Selected Poetry

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was one of the most versatile minds in European intellectual history, and a shaping influence in the development of English poetry. As a radical young poet in the years following the French Revolution, Coleridge collaborated with Wordsworth in "Lyrical Ballads" (1798) and was by turns dramatist, political journalist, lecturer and religious thinker. This edition includes his two most famous poems, "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", as well as such blank-verse 'conversation' poems as "The Eolian Harp", "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison" and "Frost at Midnight". Not least of the attractions of Heather Jackson's selection is the earlier version of the "Rime" which she presents in full, along with the later, better-known version. Demonstrating the diversity characteristic of Coleridge's work, from early politically-inspired sonnets, to an epitaph he composed for himself shortly before his death, this substantial collection is supplemented by an introduction and notes.