Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Washington Allston retouched

Coleridge's notebooks, of which seventy-two have survived, contain a huge assortment of memoranda set down by the poet

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge (; 21 October 177225 July 1834) 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 ...

from 1794 until shortly before his death in 1834. 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." 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 William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) 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). Wordsworth's '' ...

's poems. The notebooks have been described as "unique in the annals of Romantic autobiography", and as "perhaps the unacknowledged prose masterpiece of the age".

Publication history

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 Robert Southey ( or ; 12 August 1774 – 21 March 1843) 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 ra ...

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 Ernest Hartley Coleridge (1846–1920) was a British literary scholar and poet. He was son of Derwent Coleridge and grandson of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge was educated at Highgate School, Sherborne School, and Balliol College, Oxfo ...

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. The notebooks were not made available in a complete form until

Kathleen Coburn Kathleen Hazel Coburn (September 7, 1905 – September 23, 1991) was a Canadian academic and a leading authority on the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Life Born in Stayner, Ontario, a fourth generation Canadian of Scottish–Irish desc ...

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. In 2002 a new selection from the notebooks, restricted to those kept in the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...

, was published under the editorship of Seamus Perry.

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. , 0691098034, 0691098042, 0691099065 and 0691099073 * Seamus Perry, ed. (2002) ''Coleridge's Notebooks: A Selection''. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Notes

External links

''Anima Poetæ''
at the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

Review by Stephen Romer of Seamus Perry's ''Selection''
in ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'' {{Samuel Taylor Coleridge Works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Books published posthumously Romanticism