ABSTRACT
The reception of a well-known author after his death generally goes through two phases. The first is one of summing up as critics begin to consider the literary career as a whole and try to assess it free of the pressure of the contemporary preoccupations that surrounded each work when it first appeared. In the second, readers make their preferences plain over a prolonged period of time and either confirm the critics’ judgments or modify them. The reception considered in this way is largely a matter of assessment. Coleridge’s reception differs from the usual pattern because so much of what he wrote and so much of what eventually came to be preferred remained unpublished when he died. To the conventional period of assessment was added what might be called a period of reidentification as wholly new works issued from the press and even old ones were presented in new forms. With Coleridge’s ‘Opus Maximum’ and two volumes of his notebooks still awaiting publication, this process is still under way.
