Best known as a romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge also mounted a strong challenge to the skepticism and relativism we inherit from the Enlightenment. Ronald C. Wendling shows Coleridge, modern in his critical spirit and chronic anxiety, nevertheless progressing toward a total head-and-heart acceptance of Church of England orthodoxy.

The tension between Coleridge's poetic feeling for the divinity of the sensible world and his reverential sense of God's personality and transcendence stimulated this development. Adopting a personalist approach to the study of Coleridge's thought, Wendling explains how the circumstances contributing to his addictive personality helped shape his spiritual and intellectual life.