Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge are crucial to the literature of European Romanticism. As well as the early poems such as The Ancient Mariner and Frost at Midnight, for which he is probably best known, they comprise lectures, periodical essays, letters, notebooks and marginalia, and records of his conversation. Now that those texts are more widely available we can see a different Coleridge whose writings make a vital intervention in aesthetic and political theory as well as literature. The breadth and variety of those writings can be bewildering, and this book provides a lively and accessible guide to the whole of Coleridge’s writing career. It traces from Coleridge’s early poems to his late theory of a Christian state a continuous preoccupation with an audience, with education, and with the idea of a Church which reveals a surprising Coleridge with much to say to the present.