The Complete Poems Read Online

I have usually retained Coleridge’s double punctuation at the ends of clauses (– or :–), because I believe he meant something rhetorically in using such punctuation and because it is rarely confusing. The closest thing we have to a set of Coleridgean principles on punctuation is an informal unpublished essay, dated 1809 by Kathleen Coburn in her edition of the Notebooks, now in the Victoria College Library at the University of Toronto (see Appendix 2). While I have consulted some Coleridge manuscript material directly, I have not been able to edit every unpublished poem anew and have relied heavily on Earl Leslie Grigg’s edition of the Collected Letters and on Kathleen Coburn’s edition of the Notebooks.

This edition includes all the poems known to have been published by Coleridge, with the exception of some of the epigrams, translations and adaptations that he himself never collected. It also includes a substantial selection of verse that remained in manuscript at the time of his death. I worked on this edition from the outset knowing that J. C. C. Mays would soon publish what will become the most complete and authoritative edition of the poems and plays in the Bollingen – Princeton Collected Coleridge. This edition was published in 2002 and contains among other things, a great deal of previously unpublished verse, as well as previously unknown or lost versions of published poems. Readers will obviously want to consult Mays’s edition for such new material, as well as for the wealth of new textual information it offers. I should also mention here my indebtedness to John Beer’s revised and expanded Everyman edition of the Poems. Since Beer was able to consult Mays’s dates of composition for Coleridge’s poems, the chronological ordering in the revised Everyman edition is particularly valuable.

Organizing an edition according to chronological order of composition will produce anomalies and uncertainties, especially with a poet such as Coleridge who kept revising his poems over a long period of time. ‘The Eolian Harp’, to cite one obvious instance, appears here among the poems of 1795 (it was first published in the Poems of 1796), even though it assumed its final form only when Coleridge revised it for Sibylline Leaves of 1817. One advantage of this procedure for the present edition is that it coincides with the view that Coleridge himself expressed in discussing the last edition of his poems with his nephew: ‘After all you can say, I still think the chronological order the best for arranging a poet’s works. All your divisions are in particular instances inadequate, and they destroy the interest which arises from watching the progress, maturity, and even the decay of genius’ (Table Talk, 1 January 1834).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Like any one working on Coleridge and his poetry, I am particularly indebted to the editors of the Collected Coleridge ; and to Kathleen Coburn for her edition of the Notebooks. Kelvin Everest and Jack Stillinger offered very helpful general advice on undertaking this edition, as well as more specific assistance at various stages of the work. James C. McKusick brought to my attention Coleridge’s previously uncollected verse translation of ‘The Song of Deborah’, which I am pleased to include in this volume. For different kinds of help I wish to thank Anthony Arnove, Megan Behrent, Julia Deisler, Paul Magnuson, Lance Newman, Eric Ruder, Henry Spiller, Jeanne Spiller and Annie Zirin. Sheila Emerson’s abiding interest and support were, and are, surpassingly important. From the beginning Christopher Ricks, the General Editor of this series, gave me his attentive encouragement; near the end, he gave the typescript a generously careful reading. Antony Wood and Annamaria Formichella provided excellent editorial assistance in the final stages of preparing the text for publication.

For permission to publish copyright material, I am grateful to Oxford University Press for quotations from E. H. Coleridge’s edition of Coleridge: Poetical Works (1912) and from Earl Leslie Griggs’s edition of the Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1956–71); to Princeton University Press for material from the Collected Coleridge and from Coburn’s edition of the Notebooks; and to Edinburgh University Press for Anthea Morrison’s English translation of Coleridge’s prize-winning Greek ode on the slave trade.

TABLE OF DATES