Why should anyone bother with Coleridge either as a theologian or a political theorist? At first in desperation, but now quite deliberately, Alan Gregory convincingly suggests that one should bother because Coleridge mounted an imporant critique of reductionist explanations of human society and moral agency, and because Coleridge has much regarding that important enterprise to teach us still. While Gregory also offers a perceptive outline of early British conservatism, his main concern is with Coleridge's attack on reductionism, including his defense of the will against associationism, his criticisms of Enlightenment historiography, his discussions of the inadequacies of political economy, and the Trinitarian arguments against monism. There is, Gregory remarks, no grasping the range or inner dynamic of Coleridge's thought without appreciating his religious vision, his theology. Indeed, Coleridge himself affirmed that should we try to conceive a man without the ideas of God, eternity, freedom, will, absolute truth, of the good, the true, the beautiful, the infinite...the man will have vanished.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is one of the most influential, as well as one of the most enigmatic, of all Romantic figures. The possessor of a precocious talent, he dazzled contemporaries with his poetry, journalism, philosophy and oratory without ever quite living up to his early promise, or overcoming problems of dependence and drug addiction. The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge does full justice to the many facets of Coleridge's life and work. Specially commissioned essays focus on his major poems, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel, his notebooks, and his major work of non-fiction the Biographia Literaria. Attention is given to his role as talker, journalist, critic, and philosopher, his politics, his religion, and his reputation in his own times and afterwards. A chronology and guides to further reading complete the volume, making this an indispensable guide to Coleridge and his work.

This book considers Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s engagement with ‘Whig poetry’: a tradition of verse from the eighteenth century which celebrated the political and constitutional arrangements of Britain as guaranteeing liberty. It argues that, during the 1790s, Coleridge was able to articulate radical ideas under the cover of widely accepted principles through his references to this poetry. He positioned his poetry within a mainstream discourse, even as he favoured radical social change. Jacob Lloyd argues that the poets Mark Akenside, William Lisle Bowles, and William Cowper each provided Coleridge with a kind of Whig poetics to which he responded. When these references are understood, much of Coleridge’s work which seems purely personal or imaginative gains a political dimension. In addition, Lloyd reassess Coleridge’s relationship with Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, to provide an original, political reading of ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’. This book revises our understanding of the political and poetic development of a major poet and, in doing so, provides a new model for the origins of British Romanticism more broadly