Book description
Living in a revolutionary age, Coleridge's poetry was written in a
spirit of moral and emotional inquiry into the absolutes of the human
condition. He is best known for his visionary poetry ('Kubla Khan') and
his ballads ('The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'), but he used and
transformed a variety of verse forms, from the sonnet to the
conversation poem, on subjects as diverse as nature, love, and politics.
This selection calls attention to the range of Coleridge's work, its
strong autobiographical content,and its artistic development throughout
his career. The old chronological form has been abandoned and the poems
are organised according to genre, with each section displaying its own
individual development in craft and theme. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1772 - 1834) was a poet, critic, and philosopher of Romanticism. He and
William Wordsworth published the LYRICAL BALLADS in 1799, marking a
conscious break with 18th-century tradition. Richard Holmes is a Fellow
of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded an OBE. The first
volume of his biography of Coleridge won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the
Year Prize.
