Reviews for Biographia Literaria - Or Biographical Sketches Of My Literary Life And Opinions (1817)

The average rating for Biographia Literaria - Or Biographical Sketches Of My Literary Life And Opinions (1817) based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-05-26 00:00:00 Derek Cheung Poor Coleridge. It's impossible to go against the almost unanimous judgment of his contemporaries regarding his brilliant intelligence and conversation. But the reality is that he never, ever was able to make that intelligence and brilliance as productive as it should have been. And as can be attested by some others who have been opium slaves (some, not all, viz: DeQuincey, Burroughs et al.), Coleridge's serious and life-long addiction to laudanum is most probably the cause. And so we have Biographia Literaria, a mildly interesting but failed work the prose of which winds back and forth and in and around itself in a manner that makes it difficult to read except in fits and starts and little bits and pieces now and then. I owned this book for more than thirty years, frequently taking it off the shelf in attempts to read through it as with other books. No. Impossible. An hour's worth of BL would always either have me asleep or bored out of my sconce. Poor Coleridge.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-09-05 00:00:00 William Jones An absorbing read as Coleridge seeks a philosophical foundation for his aesthetics. He mounts a convincing defense of Wordsworth's poetic genius and a withering attack on his poetic theory. An impressively serious intellectual endeavor written in the trail-blazing form of an intellectual autobiography.