" However, refutes Ernest Coleridge, whatever may be said about Coleridge for or against, as an "inventor of harmonies," his self-criticism was the most stern of all. He continually wrote and rewrote his work in order "discover and reveal the hidden springs, the thoughts and passions of the artificer." One would be wrong to believe that it was only his family that thought his work excellent. Many later critics have been just as positive about his writings. Suther (5) said, for example, that Coleridge's greatness was due to his "dogged refusal to pretend that the problems and paradoxes of human life are any less vast, ineffable, and terrifying than his intuition revealed to him they were." In his efforts to come to terms with life using words such as "tragedy," "sin," "guilt," "redemption," "grace," "Reason," "inspiration," and "God," to describe phenomena he was helping others deal with the paradoxes that they faced in their own lives.

Similarly, Taylor wrote that Coleridge was "among the most purposeful practitioners of verse as verse in his era." Along with his deep involvement with a changing political situation and with philosophical and religious debates, he greatly enjoyed the specifics of willed poetic craftsmanship and was quick to critique in his own writings and in that of others lapses in sound, whether from haste to express opinions however true or false, training, natively faulty sense of rhythm or weight of vowels, or erroneous perceptions about an equivalence of poetry and prose. "Amid his many ardent defenses -- of the sanctity of the human soul, of the trinity, of the clerisy, and of method -- his defense of the ancient...

Others, like his estranged friend Wordsworth are cited much more often. Many scholars believe that it is because he wrote very little during his life time and/or had a large gap between his works.
He wrote the Ancient Mariner by the time he was twenty-five and then never succeeded in finishing another work on the same scale throughout a long lifetime. What other well-known writer has done this? As Suther notes (3): Although someone may quarrel with a comment that Coleridge's philosophical works are more interesting than those of any other nineteenth-century English writer, it is true as well that all of his immense scholarship and fresh creative perceptions did not issue in a "work" -- much less in a "system" (although Coleridge never ceased to lament his failure to establish "his system").

Thus, concludes Suther, we have a man of first promise both as poet and as philosopher, who, though he worked hard through a long lifetime fell dramatically short of that promise, the flow of his poetic inspiration drying up almost suddenly, his philosophy never coming to anything like a definitive form, a prey throughout his life to serious depression, a "confirmed" opium addict, and, in the eyes of some of his ablest friends and of numerous subsequent critics, a failure -- in spite of his achievements -- because of his promise