The book studies metaphor, myth and their imaginative aspects in the poetry of William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Relying on Kantian, Romantic, Neo-Kantian and modern ideas of imagination, metaphor and myth, the book proposes that imagination is an inherently metaphorizing and mythologizing faculty because the act of perception is an act of giving form to natural phenomena and seeing similitude in dissimilitude, which are basically metaphorical and mythological acts. Studying selected poems, the author explores how in its form-giving activity the imagination of the speaking subject 'mythologizes' and 'metaphorizes' by seeing objects of nature as spiritual, animate or divine beings and thus transforming them into the alien territory of myth. Myth and metaphor are analyzed in these poems mainly in two regards: first, myth and metaphor are handled as inborn aspects of imagination and perception, and the interaction between nature and imagination is presented as the origin of all mythology; second, to show how myth is re-created time and again by poetic imagination, Romantic mythography and re-creation of precursor mythologies are analyzed.

Coleridge's relation to his German contemporaries constitutes the toughest problem in assessing his standing as a thinker. For the last half-century this relationship has been described, ultimately, as parasitic. As a result, Coleridge's contribution to religious thought has been seen primarily in terms of his poetic genius. This book revives and deepens the evaluation of Coleridge as a philosophical theologian in his own right. Coleridge had a critical and creative relation to, and kinship with, German Idealism. Moreover, the principal impulse behind his engagement with that philosophy is traced to the more immediate context of English Unitarian-Trinitarian controversy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book re-establishes Coleridge as a philosopher of religion and as a vital source for contemporary theological reflection.

Revision of author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Chicago, 2008 under title: The word made flesh and the mazy page: symbol and allegory in Coleridge's philosophy of faith.

The poems that Coleridge wrote after his "golden" period are seldom studied or anthologized. Yet many of these later poems are of quality and interest, addressing such universal themes as the nature of self and the experience of unrequited love. Paley examines the later verse in the context of Coleridge's oeuvre. He discusses its distinguishing characteristics, and looks at why the poet felt he had to develop distinctively different modes of writing for these works.

This book makes the case for a re-placing of Lamb as reader, writer and friend in the midst of the lively political and literary scene of the 1790s. Reading his little-known early works alongside others by the likes of Coleridge and Wordsworth, it allows a revealing insight into the creative dynamics of early Romanticism.