S. T. Coleridge as a critic: An Assessment

Abstract

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772- 1834) is one of the distinguished literary figures of the Romantic Age of the English literature. As a poet, critic and philosopher, he prodigiously influenced the writers and critics of his time and even later. Along with his friend and poet, William Wordsworth, Coleridge wrote poems in Lyrical Ballads (1798) which also includes his famous poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Both, Wordsworth and Coleridge entrenched new trend in the English poetry with the publication of Lyrical Ballad and it became one of the pioneering texts of the English Romanticism. Besides writing some of the remarkable narrative and lyric poems, Coleridge has engendered fresh insights in the field of literary criticism. In the words of George Saintsbury, “Coleridge is the critical author to be turned over by day and by night… Begins with him, continues with him, come back to him after excursion, with a certainty of suggestion, stimulation, correction, edification” (341) Moreover, he rates him with other great critics like Aristotle and Longinus.