Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This volume collects the central lyrical and philosophical works of the English Romantic tradition. It contains the complete text of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, detailing a sailor’s supernatural penance after killing an albatross, alongside the unfinished visionary fragment Kubla Khan. The collection also features the conversation poems, such as This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison and Frost at Midnight, which substitute formal epic structures for intimate observations of the natural world and the mechanics of human memory. These verses prioritize the role of the primary imagination in perceiving reality.

Students of nineteenth-century literature and readers of classic verse use this book to study the shift from Enlightenment rationalism to Romantic subjectivity. The text provides a technical look at complex meter, internal rhyme, and the Gothic aesthetic. Readers gain a specific understanding of how hallucinatory imagery and landscape descriptions influenced the development of modern English poetry. They walk away with a clear view of the historical transition toward psychological interiority in written art.