The Meaning of Feeling

Henry Nelson Coleridge is the person who appears to have persuaded William Wordsworth that he ought to write a philosophical poem. Coleridge objects to The Excursion because it is about common experience, because Wordsworth has attached the whole depth and weight of his own individual feelings to the truths of human development. Lady Beaumont showed Coleridge&s;s letter criticising The Excursion to Wordsworth. Coleridge&s;s plan for The Recluse also resembles the philosophical sections of the Biographia Literaria that were to be written that summer and autumn, so that what Coleridge was recommending to Wordsworth he was meditating for his own purposes as well. Coleridge&s;s deep personal involvement in the idea that Wordsworth should write a philosophical poem is apparent throughout his remarks. Outside of poetry, he has little taste for fiction, speculation or abstraction. The references to philosophers and philosophy in Wordsworth&s;s prose are extremely sparse and perfunctory.