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eading carefully in Plato, who also conceived of the poet, primarily, as an inspired visionary, mostfamously in the representation portrayed in his Ion.But in 1815, when writing Biographia Literaria Coleridge does refer to Kant’s philosophy toadd a more serious and sophisticated tone to his enquiry then, relating that:The writings of the illustrious sage of Königsberg, the founder of Critical Philosophy, morethan any other work at once invigorated and disciplined my understanding. The originality,the depth, and the compression of the thought; the novelty and subtlety, yet solidity andimportance of the distinctions; the adamantine chains of logic; and I will venture to add(paradox as it will appear to those who have taken their notion of Immanuel Kant fromreviewers and Frenchmen) the clearness and evidence of the Critique of Pure Reason; of theJudgement; of the Metaphysical Elements of Natural Philosophy, and of his Religion Withinthe Bounds of Pure Reason, took possession of me as with a giant’s hand. (BL IX 84)At the time of writing Biographia, however, Coleridge was actually drawing extensively onSchelling’s work, which he copied, almost verbatim, as he tried to impress his readers with aphilosophical ‘deduction of the Imagination’. But, as Thomas McFarland argued in Wordsworth andthe Pantheist Tradition, Coleridge’s philosophical beliefs were driven by his religious concerns, andPlato was actually a more congenial influence than Kant. In writing about Coleridge’s understandingof Imagination, and the likelihood that he was influenced by Kant’s controlling idea of Imagination asEinbildungskraft, McFarland argued that the idea originated in Plato, and that Coleridge’sunderstanding was more Platonic that Kantian. McFarland writes that the representation of thecreative power of the poet’s mind, ‘as an analogue of the divine creativity, is not the property of Kant,but is an idea of great persistence and great antiquity, [and] is specifically, a Platonism’ (34). 50 The‘radical difference’ between Wordsworth and Coleridge is better understood as one reflecting theancient divide between Platonic idealism and Aristotelian realism, though in Wordsworth’s case it wascompounded by his adoption of a belief in Nature that was defined by the early Stoic philosophers,and therefore refused Coleridge’s transcendentalism.50 In Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason, Richard Berkeley presents a major challenge to MacFarland’sColeridge and the Pantheist Tradition claiming that his ‘very specific and idiosyncratic understanding ofthe issue’ had failed to appreciate ‘the full significance of the pantheism controversy for Coleridge’s poetryand thought’(1).69