Samuel Taylor Coleridge emerges here as a brilliant, elusive figure whose life can be most fully grasped through his letters. This scholarly volume traces the origins and editing of the Biographical Supplement to Biographia Literaria, weighs competing biographical plans, and insists on preserving Coleridge's own voice from authoritative sources. It also offers a rich historical census of his correspondence, showing how letters scattered through poems, essays, memoirs, magazines, and biographies gradually formed a vast, partly recovered record. More than a documentary archive, the book presents the letters as a vivid psychological and intellectual portrait of Coleridge at the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, when older traditions yielded to Romantic and Transcendental thought. His wit, political force, domestic humor, self-scrutiny, and poetic ambition appear in lively letters from 1797 onward, including exchanges with Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Lamb, Thelwall, Poole, Cottle, and the Wedgwoods. The volume follows his growth from Cambridge and Pantisocracy through The Watchman, Stowey, Lyrical Ballads, Germany, and the writing of Osorio, while also providing a substantial bibliography and detailed contents for his early life and correspondence. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.