SOURCE: A letter to Charles Augustus Tulk in 1818, in Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. II, edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, William Heinemann, 1895, pp. 685-88.

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...