It’s a pity his lectures on Shakespeare and other poets could not be preserved. What we have today is prepared from notes and reports by his daughter in 1836 and by Payne Collier in 1856. Even then they present Coleridge as a towering personality in the ranks of English critics. His examination of Shakespearean plays in subtly suggestive, always egging on the reader to keener perceptions. He sees every work of art as an organic whole. Taking cue from the German Romantics, he hinted prominently that poetry is an independent organic growth quite opposed to mechanical construction. A play by Shakespeare, he demonstrated, grew from within, as a tree did. In Shakespeare he found organic unity not to be found elsewhere. If indeed Coleridge could describe such organic unity only on an abstract plane, it was because his world—the later years of his life—was a divided world. It was divided between ‘civilization’, the sphere of Understanding, and faith, the sphere of Reason which he ‘struggled’ to unify with the help of imagination.

About Coleridge’s contribution TS Eliot has this to say with which this brief treatise must end: “He (Coleridge) established the relevance of philosophy, aesthetics and psychology; and once Coleridge had introduced these disciplines into literary criticism, future critics could ignore them only at their own risk”.

Times of India