Coleridge the Talker

This chapter explores Coleridge’s late career as a prodigious talker. An insistent strain in contemporary accounts of Coleridge’s talk suggests that his auditors recognized in his talking the dynamics of thinking itself: not a content that could be transported back from one’s encounter with him, but the rhythms of a mind in a state of radical non-relation to a social world with which it nonetheless “colludes,” in Thomas De Quincey’s words. Both Hannah Arendt, in The Life of the Mind, and William Hazlitt, in The Spirit of the Age, hold up this sort of thinking as a slender, rear-guard resistance that the purposelessness of thought can offer to an unthinking instrumentalism that functions to “reduce law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine,” in Hazlitt’s words. In his time, Coleridge became the figure of a thinking without limits, the bearer of a frail resistance to the modern social and political arrangements from which this thinking withdraws.