Afterword

Summary

Coleridge has been fortunate in his admirers. He has been the subject of a hugely praised two-volume biography by Richard Holmes, and in the Bollingen edition of his collected works and notebooks he has been the subject of one of the great scholarly enterprises of the age. Numerous selections of his prose and his poetry are also available.

Coleridge seems to be becoming the archetypal figure of English Romanticism, as individual works of genius become less significant to modern readers. Fragmentary works often have a greater appeal to us than finished ones; a fully worked-out system of philosophy from the 1820s will not interest many people, but Coleridge's fragmentary attempts to create one are fascinating for readers who are happy to believe that the fragments demonstrate ‘that he did not regard his philosophy as a closed system, or an ultimate one’. We are also fascinated by the intellectual and political context in which such works appeared, and the philosophical or psychological ideas lying behind them, especially when exemplified in work in non-standard forms (such as Coleridge's notebooks and marginalia). ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘Christabel’ have neither of them suffered from being fragments. If anything, the opposite; opportunities for understanding them can never diminish, their appeal need never fade. And the existence of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Dejection’ in various versions interests both non-academic and academic readers who prefer to observe process and change rather than to find their reading a source of moral improvement or solace.