Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

In addition to being one of the finest poets of the Romantic generation, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was a philosopher, theologian, and literary theorist whose work exerted a profound influence upon nineteenth-century thought in Britain and America. For John Stuart Mill, Coleridge’s cultural conservatism formed a necessary counterweight to the radical utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham; for Newman and the Oxford movement, his treatments of conscience and the Trinity in his philosophical theology were of immense significance, while for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Coleridge’s idealism reconceived the relationship between mind and nature in ways that would become fundamental to the American Transcendentalist movement. Coleridge borrowed freely (though not always transparently) from philosophical sources, especially German idealism, and his thought combines elements of transcendentalism, Platonism, and Christian theology.