Coleridge wrote obsessively about atheism in his prose outpourings and it haunts his poetry, whether in such explicit embodiments as ‘the owlet Atheism’ unable to see the sun in ‘Fears in Solitude’, or in the more subtextual perturbations of his great symbolic poems ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’. In an understandable oversimplification, this obsession has sometimes been presented as a betrayal of his youthful ‘Jacobinism’, a belated turning to a religiose and German-inspired interest in metaphysics to cover his retreat into political reaction. Hence in Thomas Love Peacock's parodic Nightmare Abbey (1818), the Coleridge-figure Mr Flosky reels from disappointment with the French Revolution to the conclusion that

This neat reversal of Coleridge's image of the sun-blind ‘owlet Atheism’ is not quite accurate, in that he was passionately and ‘metaphysically’ Christian from his most outspokenly radical phase (around 1793 to 1796) to his most conservative; nonetheless, the nature of his Christianity itself changed dramatically, and many of his writings on the subject before and after that change constitute an enthralling catalogue of the positions available at the time that could be charged with atheism, within the psychodrama of self-accusation and self-exculpation staged by a brain exceptionally alert to the resonances of the word.