Coleridge the Visionary

about

Now a critical classic, Coleridge the Visionary was first published in 1959 by Chatto & Windus. This much-cited book throws light on the intellectual organisation of Coleridge's poetry and the imaginative qualities implicit in his philosophy.

John Beer's treatment of the visionary Coleridge is at the same time an informative companion to the 18th century's explorations of mythology in such works as Calmet's Antiquities Sacred and Profane, Burnet's Theory of the Earth, Campanella's City of the Sun, Lowth's De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum, Maurice's Hindostan, Bryant's Analysis of Ancient Mythology, Grew's Cosmologia Sacra.

Chapter headings

Coleridge and Romanticism
The Sense of Glory
“Science, Freedom and the Truth in Christ”
The Daemonic Sublime
The Glorious Sun
“By all the Eagle in thee, All the Dove”
The River and the Caverns
Fountain of the Sun
The Visionary Gleam

author

Professor John Bernard Beer, M.A., Ph.D., Litt.D., FBA, Coleridge scholar, Emeritus Fellow of Peterhouse, and former Research Fellow of St John’s College FBA (31 March 1926 – 10 December 2017) was a critic of British literature. . Best known as a scholar and critic of Romanticism – especially William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth – he was also published on E. M. Forster. John was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1994.

Beer served in the Royal Air Force from 1946 to 1948, a junior research fellow at St John's College, Cambridge, from 1955 to 1958 and between 1958 and 1964 he was assistant lecturer and then lecturer at the University of Manchester. From 1964 until his retirement in 1993, he was successively lecturer, reader (1978) and professor (1987) of English literature at the University of Cambridge.

His other roles included; President of the Charles Lamb Society from 1989 until 2002, Leverhulme emeritus fellow in 1995–1996. and Stanton lecturer in the philosophy of religion in the University of Cambridge in 2006. 

Notable WORKS 

• Coleridge, the Visionary, Chatto & Windus, 1959; Humanities E-Books LLP, 2007. ISBN 978-1-84760-044-8

• The Achievement of E. M. Forster, Chatto & Windus, 1962; Humanities E-Books LLP, 2007. ISBN 978-1-84760-003-5

• Blake's humanism, Manchester University Press/Barnes & Noble, 1968; Humanities E-Books LLP, 2007. ISBN 978-1-84760-000-4

• Wordsworth and the human heart, 1978. ISBN 978-0-231-04646-6

• Questioning Romanticism, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-8018-5052-5

• Post-Romantic Consciousness: Dickens to Plath, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ISBN 1-4039-0518-5

• William Blake: a Literary Life, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ISBN 978-1-4039-3954-8

• Blake's Visionary Universe, Manchester University Press/Barnes & Noble, 1969. ISBN 0-7190-0390-3

• Coleridge's Poetic Intelligence, Macmillan, 1977. ISBN 0-333-21312-2