Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I discuss Coleridge’s life and its inauguration of the poet as Satanic opium-smoking tormented outcast; his late-life theory of the God-like poetic imagination and its debts to Immanuel Kant; his more youthful model of the poet as invaginated rapt/raped figure of passivity before nature; his metafiction and its relation to German Romantic ideas about irony and “progressive universal poetry”; his “mystery poems” of female monsters and dragons of the deep; his conservative revolution in prosody; his lesbian vampire pornography; his mythical person from Porlock; and his summative and explosive vision of Xanadu.
The last 12 minutes are free to all: there, in conjunction with “Kubla Khan,” I discuss a 19th-century theory positing a Mongol origin for the Aztec Empire and its startlingly synchronistic relevance to my recent querelle (since ended) with a fellow Substack author—and possibly to the next world war. Please like, share, comment, subscribe, and please enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
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