This book provides a critical and biographical account of the fascinating hand-made book of rector William Greswell (1848-1923), in which he assembled British and American reviews and accounts of the Romantic poet, critic, philosopher, and religious thinker Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). J.C.C. Mays re-evaluates Coleridge’s nineteenth-century reputation through the lens provided by Greswell’s workbook. Mays demonstrates how Coleridge is one of the most complicated and influential religious thinkers of the nineteenth century, whose “religious musings� (most prominently as published in Aids to Reflection and On the Constitution of the Church and State, but also in posthumous collections such as Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit) cast a long shadow over religious thinking in nineteenth-century England and America. Although Greswell was but one of Coleridge’s many readers in the nineteenth century, his engagement with Coleridge’s writings was noteworthy for the sheer mass of the materials he assembled, and the breadth of the Coleridge he depicts. Greswell’s Coleridge is a Coleridge in whom all Coleridgeans will be interested.

This is the first book-length study to read the "Ancient Mariner" as "poetry," in Coleridge's own particular sense of the word. Coleridge's complicated relationship with the "Mariner" as an experimental poem lies in its origin as a joint project with Wordsworth. J. C. C. Mays traces the changes in the several versions published in Coleridge's lifetime and shows how Wordsworth's troubled reaction to the poem influenced its subsequent interpretation. This is also the first book to situate the "Mariner" in the context of the entirety of Coleridge's prose and verse, now available in the Bollingen Collected edition and Notebooks; that is, not only in relation to other poems like "The Ballad of the Dark Ladie" and "Alice du Clos," but also to ideas in his literary criticism (especially Biographia Literaria), philosophy, and theology. Using a combination of close reading and broad historical considerations, reception theory, and book history, Mays surveys the poem's continuing life in illustrated editions and educational textbooks; its passage through the vicissitudes of New Criticism and critical theory; and, in a final chapter, its surprising affinities with some experimental poems of the present time.

Coleridge's Dejection Ode completes J.C.C. Mays' analysis of Coleridge's poetry, following Coleridge's Ancient Mariner (Palgrave 2016) and Coleridge's Experimental Poetics (Palgrave 2013). "Dejection: An Ode" stands alone in Coleridge's oeuvre: written at a time of personal crisis, it reaches far back and deeply into his thinking in an attempt to find a poematic solution to ideas and problems he had mulled over for a long time. Mays reveals how the poem also marks the opening of the second half of Coleridge's career as both poet and thinker. In three central chapters Mays examines the new style that evolved in the process of writing the Ode: the technical means of metrics, rhyme and grammar; language and allusion; and symbol and structure. He recounts the complex, sometimes controversial critical history of the Ode, and suggests an editorial solution to the problem created by the Letter to Sara Hutchinson; re-evaluates the position of Wordsworth in the poem apropos the political statement it makes; clarifies the distinction between the views on Imagination expressed and those contained in Biographia Literaria; and traces the links of the concept "dejection" as it underpins Coleridge's late poems.

This is the first book-length study to read the "Ancient Mariner" as "poetry," in Coleridge's own particular sense of the word. Coleridge's complicated relationship with the "Mariner" as an experimental poem lies in its origin as a joint project with Wordsworth. J. C. C. Mays traces the changes in the several versions published in Coleridge's lifetime and shows how Wordsworth's troubled reaction to the poem influenced its subsequent interpretation. This is also the first book to situate the "Mariner" in the context of the entirety of Coleridge's prose and verse, now available in the Bollingen Collected edition and Notebooks; that is, not only in relation to other poems like "The Ballad of the Dark Ladie" and "Alice du Clos," but also to ideas in his literary criticism (especially Biographia Literaria), philosophy, and theology. Using a combination of close reading and broad historical considerations, reception theory, and book history, Mays surveys the poem's continuing life in illustrated editions and educational textbooks; its passage through the vicissitudes of New Criticism and critical theory; and, in a final chapter, its surprising affinities with some experimental poems of the present time.

In 1934 Samuel Beckett named Denis Devlin and Brian Coffey as "without question the most interesting of the youngest generation of Irish poets." When the first edition of the present volume appeared in 1989 (in what would prove to be the year of Beckett's death), he signalled his appreciation with a brief message which concluded: "Amends at last." Yet in recent years Devlin's visibility has again faded. Though often cited as one of the great modernist and modernising influences on Irish poetry, his substantial body of work is both under-read and perhaps as often mis-read. As JCC Mays points out in his Introduction, Devlin's writing "has attracted readers who have taken it to stand for a kind which anticipates the ambitions of writing now, and which is cognate with the beginnings of post-modernism in other traditions. In Ireland, he has been taken as an exemplary poet of a kind at variance with the dominant antimodernist tradition and a kind of rallying-point." Of the relative popularity of his work during his years in Washington in the diplomatic service, Mays writes: "Even so, the reputation he enjoyed rested partly upon misunderstanding." Twenty years on from its original publication, this reissue affords contemporary readers the opportunity to re-evaluate a complex, often challenging body of work, while the Introductory essay by JCC Mays, since retired as Professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College Dublin, remains exemplary for its depth of learning, insight and even-handedness.

Poetry in its many guises is at the center of Coleridge's multifarious interests, and this long-awaited new edition of his complete poetical works marks the pinnacle of the Bollingen Collected Coleridge. The three parts of Volume 16 confirm and expand the sense of the Coleridge who has emerged over the past half-century, with implications for English Romantic writing as a whole. Setting new standards of comprehensiveness in the presentation of Romantic texts, they will interest historians and editorial theorists, as well as readers and students of poetry. They represent a work of truly monumental importance.

The first part presents the reading texts of 706 poems in chronological sequence. Its blend of newly discovered and newly collected poems, presented in light of all known evidence and where practicable in unrevised forms, offers a fresh and original Coleridge: less inhibited by Victorian ideas about what poetry should be, moving easily and productively between genres and levels of seriousness. In texts that remained fluid and exploratory to the end, Coleridge alternates between lyric and satire, prophecy and conversation, symbol and allegory.

Each poem is accompanied by a headnote and commentary that together provide its historical-biographical context and offer key textual variants. The book opens with an introduction and chronological tables. The three appendixes position individual poems in the contexts in which they appeared during Coleridge's lifetime. Illustrations such as contemporary scenes and portraits bring this rich collection, like the companion volumes, all the more to life.

Poetry in its many guises is at the center of Coleridge's multifarious interests, and this long-awaited new edition of his complete poetical works marks the pinnacle of the Bollingen Collected Coleridge. The three parts of Volume 16 confirm and expand the sense of the Coleridge who has emerged over the past half-century, with implications for English Romantic writing as a whole. Setting new standards of comprehensiveness in the presentation of Romantic texts, they will interest historians and editorial theorists, as well as readers and students of poetry. They represent a work of truly monumental importance.

Coleridge's plays form a vital part of his poetic achievement. This part covers all of them--twelve altogether, including collaborations, adaptations, and plays left unrevised or in note form. It considers his drama translations as well. Coleridge's practical engagement with theater over a span of twenty years influenced his approach to other, lyric forms as well as, for example, his assessments of Shakespeare and of public taste. As in the first and second parts, all known manuscript, printed, and annotated versions have been collated to produce reading texts, and much new information, historical as well as textual, is presented in the commentary. The index covers proper names and prominent themes and features of all three parts.

The presentation of four plays is of particular interest. Coleridge's translations of Schiller's "Piccolomini" and "Death of Wallenstein" are accompanied by facing texts of the German originals (the first reconstructed by Joyce Crick, the second from a manuscript authorized by Schiller himself) so that, for the first time, Coleridge's practice as translator can be properly assessed. Secondly, "Remorse" is presented in stage and printed-text versions; the former demonstrates how Coleridge's play evolved in the course of the rehearsal process and during performance, how it was received and how it enjoyed an afterlife in contemporary theatres, whereas the printed-text version developed quite differently. This authoritative volume offers a revealing and comprehensive portrait of Coleridge's work in the dramatic form.

Poetry in its many guises is at the center of Coleridge's multifarious interests, and this long-awaited new edition of his complete poetical works marks the pinnacle of the Bollingen Collected Coleridge. The three parts of Volume 16 confirm and expand the sense of the Coleridge who has emerged over the past half-century, with implications for English Romantic writing as a whole. Setting new standards of comprehensiveness in the presentation of Romantic texts, they will interest historians and editorial theorists, as well as readers and students of poetry. They represent a work of truly monumental importance.

The second part presents the same 706 poems as the first, in the same chronological sequence, but differently records in each case all known textual information in collated form--allowing for alternative construals of the reading texts. An additional 135 items are inserted into the same sequence, comprising poems mistakenly ascribed to Coleridge or of dubious authenticity and poems that remained only in the planning stage or that are referred to but have not been recovered. The index of titles and first lines incorporates the full range of variants.

All told, the Collected Coleridge variorum sequence collates over a third more additional texts--in more detailed and accurate form--than those found in the previous standard edition, by E.H. Coleridge. The presentation method in this second part will interest editorial theorists as well as those interested primarily in Coleridge and/or the making of poetry. The unusually detailed textual information also reveals changes in such areas as linguistic and grammatical usage, patterns of transcription and circulation among anthologists, and contemporary publishers' house styles.