Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Transcendentalist

In introducing the Transcendentalist poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Peter Whitham, a member of our church takes us back to the socio-political milieu of England in the late 18th Century, when revolutionary ideas - fueled by inequality, poverty, unemployment, hunger and a life expectancy of less than 40 years - had spread from France. A paranoid British Government suspected Unitarian free-thinkers and reformers such as Joseph Priestley and Thomas Fyshe-Palmer of sedition. Into this political maelstrom came the Transcendentalist Romantic Poets - Wordsworth, Coleridge and - later, the American poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson. They argued for a Transcendent God. Coleridge - and other Unitarian idealists helped shape the Unitarian, reformist values of the time: adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of humanity and - for the revelation of our deepest truths - the supremacy of insight over logic and experience. listen on for Peter's insightful address.