Samuel Taylor Coleridge is best known as a great poet and literary theorist, but for one, quite short, period of his life he held real political power - acting as Public Secretary to the British Civil Commissioner in Malta in 1805. This was a formative experience for Coleridge which he later identified as being one of the most instructive in his entire life. In this volume Barry Hough and Howard Davis show how Coleridge's actions whilst in a position of power differ markedly from the idealism he had advocated before taking office - shedding new light on Coleridge's sense of political and legal morality.

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.

Brimming with poetry, art, and nature writing—Wordsworth and Coleridge as you've never seen them before June 1797 to September 1798 is the most famous year in English poetry. Out of it came Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and “Kubla Khan,” as well as his unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood, and William Wordsworth’s revolutionary songs in Lyrical Ballads along with “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth's paean to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding. In The Making of Poetry, Adam Nicolson embeds himself in the reality of this unique moment, exploring the idea that these poems came from this particular place and time, and that only by experiencing the physical circumstances of the year, in all weathers and all seasons, at night and at dawn, in sunlit reverie and moonlit walks, can the genesis of the poetry start to be understood. The poetry Wordsworth and Coleridge made was not from settled conclusions but from the adventure on which they embarked, thinking of poetry as a challenge to all received ideas, stripping away the dead matter, looking to shed consciousness and so change the world. What emerges is a portrait of these great figures seen not as literary monuments but as young men, troubled, ambitious, dreaming of a vision of wholeness, knowing they had greatness in them but still in urgent search of the paths toward it. The artist Tom Hammick accompanied Nicolson for much of the year, making woodcuts from the fallen timber in the park at Alfoxden where the Wordsworths lived. Interspersed throughout the book, his images bridge the centuries, depicting lives at the source of our modern sensibility: a psychic landscape of doubt and possibility, full of beauty and thick with desire for a kind of connectedness that seems permanently at hand and yet always out of reach.

This is a volume of poems by Sara Coleridge, daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Includes not only all Coleridge's most famous poetic works Kubla Khan, Christobeland The Ancient Mariner, but also many lesser known poems and selected prose extracts from Biographia Literaria and his Notebooks.

A biography of the original of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, a sailor by the name of Simon Hatley. In 1719 Simon Hatley, a sailor on the Speedwell rounding Cape Horn, shot an albatross in a 'melancholy fit' and his scheming captain, George Shelvocke, wrote about the incident. Samuel Taylor Coleridge read Shelvocke's book seventy-eight years later and was inspired to write his famous poem The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere. Robert Fowke, working from contemporary documents, uncovers for the first time in over two hundred years the true identity of Simon Hatley/the Ancient Mariner and gives an enthralling account of his adventures. Simon Hatley sailed to the Pacific on two of the most dangerous privateering voyages of the early eighteenth century, was implicated in an act of piracy, twice imprisoned by the Inquisition and, in 1709, sailed on the same ship with Alexander Selkirk, the model for Robinson Crusoe, and William Dampier, mentioned in Gulliver's Travels as 'my cousin Dampier'. The models for the Ancient Mariner, Robinson Crusoe and, to some extent, Gulliver were once all shipmates together. The tale of Hatley's adventures illuminates events behind this strange literary coincidence. Contents: Preface Hatley: the discovery of Simon Hatley/the Ancient Mariner's identity, his childhood and family background. The Language of the Sea: about the extraordinary voyages and books of buccaneer authors and shipmates of Simon Hatley, such as William Dampier, how they exploited their credentials as seamen for literary and commercial gain. The Hand of the most High: how religious tension was reflected on the high sea, and the broader politcal/religious context behind early-eighteenth-century pirate, buccaneering and privateering voyages into the Pacific. The Voyage of the Cinque Ports: William Dampier's privateering expedition into the Pacific at the start of the War of the Spanish Succession, when Alexander Selkirk (Robinson Crusoe) was marooned on the Juan Fernandez Islands. The Voyage of the Duke and Duchess: Hatley sails as Third Mate, the rescue of Selkirk, capture of Guaykil, Hatley lost at sea. Good Dogs were Tories: return of the Duke and Duchess, formation of the South Sea Company, litigation and dissension. Hatley lost at sea. Lima and the Ancient Mariner: tortured by the Inquisition. Gentlelam Venturers: the voyage of the Speedwell. The Albatross: the shooting of the albatross and other adventures Crusoe and Gulliver: the South Sea Bubble bursts, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver and Shelvocke's book are written. Last information on Simon Hatley. Coleridge: the genesis of the poem. Bibliography Endnotes Index