Samuel Taylor Coleridge was certainly influenced by German transcendentalism, but he also went beyond what the philosophers proposed to develop an idealism of his own in Biographia Literaria. Let's look at this in more detail to help you get started on this assignment.

Coleridge was influenced by German philosophers like Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Schelling, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. You should read a bit about their ideas in order to be able to recognize them in Coleridge's work.

As you turn to Biographia Literaria, you should pay special attention to Coleridge's ideas about how the mind sees reality. He discusses how the mind can discover new realities in nature and how new ideas do not necessarily have to grow out of old ideas as some have claimed. You should also look closely at Coleridge's definitions of primary imagination, secondary imagination, and fancy. As he presents these, he is working in the tradition of transcendentalism while at the same time branching out in new directions that express his own idealism.