Series:

Wordsworth Poetry Library

2 total works

Cover of The Poetical Works
This edition of Coleridge's poems is edited by the grandson of the poet, and contains a complete text from his earliest teenage poems to the the supernatural poems, "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel". The text follows the 1834 edition, the last published in the author's lifetime, with footnotes indicating the variants from earlier editions and from manuscript drafts and alternative versions. The poems are printed, as far as possible, in chronological order, with Coleridge's own notes as well as textual and bibliographical notes by the editor. There are sections on "Metrical experiments" and "Fragments", most of the latter transcribed from the poet's manuscript notebooks. Apppendices contain first drafts and early versions, as well as the text of "Allegoric vision" of 1795, and the "Apologetic preface" to "Sibylline leaves" (1817), which Coleridge called his "happiest effort in prose composition".

Cover of Lyrical Ballads & Other Poems

With an Introduction and Notes by Martin Scofield.

Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800) constituted a quiet poetic revolution, both in its attitude to its subject-matter and its anti-conventional language. Those volumes and Wordsworth's and Coleridge's other major poems were central to the Romantic period and remain classic texts in our own time. Wordsworth focuses on 'the essential passions of the heart' and achieves a penetrating insight into love and death, solitude and community. Coleridge explores a more fantastic and dreamlike imagination and also writes poems of quiet, conversational meditation. Both poets look with a fresh and visionary eye at the human and the natural world. They examine the condition of men and women at the extreme edge of society; they are also subtle analysts of their own minds and the processes of introspection and memory.

This volume contains all of Lyrical Ballads (1798) with Wordsworth's Preface of 1800/1802, and a wide-ranging selection of both poet's other work, including virtually all their best known and discussed shorter poems.