This article examines the reputation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a talker and sage. It suggests that Coleridge's celebrity as a sage and conversationalist was at its height during his stay with the Gillmans in Highgate, England from 1816 onwards, and especially the period after 1829. The article discusses the distinctive opinions he expressed to his numerous visitors in this period based on Table Talk.
David Vallins is a Professor in the English Department of the Graduate School of Letters at Hiroshima University, Japan, and previously taught at universities in Britain and Hong Kong. His monograph, Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism, was published by Macmillan in 2000, and he has also edited Coleridge's Writings: On the Sublime (2003). His essays on Akenside, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Emerson, Virginia Woolf, and other authors have appeared in a number of books and journals, including Journal of the History of Ideas, ELH, Modern Philology, Prose Studies, and Symbiosis. His essay on ‘Affective Spaces and Romantic Consciousness’ in RadcliVe, Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley will appear in David Herman (ed.), The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, 700–the Present (2009).