ABSTRACT
'Samuel Taylor Coleridge' exposes the self-creating genius as a myth, unmasking the poet's quest for self-possession as a colonization of the feminine, and insisting upon a relationship between the intellectual and the domestic dependencies of the poet. The rise in popularity of biography in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries exposed a deep vein of resistance to the genre from some of the canonical male poets of the period. Both Coleridge and William Wordsworth published essays expressing their hostility to the form of writing and, in Wordsworth's case, especially to literary biography. The resistance to biography, especially in the light of Coleridge's gendering of the genre, may be seen as part of a more widespread anxiety in Romantic culture. The gender implications of Coleridge's invasion metaphor are interesting because they suggest that, although the biographers specified by him, as by Wordsworth, are all male, Coleridge, perceives the genre on some level as a feminine threat to masculine self-possession.
