Coleridge's distinctions, definitions, and dynamic method galvanized Emerson's thought at a critical moment in his intellectual maturation and simultaneously shaped the development of Boston Transcendentalism. Yet his influence extended even further into the nineteenth and early twentieth century via Vermont Transcendentalism, a movement that profoundly affected the development in America of modern higher education and the national press, and the emergence of the philosophical movement of Pragmatism. Although the movements issued from different ends of the theological spectrum, Coleridge was the common link between Boston and Vermont Transcendentalism. Coleridge's thought provided a new model of the Romantic triad of nature, spirit, and humanity, categories that could be mediated in an open-ended, dynamic intellectual method instead of through systematizing. Because Coleridge's prose was so obscure and fragmented, and because he himself had misappropriated Kant and other philosophers, he became a palimpsest, a multi-layered record of an ongoing reinterpretation of philosophical and theological traditions in a new American context. It was precisely this imprecision that enabled Coleridge to become such a vital link in Transatlantic Transcendentalism.

Chapter 2 discussed the central role of James Marsh for the development of Boston Transcendentalism through his American editions of Coleridge, including his influential “Preliminary Essay” to Aids to Reflection. Marsh further broadcast Coleridge's thought in America during his tenure as president of the University of Vermont from 1826 to 1833. He restructured the curriculum according to Coleridgean principles, subsequently igniting a pedagogical revolution in higher education.