Coleridge and the Uses of Division

'magnificent... Perry's discussion of Wordsworth has a special power and poignancy in it.... the end of Perry's discussion, the ultimate nature of the dilemma facing Coleridge is set forth with a clarity the reader can only marvel at....The book concludes with a very persuasive reading of The Ancient Mariner as a poem about the value of having things both ways. Perry's account is too complex to summarize, but offers powerful vindication of the interpretative value of his book's argument. It would be hard to do justice to the stylistic verve of the book, its patient and dazzlingly elegant elucidation of complex problems. What can be said is that it takes its place among the very best of books on Coleridge and that no university or college library should be without it.' -Neil Vickers, The Review of English Studies'the genius of one of the greatest and strangest Romantics is explored by Perry with the unreductive sympathy it deserves' -Michael O'Neill, TLS'For all its careful scholarship, Perry's book forms a spirited addition to performance criticism of Romantic literature' -Michael O'Neill, TLS'A supple, intelligent study... Perry writes with a capacious nimbleness that allows him to keep pace with and track of 'the windings of [Coleridge's] writings', and do justice to their brilliant 'zigzaggery'... his book permits us to eavesdrop with newly attuned ears on an endlessly fascinating 'dialogue of two voices, both Coleridge's'.' -Michael O'Neill, TLSFaced with Coleridge's irresolution and fragmentariness, critics have often declared him a failure. This study champions that failure as an oblique kind of success - the fruit of a virtuous and fertile indecision between rival imaginative vocations, each good but incompatible. Covering the entire range of his religious and philosophical prose and criticism, it also offers close readings of the major poems and describes afresh the momentous relationship with Wordsworth.