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A literary tour of the United Kingdom

The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

One of the great figures of English Romanticism, Coleridge's poems show diversity and imaginative genius

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834) was one of the first figures of the Romantic movement, and a poet, philosopher and critic.  His close friendship with Dorothy and William Wordsworth, whom he met in 1797, led to the publication of the "Lyrical Ballads", which marked a conscious break with poetic tradition and includes one of Coleridge's most famous poems, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner".  <br/>
William Keach is Professor of English at Brown University in Rhode Island.  He has published many books and articles on Renaissance and Romantic literature.

One of the major figures of English Romanticism, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) created works of remarkable diversity and imaginative genius. The period of his creative friendship with William Wordsworth inspired some of Coleridge's best-known poems, from the nightmarish vision of the 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and the opium-inspired 'Kubla Khan' to the sombre passion of 'Dejection: An Ode' and the medieval ballad 'Christabel'. His meditative 'conversation' poems, such as 'Frost at Midnight' and 'This Lime-Tree Bower Mr Prison', reflect on remembrance and solitude, while late works, such as 'Youth and Age' and 'Constancy to an Ideal Object', are haunting meditations on mortality and lost love.

Selected Poetry

Poems organised according to genre, to demonstrate the progress and variety Coleridge achieved

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834) was a poet, critic, and philosopher of Romanticism. He and William Wordsworth published the LYRICAL BALLADS in 1799, marking a conscious break with 18th-century tradition. Richard Holmes is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded an OBE. The first volume of his biography of Coleridge won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize.

Living in a revolutionary age, Coleridge's poetry was written in a spirit of moral and emotional inquiry into the absolutes of the human condition. He is best known for his visionary poetry ('Kubla Khan') and his ballads ('The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'), but he used and transformed a variety of verse forms, from the sonnet to the conversation poem, on subjects as diverse as nature, love, and politics. This selection calls attention to the range of Coleridge's work, its strong autobiographical content,and its artistic development throughout his career. The old chronological form has been abandoned and the poems are organised according to genre, with each section displaying its own individual development in craft and theme.

Samuel Coleridge

William Wordsworth

Published in 1798, Lyrical Ballads is a dazzling collaboration containing twenty-three poems by close friends, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) - two major figures of English Romanticism. The volume heralded a new approach to poetry and expresses the poets' reflections on mankind's relationship with the forces of the world. Coleridge's contribution includes the nightmarish vision of 'The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere', one of the works for which he became best known, as well as the fantastical conversational poem 'The Foster-Mother's Tale' and the melancholic 'The Nightingale'. Wordsworth's 'We are Seven' depicts a child's naïve optimism in the face of the cruel mortality, while 'Goody Blake and Harry Gill' and 'Simon Lee' celebrate the simplicity and strength he perceived in country people, and 'Tintern Abbey' explores the healing powers of nature.<br/>
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Published as part of the Penguin Poetry First Editions series in which the greatest collections of poetry in English will be published in their original form.  All texts have been completely reset and some minor changes made to punctuation.

Samuel Coleridge

Books by Samuel Coleridge

Articles featuring Samuel Coleridge

A literary tour of the United Kingdom

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