| some of his speculative ideas. I have not, however, included any comprehensive discussion of Coleridge's published prose works per se, and the reader will find that, while I have drawn on the published prose in various ways, I have relied much more heavily on notebooks, marginalia, and letters. This may seem to some readers a serious deficiency, and I should perhaps therefore explain that, since the 'generative principles' with which I am concerned have their origin in Coleridge's consciousness, in his own experience of 'being,' the notebooks, the marginalia, and the letters are, so to speak, closer to the point of origin than the works which he prepared for publication, and in which he was to some degree concerned to adapt his statements to what he conceived to be the demands of public comprehension. Coleridge liked to suggest that Plato and even Kant kept secret or revealed only to initiates their most profound and esoteric doctrines. Whatever shortcomings this suggestion may or may not have as applied to Plato or Kant, it reveals, I think, something about Coleridge. |
| Some parts of this essay derive from a dissertation written some years ago and I am indebted to Carlos Baker and the late R. P. Blackmur for their criticisms of that work. Other parts derive from my editing of Coleridge's voluminous marginalia on Jacob Boehme for the forthcoming Collected Coleridge and I owe a great deal both to Kathleen Coburn, the general editor of that monumental work, and to the editor of the "Collected Marginalia," George Whalley, for their generosity in sharing with me something of their great knowledge of Coleridge. This essay owes much to the careful and repeated reading of Robert F. Gleckner, some of whose suggestions I have adopted and some of whose criticisms I fear I have failed to meet. I am also indebted to the criticism of Peter Heller, Robert Tucker, and Leone Stein, who have all read the manuscript at one stage or another of its development. And I owe more than I can say to discussions over the years with G. Armour Craig, Robin Skelton, and Charles McDonald. |
| I wish to thank the Clarendon Press, Oxford, for permission to use material from E. L. Griggs's edition of The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Bollingen Foundation for permission to use material from The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor |
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