1 - Coleridge’s life

Summary

Coleridge's life has proved difficult to narrate. Its events are hard to understand as a developmental sequence. Like Coleridge's personality, and like his writings, they disclose numerous facets in loose and disorganised connection. His drive to articulate a philosophy of unity, with its conspicuous successes and sometimes embarrassing failures, has its fundamental context in the great sweep of momentous political and social change in Britain and Europe during the period of his life. The moves from radical to conservative, from necessitarian rationalist to philosophical idealism and Anglican Christianity, were negotiated under external pressures which were, at once, sharply focused for Coleridge personally, and profoundly representative of the spiritual journey of an entire generation. This representative quality gives a particular importance not just to Coleridge's successes, but, perhaps even more so, to his failures and failings.