Publisher's Synopsis
Endowed with the gift of self-expression, Coleridge thought about language and its significance all his life. As political and religious certainties shifted at the time of the French Revolution, the effects were felt linguistically in a growing proliferation of voices: the ordained language of Church and State, the rhetoric of politics, the exploratory language of scientific investigation - and particularly psychological investigation. Although attracted by all these voices Coleridge looked primarily for a mediating power, an imaginative and affective spirituality that was alive in all such languages for those who knew how to look.;In his study, Dr Fulford traces the story of that long engagement, which was as present in his early political enthusiasms as in his private love for Sara Hutchinson, his poetry and the more orthodox religious position that he came to offer to his later public. The investigation not only gives unity to a personality and career that sometimes seems bewilderingly multifarious but indicates modern relevances that extend well beyond Coleridge's immediate conerns.
