If William Wordsworth constructed a poetics of perception, then Samuel Taylor Coleridge struggled—heroically, inconsistently and ultimately inconclusively—to dismantle it. His poetic philosophy is a record of resistance: to the tyranny of the senses, to the passivity of observation, to the narrowing of language into the role of mirror. Where Wordsworth entrenched empiricism, Coleridge exposed its contradictions. Yet Coleridge’s tragedy, and perhaps his failure, is that his critique never fully displaced the epistemological foundations he sought to challenge. He could not, or would not, break with the empirical frame altogether.
Coleridge is often invoked as the counterpoint to Wordsworth’s naturalism: the mystic to the realist, the thinker to the feeler. But this binary oversimplifies. Coleridge was not merely a dreamer in contrast to Wordsworth’s walker. He was, in many respects, more analytically rigorous, more philosophically engaged and more alert to the perils of unexamined assumptions. Where Wordsworth accepted sensory perception as the ground of poetic truth, Coleridge questioned what it meant to perceive at all. He suspected—rightly—that empiricism smuggled in a hidden metaphysics of passivity, and that to base poetry on sensation was to surrender agency at the outset.
And yet, despite this insight, Coleridge never fully escaped the gravitational pull of empiricism. His early writings are steeped in associationist psychology. He read Hartley with enthusiasm. His attempts to reconcile sensation and imagination are burdened by the very philosophical categories he sought to transcend. In Biographia Literaria, he attempts a distinction between fancy and imagination, elevating the latter as a synthetic, unifying power capable of transforming perception into insight. But even this formulation grants too much to perception itself. It begins with the given world and merely reshapes it. Language remains reactive rather than creative.
His greatest poems, however, betray a different impulse. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ‘Kubla Khan’ and Christabel, Coleridge does not describe the world—he disorients it. These poems do not depict reality; they warp it. Time becomes unstable, space collapses, language becomes incantatory rather than expository. There is no stable subject observing a stable world. Instead, we find spectral presences, hallucinations, reversals of causality. This is not the language of sense-data—it is the language of vision, of the uncanny, of what cannot be seen but must be imagined.
And yet, Coleridge’s critical writings seek to rationalise this irrationality. He defends imagination but returns again and again to empirical language: “facts”, “experience”, “truth”. It is as though he feared the very implications of his own poetic practice. His commitment to German Idealism was never fully integrated into his poetics; it hovered above them like an aspiration never realised.
This internal contradiction has had consequences. Coleridge’s legacy has too often been used to reinforce, rather than undermine, the empirical model of poetic thought. His formulations about imagination are quoted in support of a poetics that still treats perception as primary. Even his boldest theoretical interventions are neutralised by their anchoring in epistemological “balance”—a word he uses frequently, and fatally. The imagination becomes not a radical force but a mediating one. It is a supplement to perception, not a replacement for it.
There is, then, a kind of bad faith in Coleridge’s philosophical project. He gestures toward the liberatory potential of the imagination, but retreats into empiricism when the stakes become too high. His inability—or unwillingness—to abandon the language of perception leaves him caught in a poetics of compromise. It is a failure not of intellect, but of resolve.
Nevertheless, Coleridge remains essential—not because he resolved the crisis of empiricism, but because he revealed it. In recognising that perception alone cannot ground poetry, that language is not a neutral medium but a force of distortion and creation, he opened a space that later poets would either occupy or evade. His failure is instructive, because it makes clear what is required: not a synthesis of observation and imagination, but a break. Not a reconciliation with empiricism, but a severance from its dominion over the poetic act.
