Biographia Literaria

How did Coleridge develop Kant’s philosophical ideas in Biographia Literaria?

Discuss Transcendentalist poetry in relation to Coleridge’s literary theory, as presented in Biographia Literaria.

To what extent is Biographia Literaria an autobiography?

How do Coleridge’s ideas in Biographia Literaria relate to the wider Romantic movement’s preoccupation with the elegiac?

Coleridge claims there is a parallel between Romantic poetry and the era’s landscape painting. To what extent does this principle apply to Coleridge’s own poetry? Discuss with reference to two or more poems.

Edmund Burke wrote: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” (Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry. 1757.) With this definition in mind, compare the sublime in the works of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Immanuel Kant criticized Edmund Burke’s inattention to the causation of his ideas about empirical psychology, claiming that such ideas could “hardly even aspire to rank as a philosophical science.” (Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. 1790.) How did their ideas about cognition and beauty influence Coleridge’s literary theory?

Immanuel Kant distinguishes between judgment and genius in his Critique of Judgment. How does this relate to Coleridge’s ideas about poetics in Biographia Literaria?