Coleridge talks too much. This, in short, is the considered opinion of William Hazlitt. ‘If Mr. Coleridge had not been the most impressive talker of his age, he would probably have been the finest writer’, he comments in The Spirit of the Age (Works XI.30). Talking and writing are in opposition and in competition: you cannot talk and write at the same time. The difference for Coleridge is that by contrast with the deferral of response which structures writing, talk is immediate: Coleridge ‘lays down his pen to make sure of an auditor, and mortgages the admiration of posterity for the stare of an idler’ (Works XI.30). It is Coleridge's desire for immediate recognition, then, that leads to the compulsion of his talk, and it is this compulsion which will prevent him from being remembered in posterity. While writing remains, that is to say, talk falls only momentarily on the ear.

Since his achievement of the last few years of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth century, Hazlitt goes on to argue, Coleridge has been living on borrowed time, his existence has been a kind of afterlife of the voice: ‘All that he has done of moment, he had done twenty years ago: since then, he may be said to have lived on the sound of his own voice’ (Works XI.30). For Hazlitt, the tragedy of Coleridge's genius is that his writing is ‘inferior to his conversation’.