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two points, but his actual argument fell on deaf ears. Coleridge was won over by Wordsworth’s‘manner’, as Wordsworth demonstrated his sophisticated rhetorical skill. He was both deeply ‘moved’by Wordsworth’s appeals to pathos, and ‘pleased’ by Wordsworth’s ethos: which he saw, mistakenly,as that of an inspired Orphic bard. But he was not capable of being ‘instructed’ by the ‘matter’ ofWordsworth’s logos. Wordsworth failed to convince him of his alternative, more classic, appreciationof ‘imagination’. He was no more persuaded to accept Wordsworth’s stoic philosophical beliefs inJanuary 1807 than he had been in 1798, when Wordsworth would have read him ‘Lines WrittenAbove Tintern Abbey’.Coleridge responded to Wordsworth’s epic by writing his own poem: To WilliamWordsworth. 15 In his appreciation of Wordsworth’s work he shows that he had no idea that theAddress was both a ‘defence’ of Wordsworth’s poetic art or that it re-iterated his differingunderstanding of ‘imagination’. Nor was he at all persuaded that he should join Wordsworth as a‘Prophet of Nature’ on Wordsworth’s terms. Unconscious of Wordsworth’s actual claims in hisAddress, Coleridge defined Wordsworth’s art quite differently. Wordsworth’s ‘history’ of the growthof his mind is described as something ‘More than historic’, it is a ‘prophetic Lay…An Orphic Taleindeed / A Tale divine of high and passionate thoughts…a Song of Truth…Not learnt, but native, herown natural notes!’ In his response Coleridge effectively denies Wordsworth’s voice its own authority,concluding his response by maintaining that Wordsworth’s ‘Lay’ was so powerful that when he finallyrose after it had ceased, he ‘found himself in prayer’. As would also happen some nine year later –when he did actually address his differences with Wordsworth in writing Biographia Literaria – hisgreat praise of Wordsworth occurs as a means of denying any recognition of his actual power as apoet. It was in Biographia that Coleridge finally produced his more considered and far moresignificant response to the argument over imagination, and his last word on the topic would becomedefinitive for later literary criticism.In Biographia, Coleridge set out to ridicule Wordsworth’s theoretical claims in order to provethat his success as a poet (and not a philosopher) depended on his ‘Imagination’. In his openingparagraph Coleridge introduced the work as a ‘statement of my principles in politics, religion andphilosophy, and the application of the rules deduced from philosophical principles to poetry andcriticism’. And of the objects which he proposed to himself:it was not the least important to effect, as far as possible, a settlement of the long-continuedcontroversy concerning the true nature of poetic diction, and at the same time to define withthe utmost impartiality the real poetic character of the poet by whose writings this controversywas first kindled and has been since fuelled and fired. (BL I 1)It is clear that in 1815, when Coleridge was penning these lines he was still engaged in a dispute withWordsworth that remained a burning issue, and Wordsworth is described as having continued to feedthe flames of the controversy. Coleridge’s rhetoric implies that Wordsworth’s remarks are of an15 ‘To William Wordsworth: Lines composed, for the greater part on the night on which he finished therecitation of his poem (in thirteen books) concerning the growth and history of his own mind’.For the full text of the poem as written in 1806 see NP pp. 542-4.102