| The purpose of this paper is to consider what Coleridge thought about language, focusing upon significant passages treating of it or topics related to it in Biographia Literaria, from which he mainly gains his reputation as a topnotch critic.
What is stressed about poetic expression in Biographia Literaria is the importance of being “natural”. Coleridge endeavours, like Wordsworth, to exclude conventionalized poetic diction from his poetry. But Coleridge disagrees with Wordsworth about what “natural expression” means. Coleridge takes the position that, to be natural, expression needs to reflect, or be derived from, the activities of the human mind, while Wordsworth makes every effort to bring the expression in his poems as near as possible to “the very language of men”, which he regards as natural.
Another thing which Coleridge emphasizes is that every part in an excellent poem should be harmonized into one organic whole. This theory of verbal expression, it is pointed out in this paper, corresponds with Coleridge’s world-view, in which everything has its own life, but at the same time shares “one Life”.
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