Body and Soul in Coleridge's Notebooks, 1827-1834

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's personal notebooks are fascinating, invaluable, yet sometimes opaque and therefore generally-neglected windows into the mind of this important Romantic theologian, philosopher, and poet. The 'Fly-catchers' (as he called the notebooks) do reveal clearly, however, that Coleridge spent much of his life dwelling upon the relationship between the human Body and Soul, both in life and after death. In response to this notebook evidence, especially that recorded during the last years of his unquestionably-eventful life, this study explores in depth Coleridge's fluctuating perceptions of human Body/Soul relations. Determining that he essentially oscillated between three different views of the relationship, and entertained, as a result (and among other things), several different ideas of Life and some interesting thought on certain fundamental tenets of Christianity, Body and Soul charts the main scientific, philosophical, theological, and personal influences that led Coleridge to this situation; namely Naturphilosophie, Greek philosophy, Biblical Hebraic anthropology, chronic illness, Edward Irving, Emanuel Swedenborg, and (in particular) St Paul.