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This authoritative edition was originally published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Coleridge's poetry and prose - all the major poems, complemented by important criticism, letters, and marginalia - to give the essence of his work and thinking. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, critic, and radical thinker, exerted an enormous influence over contemporaries as different as Wordsworth, Southey and Lamb. He was also a dedicated reformer, and set out to use his reputation as a public speaker and literary philosopher to change the course of English thought. This collection represents the best of Coleridge's poetry from every period of his life, particularly his prolific early years, which produced The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan. The central section of the book is devoted to his most significant critical work, Biographia Literaria, and reproduces it in full. It provides a vital background for both the poetry section which precedes it and for the shorter prose works which follow. There is also a generous sample of his letters, notebooks, and marginalia, some recently discovered, which show a different, more spontaneous side to his fascinating and complex personality. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Coleridge is such a celebrity that many who have never read "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" have a fair idea who he was, and yet the common impression of him is not flattering. He is typically seen as a youthful genius transformed by drugs and philosophy into a tedious sage. It is time for a change of image. A Book I Value offers a one-volume sampling of Coleridge's encyclopedic marginalia, revealing a figure more complex but also more humanly attractive--clever, curious, playful, intense--than the one we are used to. This book makes a convenient introduction to Coleridge's life, the intellectual issues and contemporary concerns that held his attention, and the workings of his mind. The marginalia represent an unintimidating sort of writing that Coleridge famously excelled at (often in books borrowed from friends). "A book, I value," he wrote, "I reason & quarrel with as with myself when I am reasoning." Unlike the complete Marginalia in six volumes arranged alphabetically by author, this representative selection is chronological and footnote-free, with a contextualizing introduction and brief headnotes that outline Coleridge's circumstances year by year and provide essential historical information. Our own cultural taboo against writing in books is slackening in light of new interest in the history of the book. It will be weakened further by the extraordinary and now accessible example of Coleridge, who was a remarkably shrewd but at the same time a remarkably charitable reader.

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was one of the most versatile minds in European intellectual history, and a shaping influence in the development of English poetry. As a radical young poet in the years following the French Revolution, Coleridge collaborated with Wordsworth in "Lyrical Ballads" (1798) and was by turns dramatist, political journalist, lecturer and religious thinker. This edition includes his two most famous poems, "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", as well as such blank-verse `conversation' poems as "The Eolian Harp", "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison" and "Frost at Midnight". Not least of the attractions of Heather Jackson's selection is the earlier version of the "Rime" which she presents in full, along with the later, better-known version. Demonstrating the diversity characteristic of Coleridge's work, from early politically-inspired sonnets, to an epitaph he composed for himself shortly before his death, this substantial collection is supplemented by an introduction and notes. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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In his introduction to this edition of Coleridge's Marginalia, the late George Whalley wrote, "There is no body of marginalia--in English, or perhaps in any other language--comparable with Coleridge's in range and variety and in the sensitiveness, scope, and depth of his reaction to what he was reading." The Princeton edition of the Marginalia, of which this is the sixth volume, brings together over eight thousand notes, many never before printed, varying from a single word to substantial essays. In alphabetical order of authors, the notes are presented literatim from the original manuscripts whenever the annotated volumes can be found. Each note is preceded by the passage of the original text that appears to have provoked Coleridge's comment. Texts in foreign languages are followed by translations. The present volume comprises annotations on more than fifty books and manuscripts (from Valckenaer to Zwick, plus Addenda), including comments on Wordsworth's "Benjamin the Waggoner," "The Prelude," and "Translation of Virgil's Aeneid," as well as on William Godwins's verse drama "Abbas." A key-word index to the six volumes of Marginalia, provided here, will give readers ready access to Coleridge's ideas on subjects ranging from literature and philosophy through religion, politics, history, biography, and science.

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