Faced with Coleridge's irresolution and fragmentariness, critics have often declared him a failure. This study champions that failure as an oblique kind of success - the fruit of a virtuous and fertile indecision between rival imaginative vocations, each good but incompatible. Covering the entire range of his religious and philosophical prose and criticism, it also offers close readings of the major poems and describes afresh the momentous relationship with Wordsworth.

Meeting Coleridge was one of the Romantic age's most memorable experiences, and many of his contemporaries left vivid records--Wordsworth, Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats, Emerson, and many now forgotten. This book is a comprehensive, fully annotated collection of such reminiscences. Drawing on an eclectic range of material (including journals, letters, poems, and comic portraits), and printing many texts otherwise difficult to access, it will prove an invaluable resource for students of romanticism, as well as a treasure-trove for Coleridge's many fans.

Published to mark the bicentenary of Alfred Tennyson's birth, these essays offer an important revaluation of his achievement and its lasting importance. After several years in which the temper of criticism has been largely political (and often hostile towards Tennyson in particular) a number of influential recent accounts of Victorian poetry have rediscovered the virtues of a closer style of reading and the benefits and pleasures of an approach that, without at all ignoring social and cultural contexts, approaches them through a primary alertness to textual detail and literary history. This volume, including entirely commissioned work by a wide range of critics and scholars from across the profession in both Britain and North America, seeks to bring such forms of attention to bear on the immense variety of Tennyson's career by exploring the complex and multiple connections between Tennyson and other writers - his predecessors, his contemporaries, and his successors. Collectively, the essays describe an intricate network of affiliation and indebtedness, resistance and reconciliation. They provide a unique assessment of Tennyson's origins, work, and imaginative legacy as he enters upon his third century.

Meeting Coleridge was one of the Romantic age's most memorable experiences, and many of his contemporaries left vivid records - Wordsworth, Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats, Emerson and many others, often now forgotten. This book is a comprehensive, fully annotated collection of such reminiscences. Drawing on an eclectic range of materials (including private journals, letters, poems, and comic portraits), and printing many texts otherwise difficult to access, it will prove an invaluable resource for students of romanticism, as well as a treasure-trove for Coleridge's many admirers.

This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the poetry and prose of Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)-the first of its kind for half a century. The anthology is a fresh presentation of one of the most important and influential writers and thinkers of the Victorian period. Arnold's many facets-as poet, educationalist, literary critic, cultural commentator, and religious controversialist-are represented; and the text is fully annotated, identifying the many authors with whom Arnold engaged, and the contemporary public events to which his work often responds. Many of the themes of Arnold's writing life are still pressing matters today. What is the true nature of education? What are the duties of the State towards its citizens? What are the proper limits to individual freedom within a liberal society? What is the future of religion in an age of increasing secularisation? And, besides these questions, his poetry is one of the greatest and most influential of all bodies of Victorian verse, giving voice to the anxieties of an epoch. Explanatory notes and commentary enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Arnold, and a Chronology.

William Empson is, alongside T. S. Eliot, the greatest genius among twentieth-century critics, and Some Versions of Pastoral is widely recognised as one of the most extraordinary works of the golden age of English literary criticism. Ranging with astonishing virtuosity between works of several centuries and moving purposefully between cultures, William Empson has dazzling things to say here about Shakespeare and the Elizabethan theatre, the political poetry of Marvell, Milton's Paradise Lost, the complex satire of John Gay's Beggar's Opera, and the convoluted psychology at work in the Alice books of Lewis Carroll. The book is alert to questions of politics, psycho-analysis, and anthropology, and speaks to a wide range of contemporary concerns. Written in Empson's charismatically informal and wonderfully approachable voice, the book appeared in 1935 without footnotes or references. This edition is the first to identify the quotations and allusions, to explain the pertinence of his references, and to place the work within its Empsonian context. It is published with an appendix of other texts by Empson which illuminate the issues at work in the book.

The Waste Land, first published in 1922, is not far from a century old, and it has still not been surpassed as the most famous of all modern poems. In many ways, it continues to define what we mean by modern whenever we begin to speak about modern verse. At the same time, as Ted Hughes once observed, it is also genuinely popular, and not just among the cogniscenti or the degree-bearing. "I remember when I taught fourteen-year-old boys in a secondary modern school," Hughes once said, "of all the poetry I introduced them to, their favourite was The Waste Land." Not for nothing was it included, in its entirety, in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973), edited by Philip Larkin, a poet not known otherwise for his hospitality to modernism. The poem's appeal is intellectual, certainly, but also visceral. It fulfils in miniature the demands that Eliot made of the great poet at large: "abundance, variety, and complete competence" - the first of those criteria of greatness all the more surprising, and moving, to find accomplished in a poem that has its starting place in so barren a human territory. The poetry is modern in a wholly self-conscious way, but the modernity of Eliot's poem stems in large part from a strikingly powerful awareness of what's past. In this book, the Oxford scholar Seamus Perry points out some of the fruits of that acute historical awareness - and shares his own admiration of, and pleasure in, the extraordinary voicings and counter-voicings of this perpetually great work.

While postcolonial studies of Romantic-period literature have flourished in recent years, scholars have long neglected the extent of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's engagement with the Orient in both his literary and philsophical writings. Bringing together leading international writers, Coleridge, Romanticism and the Orient is the first substantial exploration of Coleridge's literary and scholarly representations of the east and the ways in which these were influenced by and went on to influence his own work and the orientalism of the Romanticists more broadly. Bringing together postcolonial, philsophical, historicist and literary-critical perspectives, this groundbreaking book develops a new understanding of 'Orientalism' that recognises the importance of colonial ideologies in Romantic representations of the East as well as appreciating the unique forms of meaning and value which authors such as Coleridge asscoiated with the Orient.

This title is a study of Tennyson's lyrical imagination, describing its complex fascinations with recurrence, progress, narrative, and loss, and its doubts about its own artfulness.

While postcolonial studies of Romantic-period literature have flourished in recent years, scholars have long neglected the extent of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's engagement with the Orient in both his literary and philsophical writings. Bringing together leading international writers, Coleridge, Romanticism and the Orient is the first substantial exploration of Coleridge's literary and scholarly representations of the east and the ways in which these were influenced by and went on to influence his own work and the orientalism of the Romanticists more broadly. Bringing together postcolonial, philsophical, historicist and literary-critical perspectives, this groundbreaking book develops a new understanding of 'Orientalism' that recognises the importance of colonial ideologies in Romantic representations of the East as well as appreciating the unique forms of meaning and value which authors such as Coleridge asscoiated with the Orient.

Coleridge was one of the Romantic age's most enigmatic figures; his Notebooks one of the key prose works of the period. This new selection represents the full range of his most attractive and diverting prose writings. The selected passages have been re-edited and annotated by Seamus Perry, to provide vital reading to anyone interested in the Romantic period.