The Romantics, among whom Coleridge is counted, delighted in the distant, the supernatural (often horrific or terribly and
unusually beautiful,), the mysterious, the unexplainable, the unfathomable. They also rejoiced in the idea of
Freedom and were revolutionary sympathizers, if not active participants in foreign struggles and wars for freedom.
This collection of poetry shows the Romantic heart and its sympathies at their greatest. From the mysterious beauty of Kubla Khan (which, by the way, is very similar to an actual palace in a city in the Himalayas, one Coleridge could not possibly have seen except in visionary experience) to the Gothic horrors of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, from the strange and never-explained beauty, mystery and spellbinding seductiveness of Christobel to the tortured and betrayed idealistic sympathies in France: An Ode (where he expresses a hope for universal education, prophetically, realized there in the last century), from the
tormented confessions in The Pains of Sleep to the even more tormented pleas for peace and mercy and constraint of Britons’ abstract love of war evinced in Fears In Solitude, the tormented and tortured soul of the Romantic poet flows through his pen to awaken not only our love of beauty in his language, but our consciences, our caring for other beings (human and otherwise), and our ideals made real in the beauty of his words, inspiring us to ever greater understandings and ever greater efforts to bring them into reality – mercy into flesh and blood, love into our lives.
These poems were selected for the Dover edition from The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. The Notes were especially prepared for this edition, and cast an interesting light on Coleridge’s life, as well as some of the more obscure allusions in a few of the poems.This Dover collectionis an extremely inexpensive edition and well worth the money and the time.