This book explores how the British Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) pursued the divine, as shown in his poetry, published prose writing, notebooks, and letters.

Coleridge himself used a dialectic of light and dark, knowing and unknowing, in his often-fragmentary theological writing. He wrote about the light of God's reason, the logos, which illuminates human minds. Glimpses of this light appears in poetry such as 'The Eolian Harp' and 'Frost at Midnight' and is most explicitly pursued in prose works such as Aids to Reflection and the unfinished Opus Maximum. And yet Coleridge's writing is also marked with darkness that manifested in deep despair and doubt. This is especially true of his late poetry, which was written alongside his most ostensibly Christian prose works. Some scholarship has wrestled over whether Coleridge was successful in his pursuit of the divine light, or if he failed due to a personal flaw, the light's inherent unattainability, or its non-existence.

The author of this study argues that both light and darkness must be taken seriously in accounting for his pursuit of the divine, and that darkness and limitation do not preclude his pursuit. This book, then, is not just about the dialectic of light and dark, but the ways in which the light itself illuminates and obscures-just as darkness demarcates both genuine doubt and the renewal of faith. It will be of particular interest to scholars of theology and literature.