Samuel T., how I love thee!

I try to be open minded and unconventional (as unconventional as a married mother-of-three can be), yet I judge men of history when they are not good family men, abandoning their wives for a tortured relationship with opium and touring Europe. So, I started with negative feelings toward Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I also consider myself a great lover of poetry—all poetry except hard-core gangsta rap and Romantic poetry. With my disdain for Romantic poets and bad husbands, I expected to dislike Coleridge. Call me a slob, but my mind was nearly shut on the subject of him.

Yet, in reading Rex Veeder’s essay “Coleridge’s Philosophy of Composition: An Overview of a Romantic Rhetorician,” I became inspired—not Coleridge-defined inspiration, but at the very least, excited. Speaking of inspiration, I agree with Linda Flower that Coleridge’s theory of inspiration could be harmful to the ideals of composition teaching, which believe writing can actually be taught not divined. When we value lightning bolt inspiration, we make writing seem mysterious, inaccessible and magical. This historic notion of inspiration is likely the biggest cause of “writer’s block” throughout the centuries. Yet, if Coleridge was bi-polar, as some modern thinkers have suggested, he probably did experience fits of mania, posing as inspiration.

With all of these strikes against Coleridge, I still find much to celebrate in Veeder’s estimation of him. Coleridge advocates for the personal. He, according to Veeder, believes that “the composing act, therefore, has a personal and a social dimension. It requires the composer to examine personal insight and to research and observation” (23). Further, Coleridge privileges personal knowledge. He says, “No knowledge could be acquired without subjective influence” (24). He values both the intimate and the intuitive and believes that the writer serves as a conduit between the intuitive and the objective. Veeder writes, “Composition is an intimate act, tentative and exploring, where the composer reveals a sustained and personal involvement in both the subject and the process of discovering the implications of the subject’s relationship to writer and audience” (26).

He acknowledges that composing can be a non-linear process. “Coleridge’s favorite metaphor for the composing process is the spiral . . . if we were to visualize Coleridge’s method, we would have to make extensive use of concentric circles, spirals, and loops” (26). Veeder also writes, “The structure of the essay would suggest a looping activity rather than a linear one, where the writer digresses often, but brings the subject of digression back to the central concern of the essay” (27).

And, he, of course, encourages the presence of the creative in writing. He applies the Romantic emphasis on imaginative thinking onto the composing process, and he even devises his own map of imaginative thinking. His writer-ly life is punctuated with a wide variety of genres, from poetry to sermons, from essays to criticism. Coleridge also believes that as we create as writers, “our habits of thinking and composing create who we are” (28).

These ideals of the personal, the non-linear, and the creative are recognized as values of more modern composition theorists, like Wendy Bishop, Gordon Rohman, Ken Macrorie, Ann Berthoff. He seems to have much in common with feminist theorists who write about oppressive composition practices that require the suppression of the self and of the personal, and thus, erase a diversity of voices from our communal discourse. For so long, we have compartmentalized writing in terms of head vs. heart, objective vs. personal, academic vs. creative. Coleridge’s theories of writing blur these distinctions.

He also values diversity: “Coleridge’s great metaphor for composition is the journey outward from the center of the self in order to embrace diversity and bring difference into harmony with the self” (22). Veeder writes of Coleridge’s thoughts on composition methodology, “Practicing this kind of composition forms the habits Coleridge felt were necessary for an individual to interact with a diverse society: suspension of judgement, the ability to reflect, the ability to speculate and compare, the ability to act on ideas and not appetites” (28).

Quite possibly, despite his sappy poetry, Coleridge was a man who lived before his time.