He issued three editions of his Poetical Works near the end of his life – in 1828, in 1829, and (with the help of his nephew and son-in-law, Henry Nelson Coleridge) in 1834, the year of his death. Between 1834 and 1880 seven editions containing previously unpublished poems appeared, the most important of which were edited by H. N. Coleridge, by Coleridge’s daughter Sara, and then by his youngest son Derwent – all of whom had intimate knowledge of Coleridge’s attitudes towards his verse and distinctive access to his manuscripts. James Dykes Campbell in 1893 and Ernest Hartley Coleridge (the poet’s grandson) in 1912 published annotated scholarly editions of the poems and plays that represent, according to the Modern Language Association’s English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research and Criticism (1985), ‘specimens of the best of late nineteenth-century editorial practice’. An unusually full and authoritative basis for a good modern edition had been established by the beginning of the twentieth century.

But several complications arising from Coleridge’s characteristic habits as a writer of verse stand between the basis laid by these earlier editions and the kinds of editions we need today. Coleridge’s notebooks and letters are full of verse unpublished by him and by his subsequent editors. Much of this verse is fragmentary; much of it is translated or adapted from other writers. But it constitutes, in any case, writing that many readers of Coleridge’s poetry want to have ready access to. Furthermore, early in his career Coleridge published a number of poems in magazines and newspapers that he never included in collected editions. The fact that Coleridge never collected these poems is important. In some instances their textual status is ineluctably suspect because no manuscript version is known to exist and because they were never published under Coleridge’s direct editorial supervision. These circumstances do not of course mean that poems of this kind should be excluded from editions that aim to meet reasonable standards of completeness.

But the most important and interesting complication that an edition of the poems has to contend with is Coleridge’s relentless revising. Sometimes he wrote several different versions of what he and we want to think of as the same poem; sometimes he rewrote passages or added new passages for subsequent published versions, or included such passages in letters or notebooks; sometimes he revised or added passages in his own or someone else’s copy of his poems. This aspect of Coleridge’s poetic practice is the major concern of Jack Stillinger’s recent Coleridge and Textual Instability (1994). Concentrating exclusively on ‘the facts and issues raised by the existence of a great many different versions’ of Coleridge’s seven most widely read poems (‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘Christabel’, ‘The Eolian Harp’, ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’, ‘Frost at Midnight’ and ‘Dejection: An Ode’), Stillinger argues that Coleridge ‘produced a new definitive version, the “final” text that he intended to stand at the moment, every time he revised a text’. ‘We have more versions of Coleridge’s poems than we have for the works of most other major writers’, Stillinger contends; the instability of Coleridge’s texts is not primarily ‘a function of missing materials’ but ‘of a surplus of materials’.

Stillinger emphasizes the limitations of editions that privilege either the latest or the earliest versions of poems, and his analysis, in addition to containing a wealth of information and insight regarding the seven major poems he discusses in detail, suggests more generally the critical importance of taking Coleridge’s multiple revisions into account. But any editor, even an editor who aspires to produce a complete edition with variant readings, will in the end have to present reading texts based on principles that privilege one version over others. This edition, in keeping with the Penguin English Poets series as a whole, privileges the latest text published in Coleridge’s lifetime, or the latest manuscript version known to exist in cases of poems that Coleridge never published at all. The notes contain full, though not exhaustive, information about variants from earlier printed and manuscript versions. (I have, for example, included variants of punctuation only when they might be thought to have an important bearing on the meaning of a line or passage.) Readers are encouraged to follow Stillinger’s lead and explore the rich consequences of Coleridge’s revisions. In four especially significant instances (‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’, ‘The Eolian Harp’, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Dejection: An Ode’) the latest printed version is preceded by the most important earlier version.

The Poetic Works of 1834 provides the copy text for all the poems that Coleridge included in that edition. There has been some controversy on this point: for his edition of 1893 Campbell followed the text of the 1829 edition, claiming that because of Coleridge’s illness during the last year of his life this was the last edition ‘upon which he was able to bestow personal care and attention’. But there is substantial evidence to indicate that though he was ill and strongly dependent on the help of his nephew, Coleridge (as Stillinger puts it) ‘had a hand in revisions up to the very end’, and that E. H. Coleridge was right to follow the 1834 edition in his Oxford University Press edition of 1912.

I have here followed as closely as possible the 1834 edition, including what Stillinger calls its ‘distinctive accidentals’ (far fewer initial capitals in nouns than in earlier collections, for example), and I have modified the punctuation and spelling only in cases where not to do so would prove confusing to a reader today. Since Coleridge’s spelling hovers characteristically between older and more modern practice, obsolete and in some instances eccentric spellings have not been modernized except in cases where Coleridge’s actual spelling might have impeded comprehension. Where ampersands appear in poems as they were originally printed in Coleridge’s lifetime, they have been expanded to ‘and’; ampersands have been retained, however, when they appear in poems left in manuscript at the time of his death.

For poems not included in the 1834 edition the latest text published in Coleridge’s lifetime has been followed, or, in the case of unpublished poems, the most authoritative versions of manuscripts printed in recent standard editions of Coleridge’s writing. Titles assigned to poems in later editions (after 1834) and having no clear basis in a manuscript source are given in square brackets. The style of titles from the early editions is reflected here by the use of different type-size and -style and capitalization patterns to distinguish main titles from subtitles and subsidiary title prose.