Introduction

First published in 1991, this book collects a broad array of path-finding scholarship by specialists in Coleridge and Romantic literature on the subject of his prose. They range from broad appraisals of Coleridge’s own critical practises; demonstrations of the fecundity of his autobiography, the Biographia Literaria, for contemporaries; the effect of Milton and the radical polemicists of the English Civil War on Coleridge’s early political and religious dissent; and the influence of the Hebrew prophetic tradition in his move away from the conjectural millenarianism of his youth towards the interpretation of Prophecy and a symbolic narrative.