Writing as prophecy …

… Rime without reason: Did Coleridge foretell his own future in a poem? (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Undergirding Guite’s esoteric premiss is an assertion that Coleridge makes in his pioneering work of literary criticism, Biographia Literaria, published two decades after he composed the first version of his poem. Defining what he christens the “sacred power of self-intuition”, Coleridge bears witness to a kind of psychic propensity with which he is convinced some individuals are uniquely endowed – a “philosophic imagination” capable of anticipating as yet unformed contours of their identity. Such individuals, Coleridge explains, “feel in their own spirits the same instinct which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antennae yet to come. They know and feel, that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them”.