Poems

by Hartley Coleridge

Hartley Coleridge, the breeze-like child of his father's Frost at midnight and Wordsworth's To H. C., six years old, became a poet of extraordinary talent, but seems never fully to have accepted the adult world. He was only five-foot tall, smaller than the boys he tried at times to teach, and the women he admired. To the end of his life he wandered, sometimes drunk for days or weeks on end, but always returning to the Rydal and Grasmere families who cared for him. His poems are closer to Wordsworth than to his father, carrying the rhythms of the early Dove Cottage years of which he had been a part into a Tennysonian world preoccupied with underlying sadness.

Nook

First published November 1, 1990

About the author

David Hartley Coleridge was an English writer. He was the eldest son of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Hartley Coleridge's literary reputation chiefly rests on his works of criticism, on his Prometheus, an unfinished lyric drama, and on his sonnets.