Thomas McFarland

Who is Thomas McFarland?

Professor Thomas McFarland was an English literary critic who specialised in the literature of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

His critique of Coleridge's mysticism, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition, which explores the impact that German Idealism and secular deism had had upon Coleridge's philosophy, earned McFarland renowned acceptance and respect in the literary world. In Originality and Imagination, McFarland explores the relationship between consciousness and intellect, and how imagination has usurped the place of what ancient mystics used to consider 'divine conscience' or, more broadly, 'spirit'. He was Murray Professor of Romantic English Literature at Princeton University. The Wordsworth Conference Foundation described McFarland as "one of the greatest Coleridgeans" who ever lived.

A Festschrift, entitled The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas McFarland, was released in 1990 in his honour, which "explores what McFarland calls the symbiotic nature of Coleridge’s friendship and collaborations" He died in 2011, aged 84.