Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devonshire to Ann and John Coleridge, a vicar and school-master, on October 21, 1772. The youngest of fourteen children, he surrounded himself with books. He was formally educated, though he left Cambridge before graduating. He amassed a significant debt, and his debts would follow him the rest of his life. During his early professional years, he delivered lectures on politics and religion as well as published poetry.
Influenced by the French Revolution, he and a friend named Robert Southey developed a plan called a "pantisocracy" whereby ten couples would live together in a community in Pennsylvania, sharing chores and a great library, and studying philosophy. The idea included an equal government and freedom of religious and political beliefs. In order to put the plan into action, Samuel needed to marry, so despite being in love with another woman, Samuel married Southey's wife's sister, Sarah Fricker, in 1795. The pantisocracy idea was abandoned, and Samuel ultimately spent very little time with his wife.
Over the next several decades, he fell in love with and was eventually rejected by William Wordsworth's sister-in-law, traveled throughout Europe, developed an opium addiction, translated works, and continued to write poetry. He died in London on July 25, 1834.
Sources: The Poetry Foundation, Poets.org, Britannica
Artist: Peter Vandyke, 1795
Coleridge by
Timely reissue of the second volume of Holmes's classic biographies of one of the greatest Romantic poets.
Richard Holmes's biography of Coleridge transforms our view of the poet of 'Kubla Khan' forever. Holmes's Coleridge leaps out of these pages as the brilliant, animated and endlessly provoking poet of genius that he was.
This second volume covers the last 30 years of Coleridge's career (1804-1834) during which he travelled restlessly through the Mediterranean, returned to his old haunts in the Lake District and the West Country, and finally settled in Highgate. It was a period of domestic and professional turmoil. His marriage broke up, his opium addiction increased, he quarreled with Wordsworth, his own son Hartley Coleridge (a gifted poet himself) became an alcoholic. And after a desperate time of transition, Coleridge re-emerged on the literary scene as a new kind of philosophical and meditative author.
Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772-1804 by
Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes's seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain's greatest poets. Coleridge: Early Visions is the first part of Holmes's classic biography of Coleridge that forever transformed our view of the poet of 'Kubla Khan' and his place in the Romantic Movement. Dismissed by much recent scholarship as an opium addict, plagiarist, political apostate and mystic charlatan, Richard Holmes's Coleridge leaps out of the page as a brilliant, animated and endlessly provoking figure who invades the imagination. This is an act of biographical recreation which brings back to life Coleridge's poetry and encyclopaedic thought, his creative energy and physical presence. He is vivid and unexpected. Holmes draws the reader into the labyrinthine complications of his subject's personality and literary power, and faces us with profound questions about the nature of creativity, the relations between sexuality and friendship, the shifting grounds of political and religious belief.
Remembering Coleridge - Essays & Excerpts on the Life & Works of the English Poet
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was an English poet, theologian, literary critic, philosopher, and co-founder of the English Romantic Movement. He was also a member of the famous Lake Poets, together with William Wordsworth and Robert Southey. Coleridge had a significant influence on the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and American Transcendentalism in general, and played an important role in bringing German idealist philosophy to the English-speaking world. This fantastic volume contains a collection of classic essays, poems, and excerpts by various authors dedicated to the famous Romantic poet, perfect for students of English literature and others with an interest in poetry. Contents include: "To Coleridge, A Poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley", "Mr. Coleridge, by William Hazlitt", "The Death of Coleridge, by Charles Lamb", "On Coleridge, by John Gibson Lockhart", "Coleridge, by Algernon Charles Swinburne", "Notes on Coleridge, by Henry Duff Traill", "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, by Leslie Stephen", "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as Told by Others", "Coleridge, a Lecture by Leslie Stephen", "Coleridge, by Walter Horatio Pater", etc. Ragged Hand is proudly publishing this brand new collection of classic essays and excerpts now for the enjoyment of a new generation of students and literature lovers.
Re-Reading Poets by
In Re-reading Poets, Paul Kameen offers a deep reflection on the importance of poets and poetry to the reader. Through his historical, philosophical, scholarly, and personal commentary on select poems, Kameen reveals how these works have helped him form a personal connection to each individual poet. He relates their profound impact not only on his own life spent reading, teaching, and writing poetry, but also their potential to influence the lives of readers at every level. In an examination of works by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walt Whitman, and others, Kameen seeks to sense each author's way of seeing, so that author and reader may meet in a middle ground outside of their own entities where life and art merge in deeply intimate ways. Kameen counters ideologies such as New Criticism and poststructuralism that marginalize the author, and instead focuses on the author as a vital presence in the interpretive process. He analyzes how readers look to the past via "tradition," conceptualizing history in ways that pre-process texts and make it difficult to connect directly to authors. In this vein, Kameen employs examples from T. S. Eliot, Martin Heidegger, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Kameen examines how people become poets and how that relates to the process of actually writing poems. He tells of his own evolution as a poet and argues for poetry as a means to an end beyond the poetic, rather than an end in itself. In Re-reading Poets, Kameen's goal is not to create a new dictum for teaching poetry, but rather to extend poetry's appeal to an audience far beyond academic walls.
Biographia Literaria by
"The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM." -Samuel Taylor Coleridge In his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge explains his theory of poetry as a creation of the "self-sufficing power of absolute Genius," which he claimed was as different from talent as "an egg [from] an egg-shell." Fusing autobiography, literary criticism, and religious and philosophical theory, Biographia Literaria is a supreme work of literary criticism and one of the classics of English literature. Coleridge insisted on sound sense and clear reference in phrase, metaphor, and image. He discouraged literary "embroidery," along with conventional similes and stale poetic diction, aiming to write in natural language that spoke to the heart as well as the intellect. Critical of the rhetorical excesses in poetry of the time, he joined Wordsworth in promoting "natural thoughts with natural diction." Biographia Literaria was the most important work of literary criticism of the English Romantic period, combining philosophy and literary criticism in a new way. It remains an incomparable source of informed reflection on the brave new literary world whose birth pangs Coleridge attended.
Coleridge's Conversation Poems - the Complete Collection by
""Coleridge's Conversation Poems - The Complete Collection"" features all eight of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poems dubbed 'conversation poems' by George McLean Harper. The poems included in the collection are The Eolian Harp (1796), Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement (1796), This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison (1797), Frost at Midnight (1798), Fears in Solitude (1798), The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem (1798), Dejection: An Ode (1802) and To a Gentleman (To William Wordsworth) (1817). The collection explores themes of love and marriage, human nature and external nature, faith and God, and poetic inspiration. This book is the ideal gift for lovers of English poetry and the Lake Poets, and should not be missed by those interested in Romanticism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 -1834) was an English poet and literary critic and is considered a founder of the Romantic movement alongside William Wordsworth and Robert Southey. His work is well-known for its reflections on nature and human relationships to each other, the world and God. Other famous examples of his work include Kubla Khan (1817) and his critical essays and lectures on William Shakespeare. Read & Co.'s Ragged Hand imprint is proud to be publishing a high-quality pocketbook as part of the Remembering Series, and hope fans of Coleridge will enjoy the complete collection of the Conversation Poems.
The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 4 (Part II) by
Published originally in 1809-1810, The Friend was revised in 1812, by public demand. In 1818, a three-volume rifacimento appeared in which Coleridge attempted to dispel obscurity, tie up loose threads of reasoning, and provide more mature apercus. Now, in the Collected Works, The Friend has been re-edited to return to Coleridge's 1818 text. His emendations, cuts, and marginal comments noted in six copies of the work, as well as manuscript additions and deletions, have been included as footnotes. The editor's footnotes also elucidate sources and themes and provide translations of the many Latin and Greek passages. The entire periodical Friend is given as an appendix, with the 1812 revisions. Originally published in 1969. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.