, a Renaissance man of the Romantic era. The dynamic quality of his thinking, the 'dark fluxion' pursued but ultimately 'unfixable by thought', and his extensive range of interests make a philosophical yet also multi-disciplinary approach to Coleridge essential. This book is the first collection to feature philosophers and intellectual historians writing on Coleridge's philosophy. This volume opens up a neglected aspect of the work of Britain's greatest philosopher-poet--his analysis of contemplation, which he considered the highest of human mental powers. Philosophers including Roger Scruton, David E. Cooper, Michael McGhee, Andy Hamilton, and Peter Cheyne contribute original essays on the philosophical, literary, and political implications of Coleridge's views. The volume is edited and introduced by Peter Cheyne, and Baroness Mary Warnock contributes a foreword. The chapters by philosophers are supported by new developments in philosophically minded criticism from leading Coleridge scholars in English departments, including Jim Mays, Kathleen Wheeler, and James Engell. They approach Coleridge as an energetic yet contemplative thinker concerned with the intuition of ideas and the processes of cultivation in self and society. Other chapters, from intellectual historians and theologians, including Douglas Hedley, clarify the historical background, and 'religious musings', of Coleridge's thought regarding contemplation.

This welcome addition to the Blackwell Guides to Criticism series provides students with an invaluable survey of the critical reception of the Romantic poets. Guides readers through the wealth of critical material available on the Romantic poets and directs them to the most influential readings Presents key critical texts on each of the major Romantic poets – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats – as well as on poets of more marginal canonical standing Cross-referencing between the different sections highlights continuities and counterpoints

"The ambivalent curiosity of the young poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) towards Plato - 'but I love Plato - his dear gorgeous nonsense!' - soon developed into a philosophical project, and the mature Coleridge proclaimed himself a reviver of Plato's unwritten or esoteric 'systems'. James Vigus's study traces Coleridge's discovery of a Plato marginalised in the universities, and examines his use of German sources on the 'divine philosopher', and his Platonic interpretation of Kant's epistemology. It compares Coleridge's figurations of poetic inspiration with models in the Platonic dialogues, and investigates whether Coleridge's esoteric 'system' of philosophy ultimately fulfilled the Republic's notorious banishment of poetry."

Beginning with the publication of their joint collection of poems Lyrical Ballads in 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were instrumental in helping to establish the Romantic Movement as a major force in nineteenth century British literature. Two of the movement’s greatest figures, they were responsible for composing some of the most well-known poems in the British literary canon and influenced generations of acolytes. They were also the foremost literary critics of the period, contributing influential writings on literary theory and philosophy — exemplified by Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. ‘Routledge Library Editions: Wordsworth and Coleridge’ assembles a wide range of scholarship and criticism that covers all aspects of their diverse output and charts the vicissitudes of their lives — examining their poetry, criticism, philosophy and sources of inspiration. It will also help introduce them to newer readers and explain notoriously difficult to understand works like Wordsworth’s The Prelude. This set reissues 14 books originally published between 1960 and 1991 and will be of interest to students of literature and literary history.