ABSTRACT
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is attentive to the lives of animals even as or particularly because they indicate the end of the human, the space beyond the self, the conscious limit of what is meant by the human. Into a cultural climate in which corpses had become sites of decaying decency, Coleridge injected kindred animals to share in corpse contagion. Situating the body of Coleridge's work at the juncture exposes his early understanding of the relationship between humans and animals and provides a more thorough accounting of the importance of his animal representations. Even while Coleridge is less interested in pressing economic status of animals in the Romantic period, unlike both Lamb and Clare, perhaps because of his own less precarious economic status, his creatures nevertheless occupy the central ground in his poetry. To digress for a moment to Coleridge's prose, another human/non-human animal pairing offers a somewhat more clear explanation of Coleridge's understanding of mortification as a process of transcendence.
