Anima Poetae from the Unpublished Note-Books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PKEFACE Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Tay- Preface lor Coleridge, which the poet's nephew and son-in-law, Henry Nelson Coleridge, published in 1835, was a popular book from the first, and has won the approval of two generations of readers. Unlike the Biographia Literaria, or the original and revised versions of The Friend, which never had their day at all, or the Aids to Reflection, which passed through many editions, but now seems to have delivered its message, the Table Talk is still well-known and widely read, and that not only by students of literature. The task which the editor set himself was a difficult one, but it lay within the powers of an attentive listener, possessed of a good memory and those rarer gifts of a refined and scholarly taste, a sound and luminous common sense. He does not attempt to reproduce Coleridge's conversation or monologue or impassioned harangue, but he preserves and notes down the detached fragments of knowledge and wisdom which fell from time to time from the master's lips. Here are the balmy sunny islets of the blest and the intelligible, an unvexed and harborous archipelago. Very sparingly, if at all, have those pithy sentences and weighty paragraphs been trimmed or pruned by the pious solicitude of the memorialist, but it must be borne in mind that the unities are more or less consciously observed, alike in the matter of the discourse and the artistic presentation to the reader. There is, in short, not merely a mechanic but an organic regularity in the composition of the work as a whole. A myriad-minded sage, who has seen men and cities, who has read widely and shaped his thoughts in a peculiar mould, is pouring out his stores of knowledge, the garnered fruit of a life of study and meditation, for the benefit ...

66 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1895

About the author

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was an English poet, critic, and philosopher who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as his major prose work Biographia Literaria.

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible document, the first-ever selection from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's amazingly modern notebooks, published by his grandson, Ernest Hartley Coleridge. More about it and more in my column at 3 Quarks Daily: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily...