ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the close relationship the philosophical Lectures bear to the Opus Maximum and Friend. It discusses the two texts as a pair parallel to the pairing of philosophical Lectures and Tennemann marginalia. The chapter argues that The Friend, the two Sets of essays 'On the Communication of Truth' and 'Method' taken together indicate an ideal of perfectly connected philosophical discourse which would result in a 'system' — precisely in Plato's lost esoteric system — and exclude poetry. It suggests that behind Samuel Taylor Coleridge's invocations of John Milton's 'authority' lay a sense that his Opus was in some sense a similar endeavour to Milton's epic. In a note about Paradise Lost made around 1818 or 1819, Coleridge seems to be reflecting on his own situation as much as Milton's: notwithstanding 'an apparently unhappy choice in marriage', he writes, Milton's poetry shows him truly 'susceptible of domestic enjoyments'.
