When you're very well acquainted with biographies of Shakespeare, it makes a very interesting change to suddenly read about Coleridge. One of the most eminent of Shakespearean biographers, Sir E. K. Chambers, put it as follows in the introduction to his own Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Biographical Study in 1938:

“One does not, indeed, get the full picture of Coleridge from a bare chronicle of his questing and self-tortured pilgrimage through life. But I do not think that it would have been wise to break the continuity of the book by any attempt at a detailed appreciation of his poetry, or of his Shakespearean criticism, or of his contribution to aesthetic theory, or of his political development, or of his final endeavour to provide a metaphysical basis for Trinitarian Christianity. These are tempting themes, but, although their student must take account of chronology, they can hardly be presented under its limitations.”

The odd thing about it is that with Shakespeare, one doesn't feel the same kind of limitation. Biographical details about Shakespeare are very scant, and his biographers have tended to be very studious in discovering the details, and weaving it together with some of the bigger picture about the time. With Coleridge, on the other hand, there's almost a surplus of biographical detail, in terms of what can be handled, and even though some of the fundamental questions such as the circumstances surrounding the writing of Kubla Khan are currently unanswered, there's a great deal more that we know about Coleridge than we do about Shakespeare—several orders of magnitude more.

But even more oddly, though the differences are huge, their effects are similar. With Shakespeare, there are so many biographers trying to work with such an inctricate amount of very humdrum details that it's created a diversity, and he's so popular in general, that it's created what may be a biographically unrivalled diversity. With Coleridge there is less of a diversity in the biographies, and in fact it's difficult to find a really good biography about Coleridge in the way that you can just look at Schoenbaum or Honan or Chambers when you study Shakespeare; but there's a great diversity of the subject matter itself.

Why do we even spend so much effort in making biographies of people like these? Apart from the general interest of wanting to know more about people who made such astounding works, I think the question their biographers are trying to solve, whether overtly or not, is: how did they make such astounding works? The biography of famous artists may therefore be seen as, really, a guarded form of work on the philosophy and process of creativity. You might not think that from Chambers's description of Coleridge's “questing and self-tortured pilgrimage through life”, but then even that raises the question of how Coleridge was able to produce so much when he was so enfeebled in various ways.

Indeed, one of the most interesting things about Coleridge from a literary history point of view is that he's coming to be more highly regarded for his notebooks, his admarginations, and his letters than he is for his published poems. Coleridge's Notebooks in particular seem to be really stunning. As Dr. Paddy Bullard put it, they're “thought of as the very best of his prose”; but they're also “a bit hard to penetrate”. More than a bit hard if you consider just the accessibility of the works: there's a book called Coleridge's Notebooks - A Selection by Seamus Perry (2003), but this book is a miniscule abridgement of the full notebooks, as edited by Kathleen Coburn in eight books. These eight books span a foot or two of shelf space, whereas Perry's work takes up literally about a centimetre. And, of course, Coburn's works are out of print and very expensive to buy; I'm glad I've got a good library.

As to the quality of the Notebooks themselves, for what are considered the “best of his prose” there doesn't seem to be much comment about them on the web. The chief quality is their diversity of thought: they're comprised of lots of quotations, recipes, ideas, descriptions, fragments of poetry, and really all the kinds of things that you would to an extent expect to find in the notebooks of a genius of the romantic age, just more so. This miscellany of interesting bits and bobs just goes on and on. And then once you get hooked on the details, you could easily generate many an academic paper on them.

Academic papers on Coleridge are, however, another somewhat thorny issue. The wider context of how Coleridge and the Romantics are regarded by modern critics is much harder to get into than the same with Shakespeare. Apart from the works of John Spencer Hill, who is a literary historian really, there isn't really much obvious content to get hooked on. This might be a personal view; I might not have been looking in the right places, but then I had the same kind of problem with Shakespeare and solved it quickly and easily. This does seem to be a consequence of the fact that Coleridge is just less popular a writer than Shakespeare, but on the other hand the very class of work about the man is affected as a result. Chambers doesn't seem at his sparkling best with Coleridge as he does for Shakespeare. Perhaps, at the end of the day, Coleridge is simply a much more difficult biographical subject than Shakespeare, even with the large amount of available source material.