The main sections of Biographia Literaria were written – in fact largely dictated – in the summer of 1815. Within three years Coleridge was looking back on the work, and rejecting it as pantheist. His letter to J. H. Green of September 1818 lies about how much Schelling he had known at the time of writing, but makes the very interesting statement:

Two months later he commented to C. A. Tulk about Schelling:

The presence of Schelling in the metaphysical chapters of Biographia is well attested. Coleridge might choose to tell Green that he had known ‘little or nothing of any of his works, excepting his Transcendental Idealism’ (CL, iv, p. 874), but scholars concerned with the issue of plagiarism – the poet's nephew and daughter among the first, in 1847 – have listed up to a dozen Schelling volumes and individual tracts on which he drew. Norman Fruman in The Damaged Archangel (1971) not only brought out the extent of these unacknowledged borrowings – often running to several pages of verbatim translation – but revealed to a queasy Coleridge establishment the pains taken to deceive the reader into believing the material was original.