ABSTRACT
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor's description of the secondary imagination, articulated in the Biographia Literaria almost twenty years after the initial publication of 'Fears in Solitude', recalls the thematic and formal tactics employed by him to deftly maneuver between these categories in the poem. He marks the tension between these fragile boundaries through the shifting rhetoric of his text. The title of the poem itself invokes the metaphor of invasion: the tranquility of solitude is infiltrated by the insecurity of fear. The poem, in which a private meditation is displaced by a reflection on national guilt, enters the public arena as a personal and public pledge of a Christian and a patriot. Magnuson reads this as a dialogic move in which there is 'no distinction between an aesthetic language' and an ordinary political language. Coleridge, the radical lecturer from Bristol, and author and editor of the mostly political journal The Watchman, retired from public life after the failure of the journal in may.
