ABSTRACT
Samuel Taylor Coleridge weaves autobiography and inquiry into a single fabric. The author describes his youthful encounters with both genius and its anti-type, the fanatic. From his position in the autobiographer's 'present', he offers some apparently extraneous speculation about the psychological differences between geniuses and fanatics. Take these speculations seriously, examines them closely, and you find a major account of the psychological consequences of imaginative power. The author attributes his youthful ability to distinguish genius from fanatic not to any precocious insight into such matters, but to the rigor of his education. Coleridge also maps out the Biographia's future development when he presents the youthful author as seeking to substantiate these relationships. Coleridge seems to set out three domains of inquiry, politics, religion and philosophy and to note that from the philosophy will be deduced the means of settling the Wordsworth controversy.
