This work offers a new perspective on the study of the sources of S. T. Coleridges poetics. The author argues that the philosophical system endorsed by the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth significantly contributed to the genesis of Coleridges concept of the symbol and its related symbolic knowledge. After an initial view on the different articulations the symbol acquired in Coleridges theorizations over his career the book reverts to the poets formative years from 1795 to 1798 in order to reveal the roots of the concept. Apart from discussing Coleridges direct readings of Cudworths The True Intellectual System of the Universe in the years 1795 and 1796 the author explores the reception of Cudworths ideas in a number of philosophers scientists poets and literary theorists works of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which were in turn read by the Romantic author. The study also provides new insights into Coleridges lectures and poems in which the Coleridgean notion of symbol was born Lectures on Revealed Religion The Destiny of Nations Religious Musings and the Conversation Poems in the light of Cudworths philosophical tenets.