The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol 1 and 2.

To read Coleridge complete is to watch English poetry cross a threshold, from the polished order of the eighteenth century into the strange, visionary weather of Romanticism.

What it's about

These two volumes gather the poetical works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, among the most influential poets of the English Romantic movement. Here are the great supernatural poems for which he is best loved, alongside the conversational meditations, the odes, the fragments, and the wide range of shorter verse he produced across his restless career. Together they present the full arc of a poet who could conjure both the eerie grandeur of a haunted voyage and the intimate music of a mind thinking aloud beside a quiet fire.

Themes

Imagination stands at the heart of Coleridge's work, the power of the mind to transform and even transfigure the world it perceives. His poems move between the natural and the supernatural, the waking and the dreaming, exploring guilt, wonder, memory, and the mysterious sources of creativity. Nature, faith, and the burdens of a troubled inner life recur throughout, always rendered in language of extraordinary suggestive power.

Why it still matters

Coleridge helped invent modern poetry in English, and his best work remains among the most quoted and memorized in the language. His ideas about imagination shaped criticism as profoundly as his verse shaped poetry. To have his complete poems in hand is to hold one of the essential bodies of Romantic literature, endlessly rich on rereading.

Who it's for

Lovers of poetry, students of Romanticism, and anyone who has felt the pull of the Ancient Mariner or the spell of Kubla Khan will want the whole of Coleridge within reach.