Coleridge's growing sense of distance from Wordsworth was accentuated, not caused, by his ‘own peculiar lot’ in 1802; and it did not always produce the envy and exclusion so clearly present in the Letter to Sara Hutchinson. The two men were in fact moving, intellectually and creatively, in opposite directions. Wordsworth at times seemed oblivious of change, and wrote as though the closeness of their earlier relationship still existed. But Coleridge became increasingly aware of ways in which they differed. In a series of justly famous letters, written during this year, one sees him not merely acknowledging divergence, but also (with a sort of doggedness) tracking down its causes. ‘I rather suspect’, he writes to Robert Sou they, in July,

This is the germ of Biographia Literaria. ‘Radical Difference’ is something Coleridge believes to have grown from his increasing dissatisfaction with the 1800 Preface. Wordsworth's claim there, that the language of ordinary life is appropriate for poetry, seems questionable to him, though he cannot yet say why.