Even a casual survey of the varied prose works in which Samuel Taylor Coleridge expressed his ideas on life and art gives immediately the impressioin of irreducible chaos. Beyond the simple physical disperson of these works-the numerous letters and lectures, the involute noteboooks, the several works published and unpublished in addition to The Friend and Biographia Literaria-there is the complexity of Colerdige's thought: altogether a formidable challenge to any scholar. After years of sympathetic reading and thinking, Owen Barfield presents Coleridge's ideas in coherent form, short of philosophical systematization but carefully organized to demonstrate precisely what his ideas were and how they devleop. Owen Barfield, who died in 1997 shortly after entering his hundredth year, was one of the seminal minds of the twentieth century, of whom C. S. Lewis wrote "he towers above us all." His books have won respect from many writers other than Lewis, among them T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkein, and Saul Bellows, and John Lukacs. He was born in North London in 1898 and received his B.A. with first-class honors from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1921. He also earned B.C.L., M.A., and B.Litt. degrees from Oxford and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He served as a solicitor for twenty-eight years until his retirement from legal practice in 1959. Barfield was a visiting professor at Brandeis and Drew Universities, Hamilton College, the University of Missouri at Columbia, UCLA, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His books include seven others published by The Barfield Press: Romanticism Comes of Age, Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960s, Unancestral Voice, Speaker's Meaning, What Coleridge Thought, The Rediscovery of Meaning, and History, Guilt and Habit.