I AM just back from the unveiling of a beautiful new statue of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his home town of Ottery St Mary. It was a glorious occasion, timed for the 250th anniversary of his birth, and the event drew admirers of the poet and his work from all over England and beyond, and also saw the gathering of many of his direct descendants and members of the wider Coleridge family.

I was especially moved by the fact that the statue depicts the young Coleridge in the prime of his life, as an ardent visionary, and already a profound philosopher, not indoors in his study, but out fell-walking, balanced on a rocky outcrop, notebook in hand gazing upward and outward. He looks just as he must have when he climbed Scafell Pike and made those thrilling notebook entries which also sealed his claim to be the first English mountaineer. It’s a beautiful work of art, and, surprisingly, the first full-size statue of the poet.

I spoke to the sculptor, Nicholas Dimbleby, and it was clear that he had entered into the full Coleridgean spirit in making the piece. For this is no static monument, with its two feet resting equally on some solid and imperturbable plinth, but a figure in motion, ascending, balancing weight on an upper foot as the lower lifts to continue the movement upwards.

Achieving such a sense of movement was a huge technical challenge, the sculptor told me, and the great piece of boulder from which the poet leans forward is as much a part of the sculpture as the bronze figure itself.

The other remarkable thing is the location of the statue: just outside the church, still within its grounds, still on consecrated soil. This not only reflects the poet’s early links with the church where his father was vicar: the churchyard, where the statue now stands, was the scene of the poet’s first reveries on nature and of his ardent daydreaming. It also speaks of the way that the mature Coleridge returned to the roots of his Christian faith, and rediscovered the deepest truths of the gospel made fresh and compelling in the light of his distinct theology of the Imagination, as a necessary complement to the work of Reason.

As he said in the conclusion to his Biographia Literaria: “Christianity, as taught in the Liturgy and Homilies of our Church, though not discoverable by human Reason, is yet in accordance with it; that link follows link by necessary consequence; that Religion passes out of the ken of Reason only where the eye of Reason has reached its own Horizon; and that Faith is then but its continuation. . .”

It has sometimes been remarked that Coleridge’s theology, his imaginative and symbolic reading of scripture, was too far in advance of the Church of his day to be fully appreciated. That may be so, but, as eco-poet and prophet, and as a theologian who calls and recalls us to wonder and to the depths of symbol, he has become, with every passing generation, a more prophetic, and indeed a more contemporary voice.

When we turned from the unveiling, and went back into the church, we heard a sermon from one of the successors of Coleridge’s father, the present Team Rector, the Revd Lydia Cook. She drew so succinctly and comprehensively on Coleridge’s best theology, and applied it so well to our time, that I had real hope that the Church of England is at last catching up with one of its greatest luminaries.