Books with title Biographia Literaria

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1817 work Biographia Literaria is an autobiography in discourse; loosely structured and non-linear, the work is meditative and contains numerous philosophical essays. Initially criticized as the product of Coleridge's opiate-driven descent into illness, more recent critics have given the work far more credit and recognition. The book is the origin of the well-known critical idea of "willing suspension of disbelief."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1817 work Biographia Literaria is an autobiography in discourse; loosely structured and non-linear, the work is meditative and contains numerous philosophical essays. Initially criticized as the product of Coleridge's opiate-driven descent into illness, more recent critics have given the work far more credit and recognition. The book is the origin of the well-known critical idea of "willing suspension of disbelief."

Biographia Literaria, or in full Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, is an autobiography in discourse by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which he published in 1817, in two volumes. It has twenty-three (23) chapters. The work was originally intended as a mere preface to a collected volume of his poems, explaining and justifying his own style and practice in poetry. The work grew to a literary autobiography, including, together with many facts concerning his education and studies and his early literary adventures, an extended criticism of William Wordsworth's theory of poetry as given in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads (a work on which Coleridge collaborated), and a statement of Coleridge's philosophical views. In the first part of the work Coleridge is mainly concerned with showing the evolution of his philosophic creed. At first an adherent of the associational psychology of David Hartley, he came to discard this mechanical system for the belief that the mind is not a passive but an active agency in the apprehension of reality. The author believed in the "self-sufficing power of absolute Genius" and distinguished between genius and talent as between "an egg and an egg-shell". The discussion involves his definition of the imagination or “esemplastic power,” the faculty by which the soul perceives the spiritual unity of the universe, as distinguished from the fancy or merely associative function.