For every day from Shrove Tuesday to Easter Day, the bestselling poet Malcolm Guite chooses a favourite poem from across the Christian spiritual and English literary traditions and offers incisive reflections on it. A scholar of poetry and a renowned poet himself, his knowledge is deep and wide and he offers readers a soul-food feast for Lent.

Traversing the themes of language, terror and representation, this is the first study to engage Coleridge through the sublime, showing him to have a compelling position in an ongoing conversation about finitude. Drawing on close readings of both his poetry and prose, it depicts Coleridge as a thinker of 'the limit' with contemporary force.

Reid, to demonstrate the centrality of concrete form for Coleridge, giving an integrated account of Coleridge's theory (including terms like 'symbol' and 'organic form') and also situating these central Coleridgean concerns within a contemporary realist and non-theistic aesthetic. In addition, he offers a clear account of Schelling's place in the development of Coleridge's thinking. Reid's interdisciplinary approach will make this book invaluable not only to Coleridge specialists but also to students and scholars concerned generally with the history of philosophy, psychology, religion, and literature."--BOOK JACKET.

Paul Magnuson contends that the relationship between Coleridge's and Wordsworth's poetry is so complex that a new criticism is required to trace its intricacies. This book demonstrates that their poems may be read as parts of a single evolving whole, a "dialogue" in which the works of one are responses to and rewritings of those of the other. Professor Magnuson discloses this dialogue as a joint canon, or sequence, which includes the complete early versions of poems, as well as fragments, canceled drafts, and poems in progress. He further shows that this sequence is based on lyric structure: the relations among its poems and fragments resemble those among stanzas in an ode, and individual poems take their significance from their surrounding contexts in the dialogue. Coleridge's and Wordsworth's poetic conversation arose from their recognition that their themes and styles were similar. There were, as one of Coleridge's friends said, "fears of amalgamation," and it was actually from their failed attempts to collaborate on individual works that their dialogue began. The first chapter of the book elaborates a dialogic methodology and the following chapters discuss the dialogic relationship between Wordsworth's Salisbury Plain poems and "The Ancient Mariner"; "The Ruined Cottage" and Coleridge's "Christabel"; Coleridge's Conversation Poems and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"; Wordsworth's Goslar poetry of 1798, "Home at Grasmere," and Lyrical Ballads (1800); and the dejection dialogue of 1802. Originally published in 1988. 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.

Coleridge tended to view objects in the natural world as if they were capable of articulating truths about his own poetic psyche. He also regarded such objects as if they were capable of illustrating and concretely embodying truths about a transcendent spiritual realm. After 1805, he posited a series of analogical 'likenesses' connecting the rational principles that inform human cognition with the rational principles that he believed informed the teleological structure of the natural world. Human reason and the principle of rationality realised objectively in Nature were both regarded as finite effects of God's seminal Word. Although Coleridge intuitively felt that nature had been constructed as a 'mirror' of the human mind, and that both mind and nature were 'mirrors' of a transcendent spiritual realm, he never found an explanation of such experiences that was fully immune to his own sceptical doubts. Coleridge and Scepticism examines the nature of these sceptical doubts, as well as offering a new explanatory account of why Coleridge was unable to affirm his religious intuitions. Ben Brice situates his work within two important intellectual traditions. The first, a tradition of epistemological 'piety' or 'modesty', informs the work of key precursors such as Kant, Hume, Locke, Boyle, and Calvin, and relates to Protestant critiques of natural reason. The second, a tradition of theological voluntarism, emphasises the omnipotence and transcendence of God, as well as the arbitrary relationship subsisting between God and the created world. Brice argues that Coleridge's detailed familiarity with both of these interrelated intellectual traditions, ultimately served to undermine his confidence in his ability to read the symbolic language of God in nature.

Grounded in the thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Romanticism and Transcendence explores the religious dimensions of imagination in the Romantic tradition, both theoretically and in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. J. Robert Barth suggests that we may look to Coleridge for the theoretical grounding of the view of religious imagination proposed in this book, but that it is in Wordsworth above all that we see this imagination at work. Barth first argues that the Romantic imagination--with its profound symbolic import--of its very nature has religious implications, and notes parallels between Coleridge's view of the imagination and that of Ignatius Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises. He then turns to the role of religious experience in Wordsworth, using The Prelude as a privileged source. Next, after comparing the conception of humanity and God in Wordsworth and Coleridge, Barth considers the role of religious experience and imagery in two of Coleridge's central poetic texts, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Finally, Barth examines the continuing role of the Romantic idea of the religious imagination today, in literature and all the arts, linking it with the thought of theologian Karl Rahner and literary critic George Steiner. Romanticism and Transcendence brings together literary theory, poetry, and religious experience, areas that are interrelated but are often not seen in relationship. By exploring levels of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's poetry that are often ignored, Barth provides insight into how and why the imagination was so important to their work. He also demonstrates how rich with religious value and meaning poetry and the arts can be. The interdisciplinary nature of this important new study will make it useful not only to Wordsworth and Coleridge scholars and other Romantic specialists, but also to anyone concerned with the intellectual history of the nineteenth century and to theologians in general.

Few figures who were active in the English Romantic Movement are as fascinating as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Aside from his own visionary verse, Coleridge is famous for his colourful friendships with fellow-poets Wordsworth and Southey, and above all for his well documented drug-taking and creative use of opium. But it is less widely appreciated that he was also a key figure in Anglican thought, whose writings are continually referred to by modern Anglican theologians. Coleridge's journey from the Unitarianism of his father towards a later commitment to Anglican Trinitarianism of a type he had rejected in his youth involved a rigorous philosophical process of imaginative liberal thinking. Over the last 200 years, that thinking has provided Anglicanism with many valedictory tools as well as a measure of robust self-belief. Offering a major contribution both to religious history and the history of ideas, Graham Neville here charts the particular liberal tradition in British religious thought which stems directly from Coleridge. He shows why Coleridge's thought remains so significant, and traces the ways in which his subject's theological ideas profoundly influenced later British writers and scholars like F.D. Maurice, F.J.A. Hort, F.W. Robertson, B.F. Westcott, John Oman and Thomas Erskine (once called the 'Scottish Coleridge'). Dr Neville further relates the pioneering ideas of Coleridge to current developments in theology and scientific method.

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.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is one of the most influential, as well as one of the most enigmatic, of all Romantic figures. The possessor of a precocious talent, he dazzled contemporaries with his poetry, journalism, philosophy and oratory without ever quite living up to his early promise, or overcoming problems of dependence and drug addiction. The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge does full justice to the many facets of Coleridge's life and work. Specially commissioned essays focus on his major poems, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel, his notebooks, and his major work of non-fiction the Biographia Literaria. Attention is given to his role as talker, journalist, critic, and philosopher, his politics, his religion, and his reputation in his own times and afterwards. A chronology and guides to further reading complete the volume, making this an indispensable guide to Coleridge and his work.