Coleridge's Literary Criticism: With an Introduction (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Coleridge's Literary Criticism: With an Introduction

More than seventy years have passed since the death of Coleridge; and we now stand far enough of him to see him in intelligible perspective; he begins to take shape, to assume something like a permanent place and value. He affected his own age as a changeable and complex force, at first revolutionary, then constructive and interpretative. His influence on English poetry was far-reaching and profound. His influence on English thought was, as it appeared at the time, even greater. To the younger genera tion of his own contemporaries he was a prophet, a teacher who gave light on life. That side of his influence was in its nature transitory; for life is in perpetual progress, and each age has to face the problem of life afresh and find its own interpretation. For six wonderful years he was a poet and one of the immortals. That immortality remains. But he was also, both during the brief culmination of his powers and in the long succeeding period of shattered energy and fragmentary production, a critic of the first rank. In virtue of that faculty alone he was not only an expounder but a creator and, like all creative work, his criticism has a substantive artistic value, an in herent vitality.

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