A Choice of Coleridge's Verse

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Coleridge's flawed genius has fascinated people for almost 200 years. His greatest poems have a quality which sets them apart from - and perhaps above - those of even his most admired Romantic contemporaries. Yet they sit oddly, too, with the bulk of his own work, seeming to spring, if not from a different sensibility, then at least from a different state of mind. Here, Ted Hughes describes the psychological ordeal which produced the supreme utterances of 'Kubla Khan', 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and 'Christabel, Part One', and his choice gives us those poems in the company of others related to them. The result is a daring and radical attempt to get to the heart of Coleridge's spiritual and poetic concerns.

Author Bio

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). Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born in Yorkshire. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957 by Faber & Faber and was followed by many volumes of poetry and prose for adults and children. He received the Whitbread Book of the Year for two consecutive years for his last published collections of poetry, Tales from Ovid and Birthday Letters. He was Poet Laureate from 1984, and in 1998 he was appointed to the Order of Merit.