Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Author), Richard Holmes (Contributor)

Book Description

Series: Penguin Classics | Publication Date: October 31, 2000

Living in a revolutionary age, Coleridge's poetry was written in a spirit of moral and emotional inquiry into the absolutes of the human condition. He is best known for his visionary poetry ('Kubla Khan') and his ballads ('The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'), but he used and transformed a variety of verse forms, from the sonnet to the conversation poem, on subjects as diverse as nature, love, and politics. This selection calls attention to the range of Coleridge's work, its strong autobiographical content,and its artistic development throughout his career. The old chronological form has been abandoned and the poems are organised according to genre, with each section displaying its own individual development in craft and theme.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The Aeolian Harp
Alice Du Clos: Or The Forked Tongue. A Ballad
An Angel Visitant
Aria Spontanea
The Ballad Of The Dark Ladie; A Fragment
The Blossoming Of The Solitary Date-tree. A Lament
The Blossoming Of The Solitary Date-tree. A Lament
A Character
Christabel: Part 1
Christabel: Part 2
Constancy To An Ideal Object
A Dark Sky
A Day Dream
The Day-dream; From An Emigrant To His Absent Wife
Dejection: An Ode
The Delinquent Travellers
The Devil's Thoughts
Duty Surviving Self-love; The Only Sure Friend Of Declining Life
Epitaph On Himself
Fancy In Nubibus; Or, The Poet In The Clouds
Farewell To Love; Sonnet
Fears In Solitude
Fire, Famine And Slaughter. A War Eclogue
Four Metrical Experiments: 1. Iambics
Four Metrical Experiments: 2. Trochaics
Four Metrical Experiments: 4. Pindaric
France: An Ode
Frost At Midnight
The Garden Of Boccaccio
Glycine's Song, Fr. Zapolya
Hope And Time
Human Life: On The Denial Of Immortality
Hymn To Mont Blanc [in The Vale Of Chamouni]
Inscription For A Fountain On A Heath
Invisible Powers
An Invocation; Song, Fr. Remorse
The Keep-sake
The Knight's Tomb
Kubla Khan
The Language Of Birds
A Letter To Sara Hutchinson, April 4, 1802 -- Sunday Evening
Life
Limbo
Lines Composed While Climbing The Left Ascent Of Brockley
Lines Written In The Album At Elbingerode, In Hartz Forest
Love
Love's Apparition And Evanishment; An Allegorical Romance
The Mad Monk
The Netherlands
The Nightingale; A Conversation Poem
O Sara! Never Rashly Let Me Go
An Ode On The Destruction Of The Bastile
An Ode To The Rain
On A Ruined House In A Romantic Country
On Donne's Poetry
On Receiving An Account That His Only Sister's Death Was Inevitable
The Pains Of Sleep
The Pang More Sharp Than All; An Allegory
Pantisocracy
Phantom
Phantom Or Fact; A Dialogue In Verse
The Picture, Or The Lover's Resolution
Pity
A Plantive Moment
The Present State Of Society
Psyche
Recollections Of Love
Reflections On Having Left A Place Of Retirement
The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner
The Sea Mew
Separation
Sonnet (on Quitting School For College)
Sonnet (on Receiving A Letter Informing Me Of The Birth Of A Son)
Sonnet Composed On A Journey Homeward
Sonnet To A Friend Who Asked, How I Felt ... My Infant To Me
Sonnet To The Autumnal Moon
Sonnet To The River Otter
Sonnets On Eminent Characters: 7. To W.l. Bowles (1st Version)
A Stranger Minstrel; To Mrs. Robinson Before Her Death
The Suicide's Argument
A Sunset
This Lime-tree Bower My Prison
A Thought Suggested By A View, Of Saddleback In Cumberland
The Three Graves: Part 3
The Three Graves: Part 4
To A Friend, Together With An Unfinished Poem
To A Young Ass; Its Mother Being Tethered Near It
To A Young Friend On His Proposing To Domesticate With The Author
To Asra
To Nature
To The Author Of 'the Robbers' (schiller)
To The Rev. George Coleridge Of Ottery St. Mary, Devon
To The Young Artist, Kayser Of Kaserwerth
To Two Sisters; A Wanderer's Farewell
To William Wordsworth
A Tombless Epitaph
The Tropic Tree
The Visionary Hope
The Wanderings Of Cain
Work Without Hope
The World That Spidery Witch
The Yellow Hammer
You Mould My Hopes
Youth And Age
Youth And Age: Note
Burning Together
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

About the Author

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834) was a poet, critic, and philosopher of Romanticism. He and William Wordsworth published the LYRICAL BALLADS in 1799, marking a conscious break with 18th-century tradition. Richard Holmes is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded an OBE. The first volume of his biography of Coleridge won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize.

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (October 31, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140424296
• ISBN-13: 978-0140424294
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #965,903 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars XANADU INSPECTED, August 22, 2004

By 

DAVID BRYSON (Glossop Derbyshire England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

This edition has a purpose, and one that I subscribe to wholeheartedly. That purpose is `to transform Coleridge's reputation, and find him a new generation of readers'. One hundred and one poems, including thankfully many fragments, are selected. They include, obviously, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan, but also sonnets, other ballads, the Asra poems to Sara Hutchinson, nature poems, the late `confessional' poems, political, satirical and humorous poems, and even one prose item The Wanderings of Cain. The editor Richard Holmes is a writer and broadcaster but not apparently an academic, and to my way of thinking the edition is all the better for that. One thing that I looked for but did not find was the brilliant and amusing poem on the city of Cologne, but one can't have everything and I know it by heart anyway.

As far as my poets are concerned, I would far sooner be sorry than safe. When I was at school Coleridge took very much of a back seat to Wordsworth, who was obviously a much safer bet. One was given The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan for study, and maybe Christabel too if one was lucky, but my impression always was that that was as much Coleridge as the English masters had read. Tennyson once said `I have the greatest command of English since Shakespeare, but to be sure I have nothing to say.' Leaving Milton aside as being a completely special phenomenon whose wonderful language was only just English by some extension of the term, I go along with the first part of that assessment. Between Shakespeare and Tennyson, still leaving Milton out of the frame, who would you say takes the next place for sheer command and virtuosity with the English language? The orthodoxy in my time was Keats, but my own vote goes to Coleridge. Housman himself, the very high priest of Wordsworth, said that the finest versification of the era was to be found `in the irregular and simple-seeming stanzas of The Ancient Mariner'. I don't dispute that, but if The Ancient Mariner has a rival in that respect it is none other than Christabel in my own view. Housman considered the audacious metrical experiment of Christabel to be unsuccessful, but while Housman's ear for language was preternaturally acute, his ear for music was dull, and an ear for music is needed to get the full value from Christabel. We find the lines

She kneels beneath the huge oak tree
And in silence prayeth she.
The lady sprang up suddenly,
The lovely lady Christabel!
It moaned as near as near can be,
But what it is she cannot tell.

The crucial line there is `The lovely lady Christabel'. It adds nothing to the sense, it has the function of marking time, measuring out a moment of startled horror, and in general Christabel, incomplete though it is, seems to me as notable an addition to the English language as it is to English literature. It is this experimental and unpredictable element in Coleridge that thrills me with him. Very properly, there are numerous of his fragments here, fascinating testimony to his out-of-the-way mental processes. The poets of that era took their social and historical role pretty seriously - Shelley pronounced poets to be `the unacknowledged legislators of the world', and Coleridge himself considered them to be no less than the elect who would unlock the mystery of the universe. Give or take most of that kind of thing, there is a real visionary element in Coleridge, and not only in the fragments, although I'm not so sure what kind of legislator he might have made.

The selections are subdivided into categories, something Coleridge was not too keen on, believing that a plain chronological sequence was the proper reflection of a poet's development. The editor sympathises with this view, but finds it simply not a realistic option, and I agree with him. His preface is very readable, less heavy going than many such, there is a short introductory section to each category of poems included, and there is a further note on each individual poem at the back. I hope this edition succeeds in what it is trying to do.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An expanded sense of Coleridge as a poet, January 1, 2006

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

This volume contains a whole host of poems by Coleridge which are not commonly read and known. The Coleridge most of us know is limited to a few great long- poems, "The Ancient Mariner" "Kubla Khan" "Christabel" and perhaps a half- dozen shorter poems.
This anthology enables the reader to broaden and deepen in the Coleridge oeuvre, and feel how wide and wonderous the world of this many-sided genius.