It was Coleridge who, finally, for the first time, resolved the age-old problem of the relation between the form and content of poetry.
Through his philosophical inquiry into the nature and value of Poetry, he established that poem is an organic whole, and that its form is determined by its content, and is essential to that content. Thus meter and rhyme, he showed, are not merely, “pleasure super-added”, not merely something superfluous which can be dispensed with, not mere decorations, but essential to that pleasure which is the true poetic pleasure. This demonstration of the organic wholeness of a poem is one of his major contributions to literary theory.