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, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He also shared volumes and collaborated with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Charles Lloyd. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on William Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking cultures. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases, including "suspension of disbelief". He had a major influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson and American transcendentalism.
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).
The Biographia Literaria is a critical autobiography by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published in 1817 in two volumes. Its working title was 'Autobiographia Literaria'. The formative influences on the work were William Wordsworth's theory of poetry, the Kantian view of imagination as a shaping power, various post-Kantian writers including F. W. J. von Schelling, and the earlier influences of the empiricist school, including David Hartley and the Associationist psychology.
Ernest Hartley Coleridge (1846–1920) was a British literary scholar and poet. He was son of Derwent Coleridge and grandson of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Christabel is a long narrative ballad by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in two parts. The first part was reputedly written in 1797, and the second in 1800. Coleridge planned three additional parts, but these were never completed. Coleridge prepared for the first two parts to be published in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, his collection of poems with William Wordsworth, but left it out on Wordsworth's advice. The exclusion of the poem, coupled with his inability to finish it, left Coleridge in doubt about his poetical power. It was published in a pamphlet in 1816, alongside Kubla Khan and The Pains of Sleep.
Richard Gordon Heath Holmes, OBE, FRSL, FBA is a British author and academic best known for his biographical studies of major figures of British and French Romanticism.
The Bollingen Foundation was an educational foundation set up along the lines of a university press in 1945. It was named after Bollingen Tower, Carl Jung's country home in Bollingen, Switzerland. Funding was provided by Paul Mellon and his wife Mary Conover Mellon. The Foundation became inactive in 1968, and its publications were later re-issued by Princeton University Press.
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.
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.
Lines on an Autumnal Evening was composed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1793. The poem, rewritten throughout Coleridge's life, discusses nature and love. As Coleridge developed and aged, the object of the poem changed to be various women that Coleridge had feelings toward.
To Fortune was composed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1793 when he played the lottery in the hope of getting out of debt. The poem was the first work of his to be printed in a major publication.
Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement is a poem written by English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1796. Like his earlier poem The Eolian Harp, it discusses Coleridge's understanding of nature and his married life, which was suffering from problems that developed after the previous poem. Overall, the poem focuses on humanity's relationship with nature in its various aspects, ranging from experiencing an Edenic state to having to abandon a unity with nature in order to fulfill a moral obligation to humanity. The discussion of man's obligation to each other leads into a discussion on the difference between the life of a philosopher and the life of a poet. By the end of the poem, the narrator follows the philosophical path in a manner similar to what Coleridge sought to do. The response to the poem from critics was mostly positive, with many of them emphasizing the religious aspects of the work in their analysis.
The Romantics, in seeking to understand nature in her living essence, studied the 'father of science', Sir Francis Bacon. The view of Bacon and the 'inductive method' that emerges is quite a different one from that tended to prevail both before and then after, here mainly due to John Stuart Mill's interpretation later in the 1800s. For the Romantics, induction as generally interpreted 'was not enough to produce correct understanding in Bacon's terms.' They saw another side of Bacon, generally not developed, one in which nature was a labyrinth not open to "excellence of wit" nor "chance experiments": "Our steps must be guided by a clue, and see what way from the first perception of the sense must be laid out upon a sure plan."
Zapolya: A Christmas Tale is a verse play in two parts by Samuel Taylor Coleridge written in December 1815 and January 1816. It was Coleridge's last play and, like Osorio, was rejected by Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. It received its first performance in a production by Thomas Dibdin at the Surrey Theatre in 1816.
The letters of Charles Dickens, of which more than 14,000 are known, range in date from about 1821, when Dickens was 9 years old, to 8 June 1870, the day before he died. They have been described as "invariably idiosyncratic, exuberant, vivid, and amusing…widely recognized as a significant body of work in themselves, part of the Dickens canon". They were written to family, friends, and the contributors to his literary periodicals, who included many of the leading writers of the day. Their letters to him were almost all burned by Dickens because of his horror at the thought of his private correspondence being laid open to public scrutiny. The reference edition of Dickens's letters is the 12-volume Pilgrim Edition, edited by Graham Storey et al. and published by Oxford University Press.
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.
"Time, Real and Imaginary. An Allegory" is a short poem of 11 lines written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge at an uncertain date, and first published in 1817.
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