Selected Poetry

Selected Poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 153 pages

Throughout his poetic career, Coleridge was compared to and overshadowed by Wordsworth, and it's not difficult to understand why.  Especially in his earlier poems, Coleridge's use of deliberately antique (even for its time) language detracts rather than adds, and he seems to have often left promising projects unfinished, perhaps as a result of his personal struggles.  Unfortunately, as he matured his productivity correspondingly slackened.  Still, he gave us "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", "Christabel", "Kubla Khan", and "The Nightingale", as well as other works of enduring beauty and power.  Like his most famous poem, however, his poetry as a whole is ultimately haunted by what might have been.