Coleridge and the Uses of Division

Faced with Coleridge's irresolution and fragmentariness, critics have often declared him a failure. This study champions that failure as an oblique kind of success - the fruit of a virtuous and fertile indecision between rival imaginative vocations, each good but incompatible. Covering the entire range of his religious and philosophical prose and criticism, it also offers close readings of the major poems and describes afresh the momentous relationship with Wordsworth.