Jonathan Ingram, Clytie Siddall
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's
comprising 33 letters
and being
the Biographical Supplement ofColeridge's BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA
with additional letters etc., edited by
Vol. 1.
"On the whole this was surely the mightiest genius since Milton. In poetry there is not his like, when he rose to his full power; he was a philosopher, the immensity of whose mind cannot be gauged by anything he has left behind; a critic, the subtlest and most profound of his time. Yet these vast and varied powers flowed away in the shifting sands of talk; and what remains is but what the few land-locked pools are to the receding ocean which has left them casually behind without sensible diminution of its waters."
Academy, 3d October, 1903.
The work known as the Biographical Supplement of the BiographiaLiteraria of S. T. Coleridge, and published with the latter in 1847, wasbegun by Henry Nelson Coleridge, and finished after his death by hiswidow, Sara Coleridge. The first part, concluding with a letter dated5th November 1796, is the more valuable portion of the BiographicalSupplement. What follows, written by Sara Coleridge, is morecontroversial than biographical and does not continue, like the firstpart, to make Coleridge tell his own life by inserting letters in thenarrative. Of 33 letters quoted in the whole work, 30 are contained inthe section written by Henry Nelson Coleridge. Of these 11 were drawnfrom Cottle's Early Recollections, seven being letters to Josiah Wade,four to Joseph Cottle, and the remainder are sixteen letters to Poole,one to Benjamin Flower, one to Charles E Heath, and one to Henry Martin.
From this I think it is evident that Henry Nelson Coleridge intendedwhat was published as a Supplement to the Biographia Literaria to be aLife of Coleridge, either supplementary to the Biographia Literaria oras an independent narrative, in which most of the letters published byCottle in 1837 and unpublished letters to Poole and other correspondentswere to form the chief material. Sara Coleridge, in finishing thefragment, did not attempt to carry out the original intention of herhusband. A few letters in Cottle were perhaps not acceptable to hertaste, and in rejecting them she perhaps resolved to reject allremaining letters in Cottle. She thus finished the fragmentary Life ofColeridge left by her husband in her own way.
But Henry Nelson Coleridge had begun to build on another plan. Hisintention was simply to string all Coleridge's letters available on aslim biographical thread and thus produce a work in which the poet wouldhave been made to tell his own life. His beginning with the fiveBiographical Letters to Thomas Poole is a proof of this. He took theseas his starting point; and, as far as he went, his "Life of Coleridge"thus constructed is the most reliable of all the early biographies ofColeridge.
This edition of the Biographical Supplement is meant to carry out as faras possible the original project of its author. The whole of hisnarrative has been retained, and also what Sara Coleridge added to hiswriting; and all the non-copyright letters of Coleridge available fromother sources have been inserted into the narrative, and additional