Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, the youngest son of a clergyman. He was educated at Christ's Hospital School, London where he began his friendship with Charles Lamb, and Jesus College, Cambridge. He first met Dorothy and William Wordsworth in 1797 and a close association developed between them, issuing in their groundbreaking joint-publication, Lyrical Ballads, in 1799. Coleridge subsequently settled in the Lake District, and thereafter in London, where he lectured on Shakespeare and published his literary and philosophical theories in the Biographia Literaria (1817). He died in 1834 having overseen a final edition of his Poetical Works. As poet, philosopher and critic, Coleridge stands as one of the seminal figures of his time.

When it was first published, Lyrical Ballads enraged the critics of the day: Wordsworth and Coleridge had given poetry a voice, one decidedly different to that which had been voiced before. This acclaimed Routledge Classics edition offers the reader the opportunity to study the poems in their original contexts as they appeared to Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s contemporaries, and includes some of their most famous poems, including Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancyent Marinere.

This Volume is a verbatim reprint of the original editions of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1817); The Statesman's Manual, a Lay Sermon (1816); and Blessed are ye that sow beside all waters, a Lay Sermon (1817).