Product Description

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, critic, and radical thinker, exerted an enormous influence over contemporaries as varied as Wordsworth, Southey and Lamb. He was also a dedicated reformer, and set out to use his reputation as a public speaker and literary philosopher to change the course of English thought.
This collection represents the best of Coleridge's poetry from every period of his life, particularly his prolific early years, which produced The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan. The central section of the book is devoted to his most significant critical work, Biographia Literaria, and reproduces it in full. It provides a vital background for both the poetry section which precedes it and for the shorter prose works which follow. There is also a generous sample of his letters, notebooks, and marginalia, some recently discovered, which show a different, more spontaneous side to his fascinating and complex personality.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #637533 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 752 pages

About the Author
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) studied Classics at Jesus College, Cambridge. As a radical young poet he collaborated with Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads (1798). He was by turns poet, dramatist, political journalist, essayist, and public lecturer. Chronic ill health and addiction to opium led to his death in 1834. Editor H.J. Jackson is a Professor of English at the University of Toronto.

Customer Reviews

Good collection of Coleridge's works
S.T. Coleridge is an interesting poetic figure. An opium addict who imaged an imaginary country called 'Xanadu', based on an Asian legend about one of the descendants of Genghis Khan, Coleridge's visions are very scattered and lacking in unity. His poems, while some soar to great heights, are often confusing or pedestrian, and in this regard he is a lesser poet than Blake or Milton.

Despite this and his constant dabblings in various religions and his unsystematic attempts to grasp a deep unity in the universe and in all knowledge in the realm of the spirit, along with some beautiful poems like the Ancient Mariner and some good essays and prose works (such as the Biographia) make Coleridge an essential part of any canon of English literature. He is a genius, even if not an outstanding one, and worth reading at least once.

The Oxford Collections are generally of very high standard and worth purchasing for every canonical author.