... Coleridge in some way invented his own personal religion. There is insufficient time to go into this in detail now, but there are some key ideas within this that we shall see. It is possible to see that Coleridge took on the idea that God is in things and that all substance is divine, and this has profound implications for his poetry and his poetic imagination. He feels, in The Pains of Sleep: "in me, round me, everywhere/ Eternal strength and wisdom are." The important thing is that Coleridge sees not only external objects, but also himself and therefore other people, as God ("Eternal strength"). In the Ancient Mariner, the mariner harms God in harming the albatross, and blesses God in blessing the water snakes. This has very topical implications in Fears in Solitude, where, as Duncan Wu says "the central argument of the poem is that, in declaring war on ...

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