Biographia Literaria

Samuel Taylor Coleridge calls this book 'biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions'. He tells of his schooldays and early poetry, his journalism and his years in Germany studying philosophy, and sets out his ideas on the imagination, which he distinguishes from mere fancy as the power that creates and unifies. He explains how he and Wordsworth planned the Lyrical Ballads, coining the famous phrase 'that willing suspension of disbelief', and then examines, with great admiration and some disagreement, Wordsworth's poetry and his theory of poetic language.

Published in 1817, the Biographia is disorderly and partly borrowed from German philosophers, but it is one of the founding works of English literary criticism. Read Lyrical Ballads and Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.