ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explore Southey and Coleridge’s textual dialogue about Methodism in scholarship by examining the emotions which the subject excited, the intellectual challenges that it presented for each writer, and the efforts made to reconcile the differing responses. Coleridge was as ready to condemn hysteria in the detractors of Methodism as in Methodists themselves. John Wesley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are implicitly endorsing, in sophisticated terms, the language of the heart which, when informed by reason, characterised the positive enthusiasm acknowledged by Dryden and classically defined by Shaftesbury as a necessary source of creative and religious inspiration. Enthusiasm, on the contrary, implies an undue vividness of ideas, as opposed to perceptions, or of the obscure inward feelings.’ The chapter shows how the views of each writer diverged or coincided in accordance with their individual preoccupations and anxieties, and considers how far these same anxieties reflected broader cultural concerns.
