Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Fleeing from yelp of cur, we took shelter at feet of vicious warhorse

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

British writers on peace and war

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selections on peace and war

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Biographia Literaria

To this hour I cannot find reason to approve of the first war either in its commencement or its conduct.

I regarded it as some proof of my not having laboured altogether in vain, that from the articles written by me shortly before and at the commencement of the late unhappy war with America, not only the sentiments were adopted, but in some instances the very language, in several of the Massachusetts state papers.

…in England, when the alarm was at its highest, there was not a city, no, not a town or village, in which a man suspected of holding democratic principles could move abroad without receiving some unpleasant proof of the hatred in which his supposed opinions were held by the great majority of the people; and the only instances of popular excess and indignation were on the side of the government and the established church….Like children we ran away from the yelping of a cur, and took shelter at the heels of a vicious war horse.

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O! if it should be permitted by Providence, that without detriment to freedom and independence our government might be enabled to become more than a committee for war and revenue!