Coleridge's notebooks, of which seventy-two have survived, contain a huge assortment of memoranda set down by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge from 1794 until shortly before his death in 1834.[1] Coleridge's biographer Richard Holmes summarised the range of material covered as "travels, reading, dreams, nature studies, self-confession and self-analysis, philosophical theories, friendships, sexual fantasies, lecture notes, observations of his children, literary schemes, brewing recipes, opium addiction, horrors, puns, prayers."[2] Some of this vast storehouse of material found its way into Coleridge's published works, and it is also believed to have directly influenced Wordsworth's poems.[3][4] The notebooks have been described as "unique in the annals of Romantic autobiography", and as "perhaps the unacknowledged prose masterpiece of the age".[5][6]
Coleridge originally had no intention of making his notebooks public, but in his later years he came to think of them as a legacy to be passed down to his disciples. He even allowed his friend Robert Southey to use a number of extracts in their collaborative work Omniana, published in 1812 and reprinted in an expanded form in 1836. In 1895 the poet's grandson Ernest Hartley Coleridge released a larger selection under the title Anima Poetæ, and the following year the scholar Alois Brandl published in Germany an edition of the first notebook.[7][8] The notebooks were not made available in a complete form until Kathleen Coburn produced the lavishly annotated Bollingen Edition. Coburn began work on this in the 1930s; the first volume appeared in 1957, and the fifth and final one (completed by Anthony John Harding) in 2002, 11 years after her death. Work is in progress on an electronic index to this edition.[9][10][11][12] In 2002 a new selection from the notebooks, restricted to those kept in the British Library, was published under the editorship of Seamus Perry.[13]
Modern editions
Kathleen Coburn, Merton Christensen and Anthony John Harding, eds. (1957–2002) The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bollingen Series L. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN0691098026, 0691098034, 0691098042, 0691099065 and 0691099073[14]
Seamus Perry, ed. (2002) Coleridge's Notebooks: A Selection. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN0198712014[15]
Notes
↑ Cheshire, Paul (2009). "Coleridge's Notebooks". In Burwick, Frederick (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp.289–290. ISBN9780199229536. Retrieved 18 November 2012.
↑ Cheshire, Paul (2009). "Coleridge's Notebooks". In Burwick, Frederick (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp.292, 296. ISBN9780199229536. Retrieved 20 November 2012.
↑ Dixon, Josie (2002). "The Notebooks". In Newlyn, Lucy (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p.76. ISBN0521650712. Retrieved 20 November 2012. prepared by Kathleen Coburn.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets with his friend William Wordsworth. He also shared volumes and collaborated with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Charles Lloyd.
William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).
Robert Southey was an English poet of the Romantic school, and Poet Laureate from 1813 until his death. Like the other Lake Poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey began as a radical but became steadily more conservative as he gained respect for Britain and its institutions. Other romantics such as Byron accused him of siding with the establishment for money and status. He is remembered especially for the poem "After Blenheim" and the original version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears".
Sara Coleridge was an English author and translator. She was the third child and only daughter of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his wife Sara Fricker.
Ernest Hartley Coleridge (1846–1920) was a British literary scholar and poet. He was the son of Derwent Coleridge and grandson of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Charles Lloyd II was an English poet who was a friend of Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth and Thomas de Quincey. His best-known poem is "Desultory Thoughts in London".
The Watchman was a short-lived periodical established and edited by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1796. The first number was promised for 5 February 1796 but actually appeared on 1 March. Published by Coleridge himself, it was printed at Bristol by Nathaniel Biggs, and appeared every eight days to avoid tax. Publication ceased with the tenth number. The publication contained essays, poems, news stories, reports on Parliamentary debates, and book reviews.
Pantisocracy was a utopian scheme devised in 1794 by, among others, the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey for an egalitarian community. It is a system of government where all rule equally. They originally intended to establish such a community in the United States, choosing a site on the banks of the Susquehanna River after considering other places such as Kentucky. By 1795 Southey had doubts about the viability of this and proposed moving the project to Wales. The two men were unable to agree on the location, causing the project to collapse.
Geoffrey Duke Coleridge, 3rd Baron Coleridge was responsible for making the archive of his family member the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge available to researchers for the first time.
Kathleen Hazel Coburn was a Canadian academic and a leading authority on the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772. The youngest of 14 children, he was educated after his father's death and excelled in classics. He attended Christ's Hospital and Jesus College, Cambridge. While attending college, he befriended two other Romanticists, Charles Lamb and Robert Southey, the latter causing him to eventually drop out of college and pursue both poetic and political ambitions.
Sonnets on Eminent Characters or Sonnets on Eminent Contemporaries is an 11-part sonnet series created by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and printed in the Morning Chronicle between 1 December 1794 and 31 January 1795. Although Coleridge promised to have at least 16 poems within the series, only one addition poem, "To Lord Stanhope", was published.
The Fall of Robespierre is a three-act play written by Robert Southey and Samuel Coleridge in 1794. It follows the events in France after the downfall of Maximilien Robespierre. Robespierre is portrayed as a tyrant, but Southey's contributions praise him as a destroyer of despotism. The play does not operate as an effective drama for the stage, but rather as a sort of dramatic poem with each act being a different scene. According to Coleridge, "my sole aim to imitate the impassioned and highly figurative language of the French Orators and develop the characters of the chief actors on a vast stage of horrors."
Robert Lovell (1771–1796) was an English poet who was known for his poem, Bristol: A Satire, which criticised the many merchants of Bristol and their involvement in "mortal corruption" which involved the slave trade.
James Webbe Tobin (1767–1814) was an English abolitionist, the son of a plantation owner on Nevis. He was a political radical, and friend of leading literary men.
In British and Irish culture, a party piece is something done at a gathering in order to entertain the company such as the recitation of a poem, performing a dance, singing a song, performing a trick, or giving a display of memory or strength. It is usually the speciality of the performer. The practice relates to the tradition of oral storytelling and has been described as reaching a peak in the Victorian era before the development of broadcast entertainment.
Seamus Perry is an English author, academic, a Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College, Oxford and, since 2014, a Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford.
Peter Crompton (1765–1833) was an English physician, political radical and brewer.
"The Devil's Thoughts" is a satirical poem in common metre by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published in 1799, and expanded by Robert Southey in 1827 and retitled "The Devil's Walk". The narrative describes the Devil going walking and enjoying the sight of the various sins of mankind. The poem was imitated by Lord Byron in "The Devil's Drive", and by Percy Bysshe Shelley in "The Devil's Walk".
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