Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In her introduction Heather Jackson, editor of this new collection of Coleridge's poetry, points to this poet as "one of the most fascinating minds in European intellectual history." Jackson's selection of his verse reveals that diversity and versatility form the main characteristics of Coleridge's work, from the early politically-inspired sonnets to the epitaph he wrote for himself in the penultimate year of his life. At the center of the collection are those mature poems which Coleridge wrote while enjoying a close association and firendship with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and for which he is justly famous. They include such blank verse "conversation poems" as "Fears in Solitude," "The Lime Tree Bower my Prison," and "Frost at Midnight." Also at this time he composed what came to be his most famous works, "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." This edition presents both the widely-known version of the "Rime" as well as a fascinating earlier one: compared side-by-side, they provide great insights into the working of a great poet's mind.