ABSTRACT
Sooner or later, Kathleen Coburn said, Richards had to write a book on Coleridge, whose name was occurring more frequently than any other in his criticism. 1 His students heard him construe Coleridge's famous definition of imagination so often that many knew by heart the passage beginning "The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity."2 That passage, wrote Richards, was Coleridge's "greatest contribution" to criticism; "except in the way of interpretation, it is hard to add anything to what he has said."3 Much, as it happened, was needed in the way of interpretation because the theory of imagination was unfamiliar and complex. Its philosophical origins had proven a stumbling block, its vocabulary was forbidding, and romanticism in general was in eclipse. But philosophy and psychology were Richards' training and he recognized an affinity with a critic who often expressed himself on literature through neighboring disciplines. Besides, of all major theories of imagination, Coleridge's was the most compatible with modern psychology.
