In addition to his poetry Coleridge also wrote influential piece of literary criticism
Biographia Literaria a collection of his thoughts and opinions on literature. The work
delivered both biographical explanations of the author's life as well as his impressions on
literature. The collection also contained an analysis of a broad range of philosophical
principles of literature ranging from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant and Schelling and applied them
to the poetry of peers such as William Wordsworth. Coleridge's explanations of metaphysical
principles were popular topics of discourse in academic communities throughout the 19th and
20th centuries and T.S. Eliot stated that he believed that Coleridge was perhaps the greatest
of English critics and in a sense the last. In Biographia Literaria and his poetry symbols
are not merely objective correlatives to Coleridge but instruments for making the universe and
personal experience intelligible and spiritually covalent. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 -
1834) was an English poet literary critic and philosopher who with his friend William
Wordsworth was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets.
He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan as well as the major prose
work Biographia Literaria. His critical work especially on Shakespeare was highly influential
and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. He coined many
familiar words and phrases including suspension of disbelief. He was a major influence on
Emerson and American transcendentalism.
