Selected Poetry (Penguin Poetry Library) - Softcover

Holmes, Richard; Coleridge, Samuel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140586059 ISBN 13: 9780140586053

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1996

Synopsis

First published in March 1996, a selection of Coleridge's poems which have been grouped thematically and generically. Twenty-one sonnets are followed by nine conversation poems, six ballads, love poems, confessional poems, hill walking poems, visionary fragments and political poems. From the PENGUIN POETRY LIBRARY series.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Coleridge is a great and daring poet. His presence is felt echoing through the English language by anyone who has heard the magical names of 'Kubla Khan' or 'Christabel' or 'The Ancient Mariner'. But he is also an unknown poet, much of whose work has been neglected and whose range and skill has never been properly appreciated. 'The Poet', he once said, 'is the man made to solve the riddle of the Universe.'

Contrary to the legend, Coleridge continued to produce challenging poems for over forty years, and later in life began to make new selections of his work by genre. Now Richard Holmes, Coleridge's prize-winning biographer, follows his example grouping the poetry not chronologically as in most previous selections, but thematically and generically.

Holmes presents one hundred and one poems, each with a detailed critical and biographical note, which together form a new survey of Coleridge's work. In his general introduction, he reviews Coleridge's place in the Romantic Movement, and in a short preface to each section explains Coleridge's originality, his experimental use of language and his imaginative genius in exploring traditional eighteenth-century forms. Holmes's selection gives a fresh and enlarged sense of Coleridge's creative powers and provides a revised approach to the study of Coleridge's poetic development, both for the student and the general reader.

"A great Poet must be... a profound Metaphysician. He may not have it in logical coherence, in his Brain & Tongue; but he must have it by 'Tact': for all sounds & forms of human nature he must have the 'ear' of a wild Arab listening in the silent Desert, the 'eye' of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an Enemy upon the Leaves that strew the Forest: the 'touch' of a blind Man feeling the face of a darling Child."
COLERIDGE, 1802

About the Author:

Richard Holmes is the author of The Age of Wonder, which won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was one of the ten New York Times’ Best Books of the Year in 2009. His balloon book, Falling Upwards, was chosen as a Best Book of the Year by seven newspapers in 2013. His other biographies include Shelley: The Pursuit (winner of the 1974 Somerset Maugham Prize), Coleridge: Early Visions (winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award), Coleridge: Darker Reflections (shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Duff Cooper Prize), and Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage (winner of the 1993 James Tait Black Prize). This Long Pursuit completes the autobiographical trilogy begun in Footsteps (1985) and Sidetracks (2000). Holmes was awarded the OBE in 1992, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, in 2010. He is the 2018 winner of the BIO Award presented by the Biographers International Organization for sustained achievement in biography. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0140586059
• ISBN 13: 9780140586053
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 444