Poet of Many Parts

July 5, 1990

BUT Coleridge was much more than a Romantic poet: he was also a journalist of genius, a translator, a matchless letter-writer (six volumes), an incomparable autobiographer and self-interrogator in his Notebooks (over 60 surviving between 1794 and his death), a literary critic, a spectacular lecturer, a folklorist, a philosopher, a psychologist (specialising in dreams and creativity), a playwright and dramatic critic, and - that much disputed word - a metaphysician. - From `Coleridge: Early Visions'