Front matter

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA

By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

LIST OF CONTENTS

CHAP.

  I  Motives to the present work--Reception of the Author’s first
       publication--Discipline of his taste at school--Effect of
       contemporary writers on youthful minds--Bowles’s Sonnets--
       Comparison between the poets before and since Pope

 II   Supposed irritability of genius brought to the test of
        facts--Causes and occasions of the charge--Its injustice

III  The Author’s obligations to Critics, and the probable
       occasion--Principles of modern criticism--Mr. Southey’s
       works and character

 IV  The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface--Mr. Wordsworth’s
       earlier poems--On Fancy and Imagination--The investigation
       of the distinction important to the Fine Arts

  V  On the law of Association--Its history traced from Aristotle
       to Hartley

 VI  That Hartley’s system, as far as it differs from that of
       Aristotle, is neither tenable in theory, nor founded
       in facts

VII  Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory--Of
       the original mistake or equivocation which procured its
       admission--Memoria technica

VIII The system of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes--Refined first by Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the doctrine of Harmonia praestabilita--Hylozoism--Materialism --None of these systems, or any possible theory of Association, supplies or supersedes a theory of Perception, or explains the formation of the Associable

 XI  Is Philosophy possible as a science, and what are its
       conditions?--Giordano Bruno--Literary Aristocracy, or the
       existence of a tacit compact among the learned as a
       privileged order--The Author’s obligations to the Mystics-
       To Immanuel Kant--The difference between the letter and
       The spirit of Kant’s writings, and a vindication of
       Prudence in the teaching of Philosophy--Fichte’s attempt
       to complete the Critical system-Its partial success and
       ultimate failure--Obligations to Schelling; and among
       English writers to Saumarez

  X  A Chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude
      preceding that on the nature and genesis of the Imagination
      or Plastic Power--On Pedantry and pedantic expressions--
      Advice to young authors respecting publication--Various
      anecdotes of the Author’s literary life, and the progress
      of his opinions in Religion and Politics

 XI  An affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel
      themselves disposed to become authors

XII  A Chapter of requests and premonitions concerning the perusal
      or omission of the chapter that follows

XIII On the Imagination, or Esemplastic power

XIV  Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally
      proposed--Preface to the second edition--The ensuing
      controversy, its causes and acrimony--Philosophic
      definitions of a Poem and Poetry with scholia

 XV  The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a
      Critical analysis of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, and
      Rape of Lucrece

XVI  Striking points of difference between the Poets of the
      present age and those of the fifteenth and sixteenth
      centuries--Wish expressed for the union of the
      characteristic merits of both

XVII Examination of the tenets peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth-- Rustic life (above all, low and rustic life) especially unfavourable to the formation of a human diction-The best parts of language the product of philosophers, not of clowns or shepherds--Poetry essentially ideal and generic-- The language of Milton as much the language of real life, yea, incomparably more so than that of the cottager

XVIII Language of metrical composition, why and wherein essentially different from that of prose--Origin and elements of metre --Its necessary consequences, and the conditions thereby imposed on the metrical writer in the choice of his diction

XIX  Continuation--Concerning the real object, which, it is
      probable, Mr. Wordsworth had before him in his critical
      preface--Elucidation and application of this

 XX  The former subject continued--The neutral style, or that
     common to Prose and Poetry, exemplified by specimens from
     Chaucer, Herbert, and others

XXI  Remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals

XXII The characteristic defects of Wordsworth’s poetry, with the principles from which the judgment, that they are defects, is deduced--Their proportion to the beauties--For the greatest part characteristic of his theory only

     SATYRANE’S LETTERS

XXIII Critique on Bertram

XXIV Conclusion

So wenig er auch bestimmt seyn mag, andere zu belehren, so wuenscht er doch sich denen mitzutheilen, die er sich gleichgesinnt weis, (oder hofft,) deren Anzahl aber in der Breite der Welt zerstreut ist; er wuenscht sein Verhaeltniss zu den aeltesten Freunden dadurch wieder anzuknuepfen, mit neuen es fortzusetzen, und in der letzten Generation sich wieder andere fur seine uebrige Lebenszeit zu gewinnen. Er wuenscht der Jugend die Umwege zu ersparen, auf denen er sich selbst verirrte. (Goethe. Einleitung in die Propylaeen.)

TRANSLATION. Little call as he may have to instruct others, he wishes nevertheless to open out his heart to such as he either knows or hopes to be of like mind with himself, but who are widely scattered in the world: he wishes to knit anew his connections with his oldest friends, to continue those recently formed, and to win other friends among the rising generation for the remaining course of his life. He wishes to spare the young those circuitous paths, on which he himself had lost his way.

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA