The Politics of Autobiography in the "Biographia Literaria"

Abstract

Romantic poetry is nothing if not the poetry of crisis, and, as its seminal theorist, Coleridge dutifully produces the most crisis-ridden poetry and prose of the period. In the Biographia Literaria, arguably the most traumatized of Coleridge's works, cohesive patterns of meaning never seem to emerge from the chaotic and fragmentary offerings. Instead, the frantic twists and turns away from a unifying development suspend coherence above an intellectual hodgepodge of inquiry, formulation, reformulation, and rebuttal. Jerome Christensen has recently termed this confusion Coleridge's marginal method, arguing cogently that the Biographia is a compendium of fragmented commentaries on precedent texts-Hartley, Wordsworth, God, the will, the Bible, etc.1 But Christensen, while reaffirming an opinion common to most readers of the Biographia (that the book is disorganized and hard to read), in no way represents mainstream Coleridge scholarship. To the contrary, his work radically threatens much of what is sacred. This is the case in part because Coleridge, more than any other Romantic poet, has fostered a tradition of critical apologetics. From daughter Sara's long-winded introductions and appendices to the latest and most impressive works on the Biographia, Coleridgeans have had to reconcile a very appealing genius with what are often very unappealing modes of presentation. As a result, the critical voices responsible for the poet's canonization have been necessarily strident. While the more vociferous apologists have all disappeared, their legacy continues in a less obtrusive but more effective form, in a very learned and respectable discourse which ingeniously deifies Coleridge while defusing any possibility for the recognition of the crisis so much a part of his Romanticism. Two recent books on the Biographia both offer insightful new ways to approach a difficult work; and both are similar in method and assumption.2 Kathleen Wheeler roots Coleridge in a Socratic tradition in order to find a pervasive irony and use of metaphor intended to educate the