Coleridge on Emotion: Experience into Theory

Among the writings of Coleridge's earlier period are is also true, as House's account suggested, that much of frequent statements that foreground emotion as a signifithat experience was filtered out of the mature statement of cant principle of the mind. In 1796, for example, he said in his poetics in the Biographia LiUraria. a letter "My philosophical opinions are blended with, or deduced from, my feelings: & this, I think, peculiarizes my Two specific passages can be cited to show this loss, style of writing" (CL I: 279);1 in 1800 he was proposing an In chapter 14 of the Biographia, Coleridge offers a defini investigation of "the Laws by which our Feelings form affintion of poetry which is based on the formal properties of ities with each other, with Ideas, & with words (CL I: 656). verse: on metre and on the relation of part to whole. In the In 1803 he was offering this view of his metaphysics, in confirst draft of the passage in a notebook of 1809, however, it trast to those whose metaphysics was merely an abuse of ;s feeling that forms the basic premise: language: its purpose was "to support all old & venerable