Endowed with a surfeit of imagination and creativity, Coleridge endlessly revised his poetry, changing passages, adding new lines, and even writing several variations of the same poem. Faced with the challenge of putting together an authoritative collection, William Keach presents the final texts of all the poems published during Coleridge's lifetime and a substantial selection from the verse still in manuscript at his death, together with comprehensive,...

In one of the most comprehensive pictures of the poet yet published, James Booth examines the people, the places and the chance encounters that influenced Larkin and shaped his poetry. From Larkin's early life, his academic studies and his aspirations as a novelist, an image emerges of a reserved and gentle man greatly affected by those close to him. Delving into his fluctuating relationships with Maeve Brennan and Monica Jones, two of the many women...

"William Blake, overlooked in his time, remains an enigmatic figure to contemporary readers despite his near canonical status. Out of a wounding sense of alienation and dividedness he created a profoundly original symbolic language, in which words and images unite in a unique interpretation of self and society. He was a counterculture prophet whose art still challenges us to think afresh about almost every aspect of experience - social, political,...

Metamorphosing from scholar to buccaneer, from outcast to establishment figure, John Donne emerged as one of the greatest English poets, concentrating the paradoxes of his age within his own crises of desire and devotion. Following Donne from plague-ridden streets to palaces, from the taverns on the Bankside to the pulpit of St. Paul's, John Stubbs's biography is a vivid portrait of an extraordinary writer and his country at a time of bewildering...

"A son's personal exploration of one of the most influential--and troubled--artistic couples of the twentieth century, Stephen Spender and Natasha Litvin"--