Biographia Literaria

Biographia Literaria, or in full Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, is an autobiography in discourse by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which he published in 1817, in two volumes of twenty-three chapters. The first intended title of the work was Autobiographia Literaria. The formative influences of the work were Wordsworth’s theory of imagination, Kantian view of imagination as a shaping power (for which Coleridge later coined the neologism “esemplastic”), and David Hartley and the Associationist psychology.