Biographia Literaria

“Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous undercurrent of feeling!” 

Coleridge’s measure of literary masterpieces is the continuity of pleasure that they provide. This continuity is twofold: first, the continual and lasting pleasure that such works excite in readers, and second, as the integrity of the whole. Coleridge goes on to expound his aesthetic theory in terms of the unity and unifying capacity of a poetic work.

“The men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appear to have been of calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves.” 

Coleridge presents artistic creation as a form of self-awareness or consciousness. In the opening of this work on aesthetics Coleridge rejects the traditional association between fame, reputation, and writing. In part this may be a defensive move, since creative geniuses are sometimes accused of presumption, an idea that was especially pertinent in Coleridge’s Christian Britain. Significantly, Coleridge sees poetic genius as the capacity to reflect clearly “the world without” (11).

“The man of genius lives most in the ideal world, in which the present is still constituted by the future or the past.” 

In this and in many other places in Biographia Literaria, Coleridge’s ideas echo those of the Neoplatonists. Genius is thus construed from an ideal, Form-filled world that exists outside of time. Coleridge maintains the original sense of the term “genius,” in association with the divine, conferring on the genius the role of mystic, or the power to provide access to the divine.