Biographia Literaria is an autobiography in discourse by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which he published in 1817. The work is long and seemingly loosely structured, and although there are autobiographical elements, it is not a straightfoward or linear autobiography. Instead, it is meditative (a biography rather than an autobiography), with numerous essays on philosophy. In particular, it discusses and engages the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. Being fluent in German, Coleridge was one of the first major English literary figures to translate and discuss Schelling, in particular.
Critics have reacted strongly to the Biographia Literaria. Early reactions were that it was a demonstration of Coleridge's opiate-driven decline into ill health. Recent re-evaluations have given it more credit. While contemporary critics recognize the degree to which Coleridge borrowed from his sources (with straight lifts from Schelling), they also see in the work far more structure and planning than is apparent on first glance.
It is also taken as his longer-term reaction and comment on William Wordsworth, earlier (at the time of Lyrical Ballads) his close collaborator. The book contains his celebrated and vexed distinction between 'imagination' and 'fancy'.
External links
Free eBook of Biographia Literaria (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6081) at Project Gutenberg
BiographiaLiteraria is a major document in Western literary inquiry, but its intricacies have baffled and infuriated generations of readers.
Her painstaking analysis of the Biographia's organizing structure distinguishes with great subtlety between the daring conception and the often inept execution of Coleridge's idea of critical discourse.
BiographiaLiteraria is, alas, usually read only in parts except by the most determined; and so I allowed a certain pragmatism to prevail in my own design.
Kathleen Wheeler's study, Sources, Processes and Methods in Coleridge's BiographiaLiteraria (Cambridge University Press 1980), in which she argues that the Biographia is a massively sustained exercise in Romantic Irony, has probably been the most influential attempt to argue for its intellectual unity.
That Coleridge has Common Sense philosophy in his sights in the BiographiaLiteraria is shown by various references to "common sense" (an easily recognised shibboleth of these philosophers' intuitionist mode of argument, from which they derive their name).
The basic criticism of Jeffrey and the Edinburgh Reviewers (and by extension, of Common Sense philosophy itself) that runs through the BiographiaLiteraria, is that to appeal to "common sense" as a standard of intellectual judgement is to assume that novelty in poetry (or in any other field) must always be intellectually illegitimate.
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