Samuel Taylor Coleridge (public domain photo)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

A selective list of online literary criticism and analysis for the nineteenth-century English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with links to reliable biographical and introductory material and signed, peer-reviewed, and scholarly literary criticism.

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Introduction & Biography

"Samuel Taylor Coleridge." A short biographical introduction from the Academy of American Poets.

"Samuel Taylor Coleridge." Text for "Christabel," "Constancy to an Ideal Object," "Dejection: An Ode: and other poems by Coleridge. Published by The Poetry Foundation, a project of Poetry magazine.

"Samuel Taylor Coleridge". A short biography of Coleridge that focuses on his religious beliefs. Unitarian Universalist Association.

Miall, David S. "Coleridge 'Frost at Midnight.'" Background to the poem; First version of the poem, 1798; Structure and style; Critical commentaries; Psychology of attachment, loss, and fantasy; Further reading on "Frost at Midnight." Professor's Miall's web site.

"Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Conservatism's radical prophet." An essay on the contemporary relevance of Coleridge's political ideas. News Weekly (Australia) 19 June 2004.

Perry, Seamus. "Samuel Taylor Coleridge." Literary Encyclopedia. An introduction to Coleridge, from a database that provides signed literary criticism by experts in their field, and is available to individuals for a reasonably-priced subscription [subscription service].

Literary Criticism

Brown, Eric C. "Boyd's Dante, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, and the Pattern of Infernal Influence" [Dante's Divine Comedy, trans. by Rev Henry Boyd (1802)]. Studies in English Literature 38, 4 (Autumn 1998).

Burgoyne, Daniel. "Coleridge's 'Poetic Faith' and Poe's Scientific Hoax" [and Edgar Allan Poe]. Romanticism on the Net 21 (2001).

Caldwell, Lauren. "Truncating Coleridgean Conversation and the Re-visioning of 'Dover Beach'" [and Matthew Arnold]. Victorian Poetry 45, 4 (Winter 2007) [preview of article only].

Fulford, Tim. "Mary Robinson and the Abyssinian Maid: Coleridge's Muses and Feminist Criticism." Fulford considers gendered poetics and Coleridge. Romanticism on the Net 13 (1999).

Fusco, Kurt. "'Sweet Influences': Human/Animal Difference and Social Cohesion in Wordsworth and Coleridge, 1794-1806." On animal depictions in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge that suggest alternative ideals of community for humans. Romanticism and Ecology, Romantic Circles, Nov. 2001.

Graver, Bruce and Ronald Tetreault. "Editing Lyrical Ballads for the Electronic Environment." Romanticism on the Net 9 (1998).

Hogsette, David S. "Eclipsed by the Pleasure Dome: Poetic Failure in Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan.'" Romanticism on the Net 5 (1997).

Hough, Barry; Howard Davis. Coleridge's Laws: A Study of Coleridge in Malta (Open Book Publishers 2011). Using a new publishing model, this complete book is available open access through Google. Says the publisher's blurb: "Samuel Taylor Coleridge is best known as a great poet and literary theorist, but for one, quite short, period of his life he held real political power - acting as Public Secretary to the British Civil Commissioner in Malta in 1805. This was a formative experience for Coleridge which he later identified as being one of the most instructive in his entire life. In this volume, Barry Hough and Howard Davis show how Coleridge's actions whilst in a position of power differ markedly from the idealism he had advocated before taking office - shedding new light on Coleridge's sense of political and legal morality."

Johnston, Kenneth R. "Romantic Anti-Jacobins or Anti-Jacobin Romantics?" On Wordsworth's and Coleridge's "Anti-Jacobin" and "Romantic" credentials. Romanticism on the Net 15 (1999).

Jones, Steven E. "'Supernatural, or at Least Romantic': The Ancient Mariner and Parody." Romanticism on the Net 15 (1999).

Koenig-Woodyard, Chris. "A Hypertext History of the Transmission of Coleridge's 'Christabel,' 1800-1816." Romanticism on the Net 10 (1998).

- - -. "Sex-Text: 'Christabel' and the Christabelliads." On contemporary parodies of "Christabel." Romanticism on the Net 15 (1999).

Leinwand, Theodore. "Shakespeare, Coleridge, Intellecturition" [Coleridge's criticism of Shakespeare]. Studies in Romanticism (2007).

Levy, Michelle. "Discovery and the Domestic Affections in Coleridge and Shelley." Studies in English Literature (2004) [gothic fiction; and Mary Shelley] [abstract only].

Magnuson, Paul. "Coleridge's Discursive 'Monody on the Death of Chatterton.'" The poem as an example of the instability of textual origins. Romanticism on the Net 17 (2000).

Mahoney, Charles. "The Multeity of Coleridgean Apostasy." Romantic Circles, Irony and Clerisy (1999).

Malachuk, Daniel. "Labor, Leisure, and the Yeoman in Coleridge's and Wordsworth's 1790s Writings." Romanticism on the Net 27 (2002).

Milnes, Tim. "Through the Looking-Glass: Coleridge and Post-Kantian Philosophy." Comparative Literature (1999) [and Immanuel Kant; David Hume]. Milnes contends that "while in Germany the role of the professional philosopher had been energized by the task of working through the implications of Kant's 'Copernican revolution,' in England the withering of the philosophical appetite after Hume's dismantling of knowledge meant that the task of constructing an ideology of a post-revolutionary culture, whether social or metaphysical, fell largely to poets, essayists and journalists" [first page of article only].

Perry, Seamus. "Coleridge, the Return to Nature, and the New Anti-Romanticism: An Essay in Polemic." Romanticism on the Net 4 (1996).

Priestman, Martin. "Temples and Mysteries in Romantic Infidel Writing." Romanticism on the Net 25 (2002).

Reid, Nicholas. "Coleridge, Language, and Imagination." Romanticism on the Net 22 (2001).

- - -. "Form in Coleridge, and in Perception and Art More Generally." Romanticism on the Net 26 (2002).

- - -. "'That Eternal Language,' or Why Coleridge was Right About Imaging and Meaning." Romanticism on the Net 28 (2002).

Rzepka, Charles J. "Re-collecting Spontaneous Overflows: Romantic Passions, the Sublime, and Mesmerism." Romantic Passions, Romantic Circles, April 1998.

Scott, Matthew. "The Circulation of Romantic Creativity: Coleridge, Drama, and the Question of Translation." [writing of drama, translation of German texts] Romanticism on the Net 2 (1996).

Shaffer, E.S. "Ideologies in Readings of the Late Coleridge: Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit." Romanticism on the Net 17 (2000).

Simons, Thomas R. "Coleridge Beyond Kant and Hegel: Transcendent Aesthetics and the Dialectic Pentad." Studies in Romanticism (2006).

Smith, Christopher. "Southey and the Emergence of Lyrical Ballads." Romanticism on the Net 9 (1998).

Taylor, Anya. "Coleridge's 'Christabel' and the Phantom Soul." Studies in English Literature 42, 4 (Autumn 2002) [preview of article only].

Weinberg, Alan. "'Yet in its Depth What Treasures': Shelley's Transforming Intellect and the Paradoxical Example of Coleridge" [and Percy Bysshe Shelley]. Romanticism on the Net 22 (2001).

Coleridge and Drama

Barbarese, J.T. "Dramas of Naming in Coleridge." Studies in English Literature 37, 4 (Autumn 1997) [first page of article only].

Carlson, Julie. "An Active Imagination: Coleridge and the Politics of Dramatic Reform." On Coleridge's interest in the drama. Modern Philology 86, 1 (Aug. 1988) pp. 22-33 [first page only].

Fogle, Richard Harter. "Coleridge on Dramatic Illusion." Fogel begins, "Coleridge's celebrated theory of dramatic illusion was doubtless forumulated to deal with the problem of Shakespeare and the 'three unities.'" The Tulane Drama Review 4, 4 (1960) pp. 33-44 [first page only].

Thomas, Sophie. "Seeing Things ("as They Are"): Coleridge, Schiller, and the Play of Semblance." Thomas discusses Coleridge's play Remorse, nothing that although Coleridge is not usually studied as either a playwright or theorist of the drama, "Coleridge did make serious attempts to write plays, largely, it seems, in response to the abysmal state of English drama in the 1790s." Studies in Romanticism 43 (2004) [subscription service].

Web Sites

"The Web Concordances." Ed. Rob Watt. Six concordances with wordlists: P.B. Shelley's Selected Poems; Coleridge's The Ancyent Marinere; Keats's Odes 1819; Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience; Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads 1798; Gerard Manley Hopkins' Poems First Edition, 1918. Also software to make your own concordance.

Romanticism on the Net. Ed. Michael Eberle-Sinatra. An international, peer-reviewed electronic journal devoted to British Romantic studies, an impressive scholarly enterprise that has been making essays freely available since 1996.

Romantic Circles. Eds. Neil Fraistat, Steven E. Jones, and Carl Stahmer. "A refereed scholarly website devoted to the study of Romantic-period literature and culture." An innovative publication on topics in Romanticism.

"A Romantic Natural History." Ed. Ashton Nichols. The relationships between literary works and natural history in the century before Darwin, with articles on Coleridge and other Romantics.

Tetreault, Ronald and Bruce Graver. The Lyrical Ballads Bicenterary Project, 1998. Ed. Ronald Tetreault and Bruce Graver. Electronic texts from the books, which have been transcribed and encoded using sgml, supplemented with images of the printed pages of the first edition.

Book Reviews

Brewer, Kenneth Larry. A review of Coleridge's Later Poetry by Morton D. Paley; and of Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity: 1774-1830, by Andrea K. Henderson. Romanticism on the Net.

Corbett, R. A review of Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, by Peter Kitson, ed. [and Percy Bysshe Shelley; John Keats]. Romanticism on the Net.

Felluga, Dino. A review of The Poetry of Relationship: The Wordsworths and Coleridge, 1797-1800, by Richard E. Matlak. Romanticism on the Net.

Halmi, Nicholas. A review of Coleridge on Dreaming, by Jennifer Ford. Romanticism on the Net 18 (2000).

- - -. A review of "The Norton Critical Edition of Coleridge's Poetry and Prose," a new edition aimed at students. Romanticism on the Net 19 (2000).

Kooy, Michael John. A review of The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Rosemary Ashton. Romanticism on the Net.

Laplace-Sinatra, Michael. A review of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Romantic Autobiography: Reading Strategies of Self-representation by Sheila M. Kearns. Romanticism on the Net.

O'Donnell, Brennan. A review of Romantic Aversions: Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge, by J. Douglas Kneale. Romanticism on the Net 18 (2000).

Perkins, Mary. A review of Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism by David Vallins. Romanticism on the Net 18 (2000).

Reid, Nicholas. A review of The Challenge of Coleridge by David Haney. Romanticism on the Net 29 (2003).

- - -. A review of The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, by Lucy Newlyn, ed. Romanticism on the Net 36-37 (2004-2005).

Roman, Laura. A review of Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge and the High Romantic Argument. Romanticism on the Net 20 (2000).

Sandy, Mark. A review of Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage by Matthew Gibson. Romanticism on the Net 32-33 (2003-2004).

Vickers, Neil. A review of Coleridge's Progress to Christianity: Experience and Authority in Religious Faith by Ronald C. Wendling. Romanticism on the Net 14 (1999).

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