Modelling Genius: Performance and Pedagogy in Coleridge’s Royal Institution Lectures

This article explains how Royal Institution lecturing policy informs Coleridge’s 1808 lecture series on the Principles of Poetry. The explanation rests on the pedagogical rationale requiring all RI lecturers experimentally to demonstrate or illustrate the principles they introduce. While lecturers on natural philosophy and chemistry fulfilled this obligation through on-stage experiments, lecturers on the ‘arts’ typically made use of models to demonstrate the function of a product of art. Coleridge, I argue, in order to illustrate his principles of Poetic and critical genius, instead uses himself as a model. Situating Coleridge’s lecture performances within the pedagogical infrastructure of the RI confirms and extends recent claims by other critics that Coleridge’s digressions are a deliberate part of his method. As these lectures comprise much of Coleridge’s earliest thinking on poetry and criticism, understanding how RI policy shaped it also reveals the intimate connection between Romanticism and the Royal Institution.