Under the Lime-Tree, Revisited, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Opus 4.7
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, let us discuss him. May 3 Claude responded: Coleridge — yes, let's. Coleridge — yes, let's. Where would you like to enter? He's a vast country with several borders. The opium-haunted visionary of "Kubla Khan" and the "Ancient Mariner" is one Coleridge. The philosophical critic of Biographia Literaria — wrestling with imagination versus fancy, primary versus secondary — is another. The conversational poet of "Frost at Midnight" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," murmuring to his sleeping son or to absent Charles Lamb, is a third. And then there's the political pamphleteer, the Unitarian-turned-Trinitarian, the failed Pantisocratic dreamer, the friend who broke Wordsworth's heart and his own. Given your work — the Peircean semiotics, the consciousness research with Charles, the question of imagination as the most vulnerable vertex of the triad — I suspect there's a particular Coleridge calling...