Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Fascinated by his own imagination, Coleridge secretly wrote that its characteristic blend of power and desire made him a “Daemon”: a being superstitiously feared as “a something transnatural.” Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination examines this simultaneous experience of exaltation and transgression as a formative principle in Coleridge’s poetry and the fabric of his philosophy. In a reading that spans the breadth of Coleridge’s achievement, through politics, religion and his relationship with Wordsworth, this book builds to a new interpretation of the poems where Coleridge’s daemonic imagination produces its myths: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel.” Gregory Leadbetter reveals a Coleridge at once more familiar and more strange, in a study that unfolds into an essay on poetry, spirituality, and the drama of human becoming.