Coleridge's Desultoriness

Coleridge often deplored the failings of his own desultory character, but some of his most distinguished writings find their voice by capturing the wandering, uncollected mode of a desultory consciousness. An interest in the desultory complicates the sense of spiritual purposiveness which much of his religious thinking invokes; and it inspires some of his most audacious formal experimentation, including the textual inventions of Sibylline Leaves, his eccentrically 'collected' poems, and Biographia Literaria, his wayward "literary life." Many of these experiments take place within the masterly shadow of Wordsworth, against whom Coleridge sets himself a kind of desultory antitype.