Coleridge's Tears

Light On Light Through · Aug 3, 2007

Ever wonder why people cry their eyes out at a movie or a television show? Not just children, but men and women, fully grown? Not about a documentary about a slain president or a real-life princess who died too young, but about characters and plots that are purely fiction?

Hey, ever wonder why you have cried during such presentations, and I bet there is nearly no one on this planet who has not?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge had the answer – even though he was writing a good fifty years before the invention of motion pictures.

In his Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, the man who wrote the…