The most useful materials on this subject are the essays ‘On the Principles of Genial Criticism concerning the Fine Arts’, ‘On Poesy or Art’, and the fragments on Taste and on Beauty. These are all most conveniently found in Shawcross’s edition of the Biographia Literaria. Some attention was paid to general aesthetic problems in the lectures on literary subjects, to be found in the three volumes of literary criticism edited by T. M. Raysor. Coleridge projected various works on aesthetics which did not get written.
His experience of painting and music was that of an outsider. ‘I accompanied Dr. Callcot [J. W. Callcot, the composer] to a sort of Glee or Catch Club, composed wholly of professional singers and was much delighted,’ he writes to friends, in 1808. ‘Bartleman, Harrison, Cooke, Greatorex, Smith were the principal singers—Webb, the patriarch of the club, and Father of Catches and Glees in the country, was present and I was much interested by his affectionate cheerfulness under his grievous burthen of Age and infirmities, as well as by the fervent affection payed to him by all the others; and Bartleman and Harrison pleased me as much as men as they did of course as singers. They either were, or were polite enough to be, marvellously delighted with me; and all the musical entertainments of the town are open to me without expenses.’ It will be noticed that the human interest predominates over the musical. Similarly with painting, though through his friendship with Hazlitt, the American painter Washington Allston, Sir George Beaumont, Northcote, C. R. Leslie, Thomas Wilkinson (the lake country artist), Mathilda Betham the miniaturist, and Thomas Phillips, he had more opportunity than with musical people, to discuss theory. He was widely read in the aesthetic writings of Lessing, Kant, Schiller, Garve and the Schlegels; and with his contemporaries in Germany in particular, he recognized as important the relations between anthropology and art, and art and religion. At the same time, he considered the primary fact to be the individual’s experience of pleasure in a work of art and that this ‘calls the whole soul into activity’.