David Fairer’s learned and contextually rich study provides a critique of the concept of organic form as (once again) totalized and teleological. Because that version of organic form with which we are familiar derives from Coleridge—theorist and practitioner of organicism in its many formal varieties—this book, perhaps not surprisingly, takes him for its protagonist. Coleridge in the 1790s provides a matrix of concerns, from collaborative publication ventures to circles of friendship under strain through the anxieties and historical pressures of the period, which allows Fairer to practice his own form of organization. The book, that is, as a critical study mimics the same version of organicism that it works to define. We see this in its multiplicity of chapters (twelve, plus a postscript and introduction) and diversity of subject matter (engravings by the Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the patriotism speech in the House of Commons by Richard Brinsley Sheridan on 20 April 1798, the pamphlet printed by Coleridge as Sonnets from Various Authors). The point that Fairer wishes to make is that insofar as organicism is defined through the relations between parts, connectivity involves productive tensions: rather than relations operating in such a way that they harmonize toward a certain necessary end (such an end being, in Fairer’s view and that of others, absolutist and conducive to certain reified hierarchies), parts just as often push back against each other, causing different shapes to emerge or (at the least) not allowing differences to be elided. In theory, this is all very well, but I will add from the perspective of the reader that Fairer’s book demands the same kind of active reading that he brings to the many texts and cultural objects and events at hand. There is no easy way to swallow this book whole, so to speak, and that no doubt is part of the point. Formally enacted, Fairer’s own version of organic form might be called, Organising Facts. If not from Coleridge’s statements about organic form post-1801, where then does Fairer derive his version of non-holistic organicism? He argues that it is a mode philosophically and aesthetically enacted in the eighteenth century and one that Coleridge puts in play in his own literary, editorial and sociopolitical activity in the 1790s. This is true, he suggests, of Coleridge’s scattered publication projects as it is of his conversation poems (with Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” thrown into the mix), which are often taken to be the test case for Coleridge’s own (teleological) brand of organicism. In this respect, Fairer’s chapter on Coleridge’s ongoing, lifetime revisions to his “Monody on the Death of Chatterton” in the context of the changes in that figure’s symbolic significance over time is particularly apt. It demonstrates how cultural events or objects with a range of (possibly contradictory) significance can become simplified in such a way as to seem obvious: Chatterton, the “marvelous boy,” was a tragic genius, at odds with a society that discounts eccentricity and does not allow a voice to poverty. Such a reading (“the Romantic myth of Chatterton”) obscures earlier attitudes toward the Rowley poet and involves “a narrowing down and weakening of a figure who had earlier offered writers much more” (142). The earlier figure of Chatterton, rather than society’s victim, presented a threat: a challenge to any transparent transcription of history, in this case the literary remains of a fifteenth-century priest. Fairer argues that any effort to read Coleridge’s revisions and augmentations to his poem (from a total of 90 lines in 1790 to 165 in 1834) should not be read as building organically to a certain necessary end …