After eliminating one after another the possible contenders for the title of the greatest critic, Saintsbury concludes: “So, then there abide these three – Aristotle, Longinus and Coleridge”.
According to Arthur Symons, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria is, “the greatest book of criticism in English”. Herbert Read considers Coleridge as, “head and shoulders above every other English critic”. I. R. Richards considers him as the forerunner, “of the modern science of semantics” and Rene Welled is of the view that he is a link, “between German Transcendentalism and English romanticism.”