ABSTRACT
This chapter examines trajectories of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's engagement with Jonathan Edwards as a way of beginning to reframe his influence on the American Romantics—an influence that needs to be reconsidered in light of Coleridge's sustained attention to the problems that Edwards had placed at the forefront of the American literary tradition. In 1807, Coleridge registered his thoughts on Edwards' Freedom of the Will in the margins of Andrew Fuller's Calvinistic and Socinian Systems Examined and Compared. Alexander Crombie was a Presbyterian schoolmaster in Highgate at the time of Coleridge's writing. Edwards' skepticism and proto-pragmatic view of an ordered world of cause and effect also overlapped and established continuity with the more rational philosophies of David Hume, John Locke, and Benjamin Franklin. Strangely, Coleridge depicted his early interest in philosophical and theological problems as one that was rooted in a fallen, diseased state of being—as if his intellectual pursuits were indicative of a kind of preternatural sickness.
