University of Virginia Library

I. Introduction

We now know that Coleridge wrote most of the Biographia Literaria during the summer of 1815. We are faced, however, with two major, conflicting reconstructions of Coleridge's work from June through September of 1815. The first, developed by J. Shawcross in 1907 and based on the pioneering researches of J. Dykes Campbell, was modified but not fundamentally altered by George Watson in the introduction to his 1956 edition of the Biographia. The Shawcross-Watson reconstruction is that Coleridge had written, by July of 1815, a literary autobiography comprising most of the first half of the Biographia Literaria. Then, Shawcross and Watson conjecture, Coleridge sat down to write a preface to the autobiography. The preface, consisting of the critique of Wordsworth (the chief matter of the second half of the Biographia), grew so long that it had to be appended to the already existing work.[1] The most recent account of the

birth of the Biographia was set forth in 1959 by E. L. Griggs in his introduction and notes to Volumes III and IV of the Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Griggs not only clashes with Shawcross and Watson in his description of the project which yielded the Biographia but also reverses the order they have assigned to the composition of the book's major elements. "At no time," says Griggs, "did Coleridge plan a preface to his autobiography."[2] Rather, the Biographia was an extension, in the summer of 1815, of the preface to a projected volume of poems, Sibylline Leaves. By July, Griggs argues, Coleridge had written the critique of Wordsworth. Then, in August and September, he added the "philosophical Part" (the chief matter of the first half of the Biographia).[3]

Griggs's version of the genesis of the Biographia, though based, as we shall see, on better evidence than had been available to Shawcross and Watson, has not put an end to the dispute. Watson allows only that Griggs "has restored to obscurity Coleridge's account of the composition of the Biographia" (BL-Watson, p. xxi). The controversy is a signal instance of how evidence, though abundant, may not suffice for certainty. Nevertheless, the evidentiary materials, including correspondence about the Biographia by Morgan, Hood, Gutch, and Gale & Fenner at Victoria College, Toronto, Griggs's 1959 volumes of Coleridge's Collected Letters, and Kathleen Coburn's recently published volume of his Notebooks, now make it possible to establish to a high degree of probability the important events in the making of Coleridge's great critical work. The tabular synopsis, below, of the probable evolution of the Biographia, and the "Analytic Narrative" following, aim to identify explicitly the chapters belonging to each stage of the composition of that book. This newly detailed and revised history of the text has important implications for the interpretation of the Biographia and for the solution of some problems raised by the volume— for example, the reasons for the seeming discrepancy in Coleridge's treatment of the imagination in Chapters XIII and XIV, and the practical necessities, given the deadlines, for his wholesale importations from Schelling and others. So far as previous scholarship on the question is concerned, the present essay confirms, for the most part, the validity of Griggs's compact arguments about the evolution of the Biographia from a preface to a book of poems, analogous to Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads of 1800, to an independent "Work per se" (CL, IV, 585).