Career
He was Murray Professor of Romantic English Literature at Princeton University. This book was treated as "authoritative" for decades, mostly amongst literary critics. However, it has more recently been criticized due to McFarland"s poor understanding of the philosophical background, especially by Berkeley who argues that the main philosophical arguments of the period were over the status of reason, not over some distinction between "lieutenant is" and "I am".
Berkeley also criticised McFarland"s understanding of specific philosophers such as Spinoza and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi.
According to reports in the New York Times, McFarland resigned his professorship in 1989 following allegations of sexual misconduct. Prior to his resignation he had been placed on a one-year suspension, but the reports suggest this led to the resignations of the chairman of the department Emory Elliott, along with Margaret Doody, Sandra Gilbert and Valerie Smith because they thought McFarland was treated too leniently.
He died in 2011, aged 84. A eulogy on the website of the Wordsworth Conference Foundation describes him as "one of the greatest Coleridgeans".
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor.
Opus Maximum, Volume(s) 16 of the Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton University Press, 2002).
