BURIED IN THE MIDDLE OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE'S BIOGRAPHIA literaria (1817) is an unusual little paragraph, one that (unsurprisingly) offers critique of Wordsworth's poetic theory based on elusive mechanisms of (surprisingly) disordered memory. According to Coleridge, the pleasure received Wordsworth's poems being less derived either excitement of curiosity or rapid flow of narration, passages form larger proportion of their value. (1) And these striking passages, Coleridge continues, find their own independent life in memory of their reader: many people confess that from no modem work had so many passages started up anew in their minds at different times (2:106). Isolating themselves in they arise, we're told, reference to poem in which they are found (2:106). This decontexmalization and subsequent relocation of such passages matters to Coleridge in part because he sees it as effect of an historical shift in relationship of poetry to memory, one explicitly linked to invention of print culture: Before introduction of printing, and in still greater degree, before introduction of writing, metre, especially alliterative metre, (whether alliterative at beginning of words, as in Pierce Plouman, or at end as in rhymes) possessed an independent value as assisting recollection, and consequently preservation, of any series of truths or incidents. (2:67) In an oral culture, then, memorization of poetry was facilitated by its rhythmic consensus, its integrity as series. But this changed, Coleridge says, with introduction of print. Recent criticism has sought to reconsider traditional critical interpretation of Romanticism--and Coleridge in particular--as invested primarily in organic theories of voice and speech, looking instead for signs of its engagement with specifically print culture. Celeste Langan, for example, has suggested that Coleridge's Christabel enacts an explicit move away orality as medium of transmitting and recording meaning. Langan sees Coleridge's Romantic project in terms of nostalgia for 'oral' culture of ballad but rather as an exploration of ballad meter as sign of 'narration without narrator,' as sign of writing-as-citation rather than of speech. (2) Coleridge's view of poetry in print culture revises way poetry is seen to function in relation to reader's mouth, but it also revises poetry's relationship to reader's memory: Coleridge implies that poetry operates within memory in ways that are irregular, striking, and self-replicating. And, while sources of this implication are varied, Coleridge's poetic technology generally relies very much on new understanding of memory as physiological, one that grows out of Enlightenment materialist philosophy and early Romantic medical science. Linda Austin identifies in this newly embodied memory privileging of repetition and iterability over authenticity: a mnemonic process governed by physiology is unbeholden to recollected, cognitive past and can generate aesthetic pleasure that thrives, correspondingly, on copies and replicas. (3) Coleridge's responsiveness to print culture and to materialist physiology together make his understanding of poetry and memory stand in sharp contrast to Wordsworthian poetics of context, association, and recollection: emotion recollected in tranquility. (4) But what happens, more particularly, when poetry is memorized without rhythmic context provided by regular meter? And what happens when we memorize poetry by reading it printed page? These were key questions not only for Romantic poets but also for Romantic physiologists of memory and hallucination. Just as, for Coleridge, excerpted passages in Wordsworth's poetry possess an independent force that can start up anew in mind, so hallucinations were theorized as sensory images decontextualized, relocated, and involuntarily recalled--a move that, I will argue, depends on this newly physiological understanding of memory as somatic repository imprinted with past sensory experiences. …