Reading the prophets prophetically in Coleridge's Confessions

Through particular attention to Coleridge's metaphors for the Bible, this essay argues that in the Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit Coleridge develops a notion of reading the Bible as a prophetic creation of meaning. This notion of prophetic reading complicates accounts - represented here by Tilottama Rajan and Jerome McGann - claiming that the meaning of a text, for Coleridge, is determined by historical processes. At the same time, however, Coleridge is also careful to set parameters around the subjective reading he proposes, and the meaning that arises is not of a doctrinal or historical-critical nature. Freed from the need to search for articles of faith, the reader of the Bible reads to search for personal, privately meaningful experiences - much as one reads secular literature. For Coleridge, this does not diminish but rather increases the universal authority and truthfulness of the Bible: the reader's experiences, similar in kind to the prophet's, bear more powerful witness of the supreme authority of the Bible than any article of faith could do.