Biographia Literaria is a collection of essays by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, blending autobiography, literary criticism and philosophy. It discusses poetry, imagination, the Lyrical Ballads and Coleridge's intellectual development. Listeners interested in Romantic thought and the theory of literature may find it rewarding.
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Cover of the original edition (Project Gutenberg, public domain).
Text source: gutenberg.org · The work is in the public domain.
Opening of the book
BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA By Samuel Taylor Coleridge
LIST OF CONTENTS
CHAP.
I Motives to the present work—Reception of the Author’s first publication—Discipline of his taste at school—Effect of contemporary writers on youthful minds—Bowles’s Sonnets
— Comparison between the poets before and since Pope
II Supposed irritability of genius brought to the test of facts—
Causes and occasions of the charge—Its injustice
III The Author’s obligations to Critics, and the probable occasion—Principles of modern criticism—Mr. Southey’s works and character
IV The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface—Mr. Wordsworth’s earlier poems—On
Fancy
and
Imagination—The
investigation of the distinction important to the Fine Arts
V On the law of Association—Its history traced from Aristotle to Hartley
VI That Hartley’s system, as far as it differs from that of
Aristotle, is neither tenable in theory, nor founded in facts
VII Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory—Of the original mistake or equivocation which procured its admission—Memoria technica
VIII The system of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes—Refined first by Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the doctrine of Harmonia praestabilita—Hylozoism—Materialism —None of these systems, or any possible theory of Association, supplies or supersedes a theory of Perception, or explains the formation of the Associable
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