Samuel Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems

William Collins

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This eBook published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

Life & Times section © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

Silvia Crompton asserts her moral rights as author of the Life & Times section

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from Collins English Dictionary

Cover by e-Digital Design

Cover illustration: I Shot the Albatross , Gustave Doré, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , 1876 edition, duncan1890/iStock

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780008167561

Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780008167578

Version: 2016-09-28

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

History of William Collins

Life & Times

Part 1: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Christabel

Kubla Khan

Part 2: Conversation Poems

The Eolian Harp

Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement

This Lime-tree Bower My Prison

Frost at Midnight

Fears in Solitude

The Nightingale

Dejection: An Ode

To William Wordsworth

Part 3: Other Poems 1787–1833

Easter Holidays

Sonnet to the Autumnal Moon

To the Muse

To the Evening Star

To Disappointment

The Rose

The Hour When We Shall Meet Again

The Raven

A Christmas Carol

Inscription for a Seat by the Road Side Half-way Up a Steep Hill Facing South

Ode to Tranquillity

An Ode to the Rain

The Pains of Sleep

Farewell to Love

The Visionary Hope

God’s Omnipresence: A Hymn

To Nature

Youth and Age

Work without Hope

Duty Surviving Self-Love

Epitaph

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases

About the Publisher

In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon . Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner ; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.

Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and ThePilgrim’s Progress , making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.

In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.

HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics, and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, philosopher and critic. A great friend of William Wordsworth, he was a founder of the Romantic movement in English literature, and is regarded as one of the most important poets of the period. He died at the age of 61, having battled lifelong ill health and an opium addiction.

Coleridge was born in 1772 in Devon, the youngest of thirteen children of the Reverend John Coleridge, a vicar and headmaster. The reverend died when Samuel was just eight, and he was dispatched to London to attend Christ’s Hospital. There, under the tutelage of a stern but inspirational schoolmaster, he was introduced to the Greek and Roman poets as well as Shakespeare and Milton.

Musing on his school days in 1817’s Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions , Coleridge recalls how the Reverend James Bowyer drilled into him that ‘poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex’. Bowyer’s approach to poetic composition was no-nonsense in the extreme, but it instilled in Coleridge a sensitivity to syntax and imagery, and sent him off to Cambridge University full of ‘good gifts’. He proved a more enthusiastic poet than student, however, accumulating large debts and a collection of juvenile poems but never completing his degree.

Coleridge’s education did at least serve to throw him into the company of young men who would later form his literary circle. At Christ’s Hospital he befriended Charles Lamb, and as a student he met Robert Southey, a fellow poet and idealist with whom he hatched a plan to found a commune in the wilds of America, where learning and liberty would reign supreme. In 1795 the two young men married sisters Edith and Sarah Fricker – Southey happily, Coleridge very unhappily – and plans for the commune eventually faded.

But these disappointments were soon eclipsed: that same year, Coleridge made the acquaintance of William Wordsworth, and they embarked on a poetic and philosophical collaboration that would define not only both of their careers but also the artistic legacy of their era.