To Samuel Taylor Coleridge, tragedy was not solely a literary mode, but a philosophy to interpret the history that unfolded around him. Tragic Coleridge explores the tragic vision of existence that Coleridge derived from Classical drama, Shakespeare, Milton and contemporary German thought. Coleridge viewed the hardships of the Romantic period, like the catastrophes of Greek tragedy, as stages in a process of humanity's overall purification.

Ewan James Jones argues that Coleridge engaged most significantly with philosophy not through systematic argument, but in verse. Jones carries this argument through a series of sustained close readings, both of canonical texts such as Christabel and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and also of less familiar verse, such as Limbo. Such work shows that the essential elements of poetic expression - a poem's metre, rhythm, rhyme and other such formal features - enabled Coleridge to think in an original and distinctive manner, which his systematic philosophy impeded.

This book is the first in-depth investigation of Coleridge's responses to his dreams and to contemporary debates on the nature of dreaming, a subject of perennial interest to poets, philosophers and scientists throughout the Romantic period.

Few figures who were active in the English Romantic Movement are as fascinating as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Aside from his own visionary verse, Coleridge is famous for his colourful friendships with fellow-poets Wordsworth and Southey, and above all for his well documented drug-taking and creative use of opium.

As a young writer with neither profession nor money, William Wordsworth committed himself to a career as a poet, embracing what he believed was his destiny. But even the "giant Wordsworth," as his friend and collaborator Samuel Taylor Coleridge called him, had his doubts. In Myself and Some Other Being, Daniel Robinson presents a young Wordsworth, as ambitious and insecure as any writer starting out, who was trying to prove to himself that he could become the great poet he desired to be and that Coleridge, equally brilliant and insecure, believed he already was.