Selected Poems
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry, first emerging in the late eighteenth century and reaching its most influential form around the turn of the nineteenth, helped transform the possibilities of English verse. From the opium-haunted landscapes of Kubla Khan and the supernatural voyage of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to the intimate tenderness of Frost at Midnight, these poems move between dream and reality, terror and wonder, philosophical speculation and domestic affection. Coleridge possessed a rare gift for making the natural world feel charged with spiritual significance, whether through an ancient mariner’s encounter with the inexplicable or a quiet meditation beside a sleeping child. His language is musical and incantatory, drawing readers into worlds where imagination unsettles the boundaries of ordinary experience.
A central figure of English Romanticism, Coleridge developed, alongside William Wordsworth, a new vision of poetry grounded in the transformative power of the imagination. His finest poems combine supernatural mystery with profound questions about guilt, faith, isolation and humanity’s relationship with nature, while his more intimate lyrics reveal a poet attentive to memory, friendship and the fragile consolations of everyday life. This selection offers an introduction to a writer whose influence extends far beyond the Romantic period, from the Gothic imagination to modern poetry’s exploration of dreams and consciousness. Coleridge’s work remains compelling for its ability to make the marvellous feel immediate and the familiar newly strange.
From the book
“Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
On Selected Poems
“The best words in the best order.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, defining poetry