The “Strange Self-power in the Imagination”

Epilepsy, Fancy and Disbelief in the Writings of Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin and Thomas Beddoes

Abstract

This paper will focus on Coleridge’s writing of epileptic signs in the light of contemporary debates on the physiology and psychology of the brain. By examining the medical narratives of epilepsy, widely debated at a time where both evangelical movements and consumer behaviors were threatening the nerves and brains of English society, I intend to explore the cultural components and meanings attached to epileptic fits in order to understand Coleridge’s dreadful fear of epilepsy and its relation to fanciful imagination. I will argue that his fear of epileptic seizures may have laid the ground for his theory of fancy: body and brain could create against the will of the poet thus acting as moral alibis for his more radical poems.