Through politics, religion and his relationship with Wordsworth, the book builds to a new interpretation of the poems where Coleridge's daemonic imagination produces its myths: The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan and Christabel . Re-reading the origins of Romanticism, Leadbetter reveals a Coleridge at once more familiar and more strange.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the central figure in the dissemination of higher criticism, the analytical and historical study of the Bible begun in Germany in the late eighteenth century by Lessing, Herder, and Eichorn.

Though left uncompleted, “Kubla Khan” is one of the most famous examples of Romantic era poetry. In it, Samuel Coleridge provides a stunning and detailed example of the power of the poet’s imagination through his whimsical description of Xanadu, the capital city of Kublai Khan’s empire. Samuel Coleridge penned “Kubla Khan” after waking up from an opium-induced dream in which he experienced and imagined the realities of the great Mongol ruler’s capital city. Coleridge began writing what he remembered of his dream immediately upon waking from it, and intended to write two to three hundred lines. However, Coleridge was interrupted soon after and, his memory of the dream dimming, was ultimately unable to complete the poem. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

Ewan James Jones argues that Coleridge engaged most significantly with philosophy not through systematic argument, but in verse. Jones carries this argument through a series of sustained close readings, both of canonical texts such as Christabel and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and also of less familiar verse, such as Limbo. Such work shows that the essential elements of poetic expression - a poem's metre, rhythm, rhyme and other such formal features - enabled Coleridge to think in an original and distinctive manner, which his systematic philosophy impeded. Attentiveness to such formal features, which has for some time been overlooked in Coleridge scholarship, permits a rethinking of the relationship between eighteenth-century verse and philosophy more broadly, as it engages with issues including affect, materiality and self-identity. Coleridge's poetic thinking, Jones argues, both consolidates and radicalises the current literary critical rediscovery of form.

This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge's renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge's pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion's great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is chiefly remembered as the Romantic poet who wrote “The Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan”, as Wordsworth’s collaborator on the Lyrical Ballads, as the myriad-minded philosopher who introduced his countrymen to the thought of Kant, as one of the foremost critics of Shakespeare, and as a supremely gifted conversationalist who put a spell on any visitor to his Highgate home. In his own day, however, Coleridge was most notorious for his political “apostasy”. With the Revolution across the Channel, once celebrated as the harbinger of a new age, deteriorating into the terreur and the Pitt ministry desperately trying to contain revolutionary activities on British soil, public intellectuals were compelled to take sides. As it turned out, the choices they made during the 1790s would haunt them well into the 1810s. This first book-length study of Coleridge’s reactions to the French Revolution examines his trajectory from “radical” to “conservative” – and challenges the very notion that these labels can be applied to him. Particular focus is given to the part his friend Robert Southey played in Coleridge’s political coming of age, as well as to William Hazlitt’s role as his relentless prosecutor in later life. As such, the book offers an accessible portrayal of the first-generation Romantics and their political sensibilities.

This book explores Sara Coleridge's critical intelligence and theoretical reach. It shows her in various critical guises: editing works by her father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, commenting on her own poetry and prose, and writing diversely brilliant criticism of classical and English literature.