SOURCE: "About S.T.C.," in As I Was Saying: A Book of Essays, Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1936, pp. 86-91.

In the following excerpt, Chesterton derides criticism that would overemphasize the influence of opium on Coleridge and his poetry.

It seems to me that the central genius of a man like Coleridge is not a thing to be dealt with by critics at all. If they really had anything worth saying about such a poet, they would write it in poetry. It is the curse upon all critics that they must write in prose. It is the specially blighting and blasting curse upon some of them, that they have to write in philosophical or psychological or generally analytical prose. I have never read a page of such criticism, however clear and clever, which brought me the most remote echo of the actual sound of the poetry or the power...