22 Thomas Vogler

of general propriety dictate the separation." (1815 Preface 3:39). But also
missing is the "truth" about the imagination—the truth that Wordsworth
missed in his attempts to philosophize about his own poetry and poetry in
general.
Coleridge's image for this missing space comes in chapter 4, as he turns
from his initial encounter with Wordsworth to the "attempt" to "present
an intelligible statement of [his] own poetic creed," an attempt which will
occupy him for the next nine chapters:
My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic
fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift
themselves above ground, and are visible to the common eye of our
common consciousness. (1:88)
Kenneth Johnston has aptly observed that for Wordsworth there was "a
tendency for The Recluse to turn at every critical point into The Prelude"
(18). Coleridge's description of The Prelude in the famous letter to Words-
worth of April 1815 repeats his image of his plans for the Biographia: "the
Poem on the growth of your own mind was as the ground-plat and the
Roots, out of which the Recluse was to have sprung up as the Tree—as
far as the same Sap in both, I expected them doubtless to have formed
one compleat Whole" (CL 4:573). In the same letter he makes an interest­
ing slip, calling it "the Poem on the Growth of your own Support" (576)
which he thought would "have laid a solid and immoveable foundation for
the Edifice by removing the sandy Sophisms of Locke, and the Mechanic
Dogmatists" (574). This is also an apt description of his own project in
the following chapters, which set out to present Coleridge's "own state­
ment of the theory" and "the grounds on which I rest it" in the form of
"deductions from established premises conveyed in such a form, as is cal­
culated either to effect afundamental conviction, or to receive afundamental
confutation" (1:88, italics added). It would seem clear, from preliminary
gestures of this sort, that Coleridge was committing himself to producing
in the Biographia the story of the growth of his own mind (or "support"
as in the Wordsworth letter) as a case study or demonstration of the real
existence and operation of the imagination.4
At the core of the "story" must be the performative or self-constituting
utterance of an "1 AM." He must write his SUM before he can write his
SUMMA, as its existential "ground," for "It is asserted only, that the act
of self-consciousness is for us the source and principle of all our possible
knowledge" (1:284). But the SUMMA, the magnum opus or Logosophia in the