A biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, shaped and structured around the story he himself tells in his most famous poem, 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. Though the 'Mariner' was written in 1797 when Coleridge was only 25, it was an astonishingly prescient poem.

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.

Rosemary Ashton explores the many facets of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's complex personality, by turns poet, critic, thinker, enchanting companion, feckless husband, fabled conversationalist and guilt-ridden opium addict.

The most sustained criticism and ambitious theory that had ever been attempted in English, the Biographia was Coleridge's major statement to a literary culture in which he sought to define and defend all imaginative life. This book offers a reading of Coleridge in the context of that culture and the institutions that comprised it.

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.

Volume 1 of 2. Coleridge's Shorter Works and Fragments brings together a number of substantial essays that were not long enough to require volumes to themselves, among them his "Theory of Life," "Essays on the Principles of Genial Criticism," "Treatise on Method," "Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit," "On the Passions," and "On the Prometheus of Aeschylus." To these are added more than four hundred other pieces, some of them fragementary, many of them previously unpublished, ranging in date from school essays of the early 1790s to a discussion of the bullion controversy in 1834. As might be expected, the subject matter includes literature and language, theology, philosophy, politics, and science, but in many less predictable topics (such as child labor laws, marriage, suicide, church history, the abolition of slavery, the state of the colonies) also appear. By gathering this material and presenting it in chronological order, Shorter Works and Fragments reveals the development and major characteristics of Coleridge's seemingly inexhaustible variety. H.J. Jackson and J.R. de J. Jackson, Professors of English at the University of Toronto, are the editors of Coleridge's Marginalia and Logic, respectively, in the Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen Series LXXV Originally published in 1995. 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.

This new edition of the Biographia supersedes all previous editions. Crucially, it takes into consideration 3 decades of research and scholarship on Coleridge and includes all Coleridge's references and allusions. In tracing all unattributed references, Adam Roberts has in some cases opened up whole new avenues of interpretation for the text, materially altering or changing the way we read this classic work. This new scholarly edition for a 21st-century readership includes a detailed Critical Introduction, a Textual Introduction, the text of the Biographia Literaria, including Coleridge's notes and editorial footnotes; Endnotes; and a Bibliography. It is likely to stand as the definitive textual edition for many years to come. Key Features:. The first edition of the Biographia in 3 decades and the first ever to identify all of Coleridge's many allusions and quotations Draws on the most up-to-date scholarship on the text Fully explains the genesis, the poetic and philosophical contexts and debates surrounding the text Provides the chance to revitalise Romanticism studies more generally