THE PERVASIVE INFLUENCE OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE'S WORK ON THE writings of Edgar Allan Poe is well documented. As early as 1930, in his article "Poe's Debt to Coleridge," Floyd Stovall maintained that Coleridge was "the guiding genius of Poe's entire intellectual life." (1) Daniel Hoffman's contention from 1972 that "the philosophical breadth of Coleridge underlies Poe's acute narrowness as the pyramid on the Great Seal of the United States at its summit supports one assured and unblinking eye" is equally far-reaching. (2) Yet, as undeniable as the influential presence of Coleridge's thought in Poe's texts might be, the insinuation of seamless continuity that underpins these and similar assessments needs to be called into question. Poe is in fact far from completing the philosophical structure that Coleridge had attempted to build, and if he inhabits it, he does so not as a headstone in its supporting arch, but rather as a threat to its desired foundations. Poe felt without a doubt that he had discovered the voice of a kindred spirit in Coleridge's early poetry, a voice that would continue to reverberate in Poe's prose, where elements of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancyent Marinere resurface with the persistence of those subconscious depths of guilt and speechless dread that fascinated both writers equally. It is also an open secret that Poe the reviewer and literary critic freely borrowed from Coleridge's poetological reflections to suit his needs, unabashedly presenting Coleridge's aesthetic principles, specifically those developed in the Biographia Literaria, as his own critical insights. Even Poe's famous "tales of ratiocination," which institute the modern genre of detective fiction, owe, as Christopher Kearns has rightfully pointed out, a debt to Coleridge that is just as heavy as it is unacknowledged. (3) Despite their pervasiveness, such "effects" of literary influence would not have greatly troubled Coleridge, for whom Poe, who ultimately no more than adopts Coleridge's own strategies of textual appropriation, obviously presented no direct literary competition. What would have been of some concern for Coleridge, however--had Poe, like the "Frogpondian" Emerson, been able to make the pilgrimage to Highgate for a hypothetical table talk with the sage of British Romantic letters--is the fact that the philosophical and religious convictions that underpin Coleridge's thought ceased to have any purchase on Poe's thought and prose. If Emerson's Unitarianism no longer seemed a tenable religious position for the ex-Unitarian Coleridge, deeply immersed in Trinitarian belief in the last years of his life, the differences in religious, philosophical, and aesthetic sensibility between Coleridge and Poe ultimately run far deeper than such doctrinal conflicts.
