[An English poet and critic, Coleridge was central to the English Romantic movement and is considered one of the greatest literary critics in the English language. Besides his poetry, his most important contributions include his formulation of Romantic theory, his introduction of the ideas of the German Romantics to England, and his Shakespearean criticism, which overthrew the last remnants of the Neoclassical approach to William Shakespeare and focused on Shakespeare as a masterful portrayer of human character. In the following excerpt from a letter sent to Charles Augustus Tulk in 1818, Coleridge "grades" a selection of poems from Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience.]

I return you Blake's poesies, metrical and graphic, with thanks. With this and the book, I have sent a rude scrawl as to the order in which I was pleased by the several poems….

Blake's Poems.—I begin with my dyspathies that I may forget them, and have uninterrupted space for loves and sympathies. Title-page and the following emblem contain all the faults of the drawings with as few beauties as could be in the compositions of a man who was capable of such faults and such beauties. The faulty despotism in symbols amounting in the title-page to the µισητòν, and occasionally, irregular unmodified lines of the inanimate, sometimes as the effect of rigidity and sometimes of exossation like a wet tendon. So likewise the ambiguity of the drapery. Is it a garment or the body incised and scored out? The lumpness (the effect of vinegar on an egg) in the upper one of the two prostrate figures on the title-page, and the straight line down the waistcoat of pinky goldbeaters' skin in the next drawing, with the I don't-know-whatness of the countenance, as if the mouth had been formed by the habit of placing the tongue not contemptuously, but stupidly, between the lower gums and the lower jaw—these are the only repulsive faults I have noticed. The figure, however, of the second leaf, abstracted from the expression of the countenance given it by something about the mouth, and the interspace from the lower lip to the chin, is such as only a master learned in his art could produce.

N. B. I signifies "It gave me great pleasure.ł, "Still greater." łł, "And greater still." Θ, "In the highest degree." O, "In the lowest."

"Shepherd," I; "Spring," I (last stanza, ł); "Holy Thursday," łł; "Laughing Song," ł; "Nurse's Song," I; "The Divine Image," Θ; "The Lamb," ł; "The little black Boy," Θ, yea Θ+Θ; "Infant Joy,"łł (N. B. For the three last lines I should write, "When wilt thou smile," or "O smile, O smile! I'll sing the while." For a babe two days old does not, cannot smile, and innocence and the very truth of Nature must go together. Infancy is too holy a thing to be ornamented). "The Echoing Green," I, (the figures ł, and of the second leaf, łł); "The Cradle Song," I; "The School Boy," łł; "Night," Θ; "On another's Sorrow," I; "A Dream," ?; "The little boy lost," I (the drawing, ł) "The little boy found," I; "The Blossom," O; "The Chimney Sweeper," O; "The Voice of the Ancient Bard," O.

"Introduction," ł; "Earth's Answer," ł; "Infant Sorrow," I; "The Clod and the Pebble," I; "The Garden of Love," ł; "The Fly," I; "The Tyger," ł; "A little boy lost," ł; "Holy Thursday," I; [p. 13, O; "Nurse's Song," O?]; "The little girl lost and found" (the ornaments most exquisite! the poem, I); "Chimney Sweeper in the Snow," O; "To Tirzah," and "The Poison Tree," I—and yet O; "A little Girl lost," O. (I would have had it omitted, not for the want of innocence in the poem, but from the too probable want of it in many readers.) "London," I; "The Sick Rose," I; "The little Vagabond," O. Though I cannot approve altogether of this last poem, and have been inclined to think that the error which is most likely to beset the scholars of Emanuel Swedenborg is that of utterly demerging the tremendous incompatibilities with an evil will that arise out of the essential Holiness of the abysmal A-seity in the love of the Eternal Person, and thus giving temptation to weak minds to sink this love itself into Good Nature, yet still I disapprove the mood of mind in this wild poem so much less than I do the servile blind-worm, wrap-rascal scurf-coat of fear of the modern Saint (whose whole being is a lie, to themselves as well as to their brethren), that I should laugh with good conscience in watching a Saint of the new stamp, one of the first stars of our eleemosynary advertisements, groaning in windpipe! and with the whites of his eyes upraised at the audacity of this poem! Anything rather than this degradation I̲ of Humanity, and therein of the Incarnate Divinity!

S. T. C.

O̲ means that I am perplexed and have no opinion.

I̲, with which how can we utter "Our Father"?