ABSTRACT
The musician may tune his instrument in private, ere his audience has yet assembled: the architect conceals the foundation of his building beneath the superstructure. In this half of the century, the familiar portrait has been redrawn: we no longer see Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a genius helplessly mired in addictions, neuroses and morbid Christianity. Growing numbers of scholars have demonstrated the depth and subtlety of Coleridge's thought. His originality has been re-evaluated; his reputation has grown. Biographia Literaria deserves a new look as well. Like Coleridge himself, it is not a rambling, foggy, inconsistent traveler toward isolated, cryptic insights. At first glance, there is ample evidence that Biographia Literaria is a fragmented disaster whose difficulties can neither be resolved nor understood. The generations of scholars and critics succeeding Shawcross have explicated Coleridge's literary convictions and his 'first principles' to reveal a thinker known to very few in 1907: a Coleridge who is erudite, philosophically acute, and humanly profound.
