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This chapter examines the sort of life, or the sort of self, that may be constructed by a mixed work. It is different from that presented by a strict narrative, being (rather roughly) characterized by multiplicity and by being subject to (or privileged to) disturbance and surprise. The chapter proposes to look rather closely at the Biographia Literaria of Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a vivid example of a work that is extravagantly mixed. It discusses the mixture of genres in this work, presents the sort of a self that its mixture models, and points out certain religious ramifications of this mixed self, namely, affinities with the thought of David Tracy and Mark Taylor. In regard to the actual variety of forms in Biographia, the chapter identifies eighteen different kinds of discourse in the work, differentiated chiefly as to the sort of voice with which each speaks.

This chapter discusses some aspects of Coleridge's published prose works written between 1815 and 1825, including The Statesman's Manual (1816), Biographia Literaria (1817), The Friend (1818), and Aids to Reflection (1825). It argues that while Coleridge remained trapped within Hume's ‘fork’ of anthropomorphism and agnosticism, and cannot be said to have discovered an original solution to the philosophical and religious questions he encountered, his writings on religion, and particularly his pained acknowledgement of uncertainty and doubt, were authentic responses to the profound intellectual problems he had inherited from his precursors.

This chapter examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Theory of Life’ (1816/1848) and his theory of knowledge, discussed in Biographia Literaria (1817), through the lens of autopoietic enaction. It focuses on parallels between historical and contemporary theories, particularly their philosophical underpinnings, and argues that Coleridge’s theories are an important alternative to Cartesian accounts of the mind. Interrogating these theories in terms of enactive concepts, such as structural coupling, dynamic co-emergence, and mutual co-dependence, exposes the inherent embodied, embedded, and enacted premises on which Coleridge’s theory of cognition relies. The relationship between the subject and the object implicit in dualist and materialist theories reveals the effects assumptions about this relationship have on the way human beings understand themselves in relationship to nature and their own bodies – effects that are frequently inimical. The chapter concludes that Coleridge and the enactive approach offer valuable options for overcoming the schism between consciousness and nature, mind and world.

This chapter considers the impact on Keats of his only meeting with Coleridge in April 1819. Beginning with an analysis of Keats’s famous account of the meeting, the essay reviews its background in Keats’s medical training and in his prior knowledge of Coleridge’s work. The different life stages of the two writers are contrasted. There is discussion of the possible content of Coleridge’s conversation as recalled by Keats, particularly in the effect on Keats’s poetic ambition in the moment immediately preceding composition of the Odes. The ‘Ode to Psyche’ is characterized by a newly suggestive consciousness of philosophical concepts, including Coleridgean interest in the paradox of conscious reflection on the activity of thinking. A possible influence on the Ode by Biographia Literaria is proposed.

Chapter 5 looks at how Coleridge articulated the governing dynamics of the imagination in the 1810s and 1820s with persistent reference to gravity and the interaction of centripetal and centrifugal forces. This regulated his thinking about matters as big as idealist philosophy, poetics, the origins of life, and aesthetics, and as small as conversation. It shows that Coleridge used astronomical forces to understand the underlying structure of creative, philosophical, and critical activity, which he illustrated with spider-webs and ripples on the water. Texts given close attention: Biographia Literaria; The Statesman’s Manual; ‘The Theory of Life’; Marginalia; Notebooks; and the Opus Maximum.

Chapter 18 construes Coleridge’s last Notebook (March–April 1834, which he titled, ‘Faith, Prayer, Meditation’) as the coda to his work and life, an analogy with the concluding lines to Biographia Literaria and to Opus Maximum Fragment 2, lines likewise taken as codas to their respective works. Building on Mays’ characterization of Coleridge’s ‘poetry of the affections’, and on his identification of the arc of Coleridge’s life as arising within the bosom of his father’s so-called ‘simple’ faith, navigating ‘strange seas of thought’, and coming home at the end to his own (more complicated) simplicity, it argues that one ‘Clew’ to Notebook 55 as coda to his work and life lies in the place the affections enjoy in Coleridge’s notebooks of 1827–34, whose entries most deeply constitute exercises in contemplation.