Excerpt from From Necessity to Transcendentalism in Coleridge From his college days onward Coleridge considered himself, and was considered by his intimate friends, tho champion of religion, and particularly of the Christian religion. That this championing of Christianity was frequently attested in his letters and writings; that the most ambitious poem of his youth - Religious Musings - was written in the spirit of its title; that ho occasionally preached from Unitarian pulpits; that all his later prose writings were predominantly religious; that ho at no time considered the writing of poetry his prime purpose -hose facts lead to tho conclusion that religion was the dominating interest throughout most of his life. In Coleridge's religious history as reflected in his writings there arc two broadly marked stages, divided at about the year 1798-9 - the period of his visit to Germany. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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This new study argues that Coleridge was so influential in America because he provided a framework for American intellectuals to address one of the great questions of European Romanticism: what is the relationship between the Romantic triad of nature, spi

This is Volume II out of three in a collection on Aesthetics. Originally published in 1930, this study is part of the Muirhead library of Philosophy and was was undertaken by the author in the conviction, gathered from a superficial acquaintance with Coleridge's published works, that as a stage in the development of a national form of idealistic philosophy his ideas are far more important than has hitherto been realized either by the educated public or by professed students of the subject. Closer study of them further convinced the author that they formed in his mind a far more coherent body of philosophical thought than he has been anywhere credited with.

In the nineteenth century there was a definite divide between those who read Coleridge as a religious thinker and those who read him as a poet. Even now, readers and critics find it hard not to consider one aspect of his work to the exclusion of the other. Here David Jasper considers Coleridge as a poet, literary critic, theologian and philosopher, seeing him as occupying a representative place in European and English Romantic thought on poetry, religion and the role of the artist. His earliest writings are closely linked to his mature religious and critical thought, and his greatest poems, ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and the ‘Dejection’ Ode, are a necessary prelude to the prose writings of the middle period of Coleridge’s life. Self-reflection upon the processes of creating poetry and art, particularly in the Biographia Literaria, is an important development in Coleridge’s sense of the relation of the finite to the infinite through the inspiration of the poet. Attention to the nature of inspiration, imagination and irony in creative writing leads directly to his later discussions of man’s need of a divine redeemer and the nature of divine revelation. In the later poetry, attention is given to the theme of self-reflection in which spiritual growth is part and parcel of poetic development, each balancing the other. The final part of the book considers Coleridge’s later prose, linking his reflections upon poetry with an epistemology, which he learnt principally from Kant and Fichtee in a discussion of revelation and radical evil. In conclusion, Coleridge’s religious position is summed up through the late, and still unpublished notebooks, and the fragmentary remains of the long-projected Opus Maximum. The last chapter links Coleridge with a more recent debate on the nature of inspiration, poetic and divine, which arises out of Austin Farrer’s Bampton Lectures The Glass of Vision.