The religious dispositions, political aspirations, economic interests, and literary tastes of Dissenting communities impelled the genesis of Romanticism in England. During the late eighteenth century, theological and denominational distinctions inhabited individual manners, shaped political organizations, fueled commercial endeavors, and informed cultural programs. Although there may have been some truth to William Hazlitt's claim in his essay of 1815, “On the Tendency of Sects,” that “It would be vain to strew the flowers of poetry round the borders of the Unitarian controversy,” in another light Hazlitt's seemingly withering conclusion could not be more misleading. The Romantic Imagination itself, as articulated by the still Unitarian Samuel Taylor Coleridge as early as 1802, long before the Biographia Literaria, evolved from an opposition between the “poor stuff” of Greek pantheism – “All natural objects were dead … but there was a Godkin or Goddesling included in each” – and the “Imagination, or the modifying, and co-adunating Faculty” of the Hebrew poets, for whom “each Thing has a life of it's [sic] own, & yet they are all one Life” (CL, ii, pp. 865–66). If the vast expanse of sermons, pamphlets, tracts, and periodical polemics produced by Hazlitt's “controversial cabal” of Dissenters may in retrospect have appeared a desert in contrast to the blooming, more secular fields of “taste and genius,” it is equally clear that nonconformist identities, beliefs, and debates energized and molded much of the cultural achievement that we now associate with the early Romantic movement.