Slang-Whanger.(William Hazlitt)(Biography)

Prepare yourself: you cannot be both a Coleridgean and a Hazlittean. I'm sorry, but it needed to be said. This doesn't mean that you can't like both "Kubla Khan" and "The Indian Jugglers," but somewhere along the line you have to choose. It's an ontological thing. Coleridge had an idealizing nature, Hazlitt a skeptical one. Coleridge gravitated toward the Absolute; Hazlitt fled from it. Coleridge believed that poetry was generated by "severe laws of the intellect"; Hazlitt believed that it was forged in the crucible of the sympathetic imagination. Coleridge argued that opposites exist in order to be reconciled; Hazlitt couldn't reconcile himself to that--or to much else, ...