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.

This book frames British Romanticism as the artistic counterpart to a revolution in subjectivity occasioned by the rise of "The Rule of Law" and as a traumatic response to the challenges mounted against that ideal after the French Revolution. The bulk of this study focuses on Romantic literary replies to these events (primarily in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Blake), but its latter stages also explore how Romantic poetry's construction of the autonomous reading subject continues to influence legal and literary critical reactions to two modern crises in the rule of law: European Fascism and the continuing instability of legal interpretive strategy.

'PHILOSOPHY, or the doctrine and discipline of ideas' as S. T. Coleridge understood it, is the theme of this book. It considers the most vital and mature vein of Coleridge's thought to be the contemplation of ideas objectively, as existing powers. A theory of ideas emerges in critical engagement with thinkers including Plato, Plotinus, Böhme, Kant, and Schelling. A commitment to the transcendence of reason, central to what he calls the spiritual platonic old England, distinguishes him from his German contemporaries. The book also engages with Coleridge's poetry, especially in a culminating chapter dedicated to the Limbo sequence. This book pursues a theory of contemplation that draws from Coleridge's theories of imagination and the Ideas of Reason in his published texts and extensively from his thoughts as they developed throughout unpublished works, fragments, letters, and notebooks. He posited a hierarchy of cognition from basic sense intuition to the apprehension of scientific, ethical, and theological ideas. The structure of the book follows this thesis, beginning with sense data, moving upwards into aesthetic experience, imagination, and reason, with final chapters on formal logic and poetry that constellate the contemplation of ideas. Coleridge's Contemplative Philosophy is not just a work of history of philosophy, it addresses a figure whose thinking is of continuing interest, arguing that contemplation of ideas and values has consequences for everyday morality and aesthetics, as well as metaphysics. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, scholars of religion, and of literature.

This innovative book examines the fundamental continuities in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's writing during the revolutionary period of 1794 through 1834 to demonstrate his importance as a political philosopher and to recover romanticism as both an aesthetic and political movement.

To Samuel Taylor Coleridge, tragedy was not solely a literary mode, but a philosophy to interpret the history that unfolded around him. Tragic Coleridge explores the tragic vision of existence that Coleridge derived from Classical drama, Shakespeare, Milton and contemporary German thought. Coleridge viewed the hardships of the Romantic period, like the catastrophes of Greek tragedy, as stages in a process of humanity’s overall purification. Offering new readings of canonical poems, as well as neglected plays and critical works, Chris Murray elaborates Coleridge’s tragic vision in relation to a range of thinkers, from Plato and Aristotle to George Steiner and Raymond Williams. He draws comparisons with the works of Blake, the Shelleys, and Keats to explore the factors that shaped Coleridge’s conception of tragedy, including the origins of sacrifice, developments in Classical scholarship, theories of inspiration and the author’s quest for civic status. With cycles of catastrophe and catharsis everywhere in his works, Coleridge depicted the world as a site of tragic purgation, and wrote himself into it as an embattled sage qualified to mediate the vicissitudes of his age.

Long celebrated as a great aesthetic idealist and champion of the imagination, Coleridge is now beginning to be understood as a literary critic with many other dimensions, with exciting and far-reaching insights into language, and with detailed notions about the psychological, historical, and linguistic demands of the literary experience. In this study, Timothy Corrigan sees Coleridge's criticism as "the product of an actively self-conscious reader, of a precise user of language, and, most of all, of a historical man involved with the demands of his day." Specifically he studies the relationship between the language of Coleridge's criticism and his interests in politics, psychology, science, and theology. Corrigan concludes that Coleridge's work is not a closed and strictly defined system but an extraordinarily diverse one that responds sympathetically to new angles of research. His study is first and foremost an investigation of Coleridge's criticism based on Coleridge's own ideas about language and reading. While taking its particular direction from a variety of contemporary literary theories, the book is most concerned with how Coleridge's critical prose and theoretical positions anticipate these in an exceptionally complex way.

Author of Biographia Literaria (1817) and The Friend (1809-10, 1812 and 1818), Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the central figure in the British transmission of German idealism in the 19th century. The advent of Immanuel Kant in Coleridge's thought is traditionally seen as the start of the poet's turn towards an internalized Romanticism. Demonstrating that Coleridge's discovery of Kant came at an earlier point than has been previously recognized, this book examines the historical roots of Coleridge's life-long preoccupation with Kant over a period of 20 years from the first extant Kant entry until the publication of his autobiography. Drawing on previously unpublished contemporary reviews of Kant and seeking socio-political meaning outside the literary canon in the English radical circles of the 1790s, Monika Class here establishes conceptual affinities between Coleridge's writings and that of Kant's earliest English mediators and in doing so revises Coleridge's allegedly non-political and solitary response to Kant.