'Human Life' by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s often neglected and sometimes misread poem “Human Life, On the Denial of Immortality” deserves a reappraisal because it was composed around the time when many of his poems were revised into versions now considered canonical. The poem also repeats and anticipates some of his philosophical and religious beliefs articulated in prose. When provided this context, the poem’s tautological and enigmatic arguments, along with its formal manipulations, suggest how Coleridge employs his interest in the vitalist debate and his conceptualisation of human reason to develop his case for the viability of immortality.
The poem is peppered with instances of surplus, beginning with the image of humans as the by‐product of nature’s creative work, which draws on the materialist view that life results from the organisation of matter. Coleridge contests this faulty premise by making surplus itself redemptive: his contention is that humans were created intentionally and in God’s image and, therefore, must believe in immortality as a direct and logical result of this truth. “Human Life” then becomes an exercise in reflection - of the mind-bending back on itself and recognising that a belief in immortality is the only rational and feasible conclusion possible for its own existence.