Abstract

The body of poetry published by Coleridge during his lifetime was comparatively small. Its importance in terms of innovative merit was recognized almost immediately and so critical discussions are abundant. It took a good while even for specialists, let alone for the wider audiences, to recognize that his poetic output was just a fraction of his theoretical prose; it took even longer to get the latter completely in print; it took longest to admit that Coleridge was a quite significant thinker and that his theories were integrated in a much more coherent fashion than was originally believed. We are finally there, and the current book is a good example of uninhibited common use of the whole body of Coleridge’s work with the purpose of positioning him in the historical flow of European thinking. In fact, Haney may a go a little too far in dealing with Coleridge as a philosopher rather than as a poet.