Book Description

Coleridge's Shorter Works and Fragments brings together a number of substantial essays that were not long enough to require volumes to themselves, among them his "Theory of Life," "Essays on the Principles of Genial Criticism," "Treatise on Method," "Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit," "On the Passions," and "On the Prometheus of Aeschylus." To these are added more than four hundred other pieces, some of them fragmentary, many of them previously unpublished, ranging in date from school essays of the early 1790s to a discussion of the bullion controversy in 1834. As might be expected, the subject matter includes literature and language, theology, philosophy, politics, and science, but many less predictable topics (such as child labor laws, marriage, suicide, church history, the abolition of slavery, and the state of the colonies) also appear. By gathering this material and presenting it in chronological order, Shorter Works and Fragments reveals the development and major characteristics of Coleridge's seemingly inexhaustible variety.

Book Description

Poetry in its many guises is at the center of Coleridge's multifarious interests, and this long-awaited new edition of his complete poetical works marks the pinnacle of the Bollingen Collected Coleridge. The three parts of Volume 16 confirm and expand the sense of the Coleridge who has emerged over the past half-century, with implications for English Romantic writing as a whole. Setting new standards of comprehensiveness in the presentation of Romantic texts, they will interest historians and editorial theorists, as well as readers and students of poetry. They represent a work of truly monumental importance.

Coleridge's plays form a vital part of his poetic achievement. This part covers all of them--twelve altogether, including collaborations, adaptations, and plays left unrevised or in note form. It considers his drama translations as well. Coleridge's practical engagement with theater over a span of twenty years influenced his approach to other, lyric forms as well as, for example, his assessments of Shakespeare and of public taste. As in the first and second parts, all known manuscript, printed, and annotated versions have been collated to produce reading texts, and much new information, historical as well as textual, is presented in the commentary. The index covers proper names and prominent themes and features of all three parts.

The presentation of four plays is of particular interest. Coleridge's translations of Schiller's Piccolomini and Death of Wallenstein are accompanied by facing texts of the German originals (the first reconstructed by Joyce Crick, the second from a manuscript authorized by Schiller himself) so that, for the first time, Coleridge's practice as translator can be properly assessed. Secondly, Remorse is presented in stage and printed-text versions; the former demonstrates how Coleridge's play evolved in the course of the rehearsal process and during performance, how it was received and how it enjoyed an afterlife in contemporary theatres, whereas the printed-text version developed quite differently. This authoritative volume offers a revealing and comprehensive portrait of Coleridge's work in the dramatic form.

Book Description
Coleridge combined the genius of a poet with the mind of a philosophical critic. His writings are wide-ranging in form and content, and vast in number. Norton's long-awaited edition is the most comprehensive and user-friendly student edition available. Supporting apparatus includes detailed headnotes, footnotes (both Coleridge's and the editors'), biographical register, glossary, and an index of poems and first lines. "Criticism" includes twenty assessments of Coleridge's poetry and prose by British and American authors.

About the series: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehensive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

What is good poetry?
This edition contains, as well as the poetry, Coleridge's critical essays.For those who often find themselves wondering "is that a good poem?" he provides welcome and sensible guidelines on which to base judgement. ... Read more

Book Description

In his introduction to this edition of Coleridge's Marginalia, the late George Whalley wrote, ''There is no body of marginalia--in English, or perhaps in any other language--comparable with Coleridge's in range and variety and in the sensitiveness, scope, and depth of his reaction to what he was reading.'' The Princeton edition of the Marginalia, of which this is the sixth volume, brings together over eight thousand notes, many never before printed, varying from a single word to substantial essays. In alphabetical order of authors, the notes are presented literatim from the original manuscripts whenever the annotated volumes can be found. Each note is preceded by the passage of the original text that appears to have provoked Coleridge's comment. Texts in foreign languages are followed by translations.

The present volume comprises annotations on more than fifty books and manuscripts (from Valckenaer to Zwick, plus Addenda), including comments on Wordsworth's ''Benjamin the Waggoner,'' ''The Prelude,'' and ''Translation of Virgil's Aeneid,'' as well as on William Godwins's verse drama ''Abbas.'' A key-word index to the six volumes of Marginalia, provided here, will give readers ready access to Coleridge's ideas on subjects ranging from literature and philosophy through religion, politics, history, biography, and science.

Book Description

During the winter of 1818-1819, Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave fourteen lectures on the history of philosophy. A shorthand writer took down twelve of them in the most detailed version of Coleridge's lectures known to exist. The transcriptions are imperfect and inaccurate in various ways, but, when they are combined with Coleridge's own notes, as in this edition, the result is a coherent and largely complete whole.

The lectures contain Coleridge's interpretation of the history of philosophy. He opposed the idea, widely accepted at the time, that the philosophy of the Enlightenment had advanced by conquering religion. He believed that this view had doomed philosophy to the low esteem in which it was held in Britain, and he wanted to counter it by showing that the philosophy of the Enlightenment was largely derivative and that neither philosophy nor religion could stand alone. This series of lectures was his most systematic attempt to survey the relationship of philosophy to religion from Thales to Kant.

The edition presents a fully annotated and indexed text of the lecture series, and it provides in addition the complete texts of the shorthand reports and of Coleridge's own notes (which were omitted from the Coleridge Notebooks), along with newspaper and manuscript reports by people who attended the lectures. The volume includes an appendix by Owen Barfield, which is drawn from his incomplete manuscript edition of the lectures.

Book Description

Poetry in its many guises is at the center of Coleridge's multifarious interests, and this long-awaited new edition of his complete poetical works marks the pinnacle of the Bollingen Collected Coleridge. The three parts of Volume 16 confirm and expand the sense of the Coleridge who has emerged over the past half-century, with implications for English Romantic writing as a whole. Setting new standards of comprehensiveness in the presentation of Romantic texts, they will interest historians and editorial theorists, as well as readers and students of poetry. They represent a work of truly monumental importance.

The first part presents the reading texts of 706 poems in chronological sequence. Its blend of newly discovered and newly collected poems, presented in light of all known evidence and where practicable in unrevised forms, offers a fresh and original Coleridge: less inhibited by Victorian ideas about what poetry should be, moving easily and productively between genres and levels of seriousness. In texts that remained fluid and exploratory to the end, Coleridge alternates between lyric and satire, prophecy and conversation, symbol and allegory.

Each poem is accompanied by a headnote and commentary that together provide its historical-biographical context and offer key textual variants. The book opens with an introduction and chronological tables. The three appendixes position individual poems in the contexts in which they appeared during Coleridge's lifetime. Illustrations such as contemporary scenes and portraits bring this rich collection, like the companion volumes, all the more to life.

Book Description
This literary life of the best-loved of all the major Romantic writers uses Coleridge's own Biographia Literaria as its starting point and destination. The most sustained criticism and ambitious theory that had ever been attempted in English, the Biographia was Coleridge's major statement to an embattled literary culture in which he sought to define and defend, not just his own, but all imaginative life. This book offers a reading of Coleridge and his life in the context of that culture and the institutions that comprised it, and is a 'must-read' for any student or scholar of Coleridge. ... Read more

Book Description
In her introduction Heather Jackson, editor of this new collection of Coleridge's poetry, points to this poet as "one of the most fascinating minds in European intellectual history."Jackson's selection of his verse reveals that diversity and versatility form the main characteristics of
Coleridge's work, from the early politically-inspired sonnets to the epitaph he wrote for himself in the penultimate year of his life.At the center of the collection are those mature poems which Coleridge wrote while enjoying a close association and firendship with William and Dorothy Wordsworth,
and for which he is justly famous.They include such blank verse "conversation poems" as "Fears in Solitude," "The Lime Tree Bower my Prison," and "Frost at Midnight."Also at this time he composed what came to be his most famous works, "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." This
edition presents both the widely-known version of the "Rime" as well as a fascinating earlier one: compared side-by-side, they provide great insights into the working of a great poet's mind. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

OUR YOUNG FOLK DO NEED THE EXPOSURE TO THIS WONDERFUL POETRY!
I cannot think of a better way to introduce the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge than this small volume.The selection is excellent and of interest you the young reader.The commentary is quite relevant as are the pictures which accompany it.I find that often now, our young people go all the way through the early grades in school and many of them have never heard of Coleridge,much less read his poetry.This was the sort of stuff my generation and the generation before it grew up on and cut our teeth on.I truely feel I would be much less richer had I not read it and had it read to me.I do not feel I am any worse for the wear.I am fearful that we are bringing up an entire generation (rightfully or wrong, although I feel it is the later) of young folks who will have no appreciation to this great art form and will miss a lot.This book helps.This entire series helps, as a matter of fact and I certainly recommend you add this one and the others to your library.Actually, it is rather fun reading these with the young folk and then talking about them.Not only do you get to enjoy the work your self and perhaps bring back some great memories, but you have the opportunity to interact with your child or student.It is actually rather surprising what some of the kids come up with.I read these to my grandchildren and to the kids in my classes at school.For the most part, when I really get to discussing the work with them, they enjoy it.Recommend this one highly.

Good Poetry
Thoroughly enjoyed this book.I absolutely love the old style of poetry.I highly recommend this book to poetry lovers.

The compositions if the greatest Romanticist ever
The Romantics redefined english literature, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the leaders. Between he and William Wordsworth, they WERE the movement. His vision, and glorified writing style still tantalize me tothis day. ... Read more

Book Description
Rosemary Ashton explores the many facets of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's complex personality, by turns poet, critic, thinker, enchanting companion, feckless husband, fabled conversationalist and guilt-ridden opium addict. ... Read more

Book Description
Over the last two decades Romantic studies have been invigorated by a variety of historical methods, approaches, interests; yet work on Samuel Taylor Coleridge has remained dominated by traditional views of Romantic transcendence. Bringing together an exciting variety of approaches, the fifteen authors here redirect attention to Coleridge's relation to the 'sciences of life' - a term which embraces a much broader field than modern 'science'. Accordingly there are chapters on Coleridge and the vitalist debate, political and social ideas, race theories, dissent, literary relations, and language, as well as on his relation to contemporary optics, chemistry, geology, anatomy, and medicine. Taken all together, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life marks a vital and exciting development in Coleridge criticism. ... Read more

Book Description
Poetry Realized in Nature shows Coleridge's method at work and, more generally, explores German philosophical science, Naturphilosophie, and the relations between science and romantic thought. It combines a biographical approach with intellectual history, reconstructing Coleridge's imaginative enterprise across the whole range of the physical and life sciences. Coleridge strove for coherence in all realms of thought, and so the ways in which he explored scientific ideas illuminate all aspects of his inquiring spirit. He sought self-knowledge, which required a knowledge of man and mind in relation to nature and God. There was, accordingly, an intimate relationship between his theology and philosophy, and his ideas about the natural world. Science functioned as a touchstone in his philosophy, thus indirectly reinforcing his theology. The ideas he derived from science also bore directly on his critical doctrines, including the theory of imagination. ... Read more

Book Description
With this collection, renowned Colridge biographer, Richard Holmes, casts new light on the poets sensibilities and accomplishments. Holmes divides the poems into eight categories of theme and genre, dispeling the myth of Coleridge as "the metaphysical dreamer" and rediscovering him as a Romantic autobiographer of tremendous power and range.

At the heart of Selected Poems are the Conversation Poems, a unified and beautifully crafted autobiographical sequence written over a period of twelve years. A series of little-known love poems to Asra, which combine understated passion and desperate directness, reflect the depths of Coleridge's feelings for Sara Hutchinson, his unattainable lifelong love. The volume also includes the robust Hill Walking Poems, and the secret agony of the Confessional Poems, as well as previously undervalued later poetry born of Coleridge's restless old age and his ironic reflection on his life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

An expanded sense of Coleridge as a poet
This volume contains a whole host of poems by Coleridge which are not commonly read and known. The Coleridge most of us know is limited to a few great long- poems, "The Ancient Mariner" "Kubla Khan""Christabel" and perhaps a half- dozen shorter poems.
This anthology enables the reader to broaden and deepen in the Coleridge oeuvre, and feel how wide and wonderous the world of this many-sided genius.

XANADU INSPECTED
This edition has a purpose, and one that I subscribe to wholeheartedly. That purpose is `to transform Coleridge's reputation, and find him a new generation of readers'. One hundred and one poems, including thankfully many fragments, are selected. They include, obviously, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan, but also sonnets, other ballads, the Asra poems to Sara Hutchinson, nature poems, the late `confessional' poems, political, satirical and humorous poems, and even one prose item The Wanderings of Cain. The editor Richard Holmes is a writer and broadcaster but not apparently an academic, and to my way of thinking the edition is all the better for that. One thing that I looked for but did not find was the brilliant and amusing poem on the city of Cologne, but one can't have everything and I know it by heart anyway.

As far as my poets are concerned, I would far sooner be sorry than safe. When I was at school Coleridge took very much of a back seat to Wordsworth, who was obviously a much safer bet. One was given The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan for study, and maybe Christabel too if one was lucky, but my impression always was that that was as much Coleridge as the English masters had read. Tennyson once said `I have the greatest command of English since Shakespeare, but to be sure I have nothing to say.' Leaving Milton aside as being a completely special phenomenon whose wonderful language was only just English by some extension of the term, I go along with the first part of that assessment. Between Shakespeare and Tennyson, still leaving Milton out of the frame, who would you say takes the next place for sheer command and virtuosity with the English language? The orthodoxy in my time was Keats, but my own vote goes to Coleridge. Housman himself, the very high priest of Wordsworth, said that the finest versification of the era was to be found `in the irregular and simple-seeming stanzas of The Ancient Mariner'. I don't dispute that, but if The Ancient Mariner has a rival in that respect it is none other than Christabel in my own view. Housman considered the audacious metrical experiment of Christabel to be unsuccessful, but while Housman's ear for language was preternaturally acute, his ear for music was dull, and an ear for music is needed to get the full value from Christabel. We find the lines

She kneels beneath the huge oak tree
And in silence prayeth she.
The lady sprang up suddenly,
The lovely lady Christabel!
It moaned as near as near can be,
But what it is she cannot tell.

The crucial line there is `The lovely lady Christabel'. It adds nothing to the sense, it has the function of marking time, measuring out a moment of startled horror, and in general Christabel, incomplete though it is, seems to me as notable an addition to the English language as it is to English literature. It is this experimental and unpredictable element in Coleridge that thrills me with him. Very properly, there are numerous of his fragments here, fascinating testimony to his out-of-the-way mental processes. The poets of that era took their social and historical role pretty seriously - Shelley pronounced poets to be `the unacknowledged legislators of the world', and Coleridge himself considered them to be no less than the elect who would unlock the mystery of the universe. Give or take most of that kind of thing, there is a real visionary element in Coleridge, and not only in the fragments, although I'm not so sure what kind of legislator he might have made.

The selections are subdivided into categories, something Coleridge was not too keen on, believing that a plain chronological sequence was the proper reflection of a poet's development. The editor sympathises with this view, but finds it simply not a realistic option, and I agree with him. His preface is very readable, less heavy going than many such, there is a short introductory section to each category of poems included, and there is a further note on each individual poem at the back. I hope this edition succeeds in what it is trying to do. ... Read more

Book Description
This volume of previously unpublished and uncited letters presents a remarkable, often moving, and extraordinary image of the Coleridge family during Samuel Taylor Coleridge's youth, particularly between 1772 and 1793, when the writer reached twenty-one. Revealing the strength of a family
suffering repeated losses, James Engell's edition offers a new, frank, yet sympathetic account of Coleridge's life and the formation of his character. Anyone concerned with Coleridge and his contemporaries, English Romanticism, or social history, particularly of the eighteenth century, will be
interested in this important volume. ... Read more

Book Description

Coleridge's Aids to Reflection was written at a time when new movements in thought were starting to unsettle belief. It was read with admiration by early Victorians such as John Sterling, F. D. Maurice, and Thomas Arnold, contributing to the formation of the Broad Church Movement, and with respect by members of the High Church Movement, including John Henry Newman. Coleridge had intended simply to produce a selection from the writings of the seventeenth-century Archbishop Robert Leighton with comments of his own, but as he worked at the book he found the commentary expanding to take in the fruits of his religious thinking over the years, so that the second, and more important, part of the volume was totally dominated by his thought.

In this, the first major edition of Aids to Reflection, the intricate story of Coleridge's changing conception is unfolded by way of an introduction and detailed notes, the surviving materials for the volume being printed in appendixes. The introduction also traces the subsequent influence of the work in England and America; further appendixes include James Marsh's influential preface to the first American edition, which is reproduced in full.

Amazon.com
"Kubla Khan." "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." "The Eolian Harp." Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a genius who wrote some of the greatest poems in the history of the English language. Together with his friend William Wordsworth, he provided the best articulation of Romanticism, as well as some of the most powerful examples of that aesthetic.This collection, from the excellent Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series, includes not only Coleridge's poetry, but also some selections from his insightful essays and letters about poetry.But of course, it's the poems that count the most, as evidenced by this excerpt from one of Coleridge's less legendary works, his beautiful tribute "To William Wordsworth," which was written after hearing his friend give an especially moving reading. These sentiments could easily apply to the author himself: "The tumult rose and ceased: for Peace is nigh / Where Wisdom's voice has found a listening heart." Book Description
This selection contains all the poems from Coleridge's owncollected edition of 1828, supplemented by many that appearedposthumously; it includes "Christabel," "From Stowey to Keswick," and"Dejection." All poems are based on close examination of the earliesteditions, and include Coleridge's own illuminating emendments to hispoetry. The text of "Kubla Khan" is taken from the Crew manuscript, and"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is printed as originally published in1798. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

"Where Alph the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man/ down to a sunless sea
I have a special fondness for these 'Everyman Collections'. There are of course many other 'selected poems editions' of the most notable English language poets, but the 'Everymans' have a compactness about them I like. They contain selections of the most memorable work of the poet.
Coleridge whose scattered multiple- mindedness was the great sign of his genius nonetheless managed to concentrate and create the hypnotic 'Kublai Khan' and 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. This work contains the most well- known of his lyric works. It isnot a volume for the scholar but for the popular reader who wishes to have his Coleridge in a very handy form.

S.T.Coleridge (NOT T.S.Eliot)
Excellent selection of poetry and poetry-related essays by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.NOTE:previous reviewer seems to have confused Coleridge with Eliot.Coleridge DID NOT WRITE The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, or Ash Wednesday -- THAT is why those are not in this book.He DIED in 1834!! ... Read more