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Thomas McFarland

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Professor Thomas McFarland (1927-2011) was an English literary critic who specialised in the literature of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was Murray Professor of Romantic English Literature at Princeton University.

His critique of Coleridge's mysticism, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (1969), 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 (1984), 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'.

According to reports in the New York Times, McFarland resigned his professorship in 1989 following allegations of sexual misconduct. Prior to his resignation he had been placed on a one-year suspension, but this led to the resignations of the chairman of the department Emory Elliott, along with Margaret Doody, Sandra Gilbert and Valerie Smith because they thought McFarland was treated too leniently.[1][2]

A Festschrift, entitled The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas McFarland (Palgrave), was released in 1990 in his honour, which "explores what McFarland calls the symbiotic nature of Coleridge’s friendship and collaborations"[3].

He died in 2011, aged 84. The Wordsworth Conference Foundation described McFarland as "one of the greatest Coleridgeans".[4]

Bibliography

  • Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (1969)
  • Originality and Imagination (1984 Johns Hopkins University Press)
  • Romanticism and the Heritage of Rousseau (1995)
  • Romantic Cruxes: The English Essayists and the Spirit of the Age (1987)
  • William Wordsworth, Intensity and Achievement (1992)
  • Paradoxes of freedom: The Romantic Mystique of Transcendence (1996)
  • Shakespeare's Pastoral Comedy (2009, UNCP)

Edited

  • Opus Maximum, the collected works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton University Press, 2002)

References

  1. ^ http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/10/nyregion/4-scholars-quit-as-sex-incident-splits-princeton.html
  2. ^ http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/27/nyregion/accused-princeton-professor-to-retire-early.html
  3. ^ Gravil, Richard (1990). The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas McFarland. Palgrave.
  4. ^ http://www.wordsworthconferences.org.uk/8.html
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