Ordering the Romantic Mind: Reflections on Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This study contributes to recent revisionary trends in the study of British Romanticism, which highlight the frequently-overlooked emphasis on discipline and regulation found in Romantic reflection on the subject of poetry, imagination, and passion. The contribution revisits the tensions underlying William Wordsworth’s definitions of poetry in Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s conception of the imagination in Biographia Literaria and proposes that the latter’s Dejection: An Ode advances a Romantic re-writing of Epicurean and Stoic exercises for ordering the mind by forming deliberate and purposeful habits of attention and contemplation.