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.

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.

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.

"A complex critical portrait of one of the most influential writers in the world, Samuel Taylor Coleridge"--Provided by publisher.

Traces the life of Samuel Coleridge, looks at her marriage to the difficult English poet and critic, and discusses how Coleridge's opium addiction affected their lives

Coleridge is such a celebrity that many who have never read "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" have a fair idea who he was, and yet the common impression of him is not flattering. He is typically seen as a youthful genius transformed by drugs and philosophy into a tedious sage. It is time for a change of image. A Book I Value offers a one-volume sampling of Coleridge's encyclopedic marginalia, revealing a figure more complex but also more humanly attractive--clever, curious, playful, intense--than the one we are used to. This book makes a convenient introduction to Coleridge's life, the intellectual issues and contemporary concerns that held his attention, and the workings of his mind. The marginalia represent an unintimidating sort of writing that Coleridge famously excelled at (often in books borrowed from friends). "A book, I value," he wrote, "I reason & quarrel with as with myself when I am reasoning." Unlike the complete Marginalia in six volumes arranged alphabetically by author, this representative selection is chronological and footnote-free, with a contextualizing introduction and brief headnotes that outline Coleridge's circumstances year by year and provide essential historical information. Our own cultural taboo against writing in books is slackening in light of new interest in the history of the book. It will be weakened further by the extraordinary and now accessible example of Coleridge, who was a remarkably shrewd but at the same time a remarkably charitable reader.