‘Hence the necessity of Prayer’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge began as a Unitarian: this chapter charts the poetic emergence, in his work, of a stranger and more disturbing sense of prayer than Rational Dissent could conceive. Pushing at the borders of reason—slightly archaic and opening the self to mysterious otherness—Gothic prayers become something of a Coleridgean obsession in the late 1790s, in poems like ‘Christabel’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The attempt to understand prayer as an experience beyond the shallowly rational version of it which Coleridge inherits from Unitarian thought continues, and culminates in his 1820s Kantian-influenced philosophy of prayer, which is reconstructed from notebook entries and other fragmentary materials.