Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination [Hardcover]

Through politics, religion and his relationship with Wordsworth, the book builds to a new interpretation of the poems where Coleridge's daemonic imagination produces its myths: The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan and Christabel . Re-reading the origins of Romanticism, Leadbetter reveals a Coleridge at once more familiar and more strange.

The Willing Daemon: Coleridge and the Transnatural * 'Pagan Philosophy' and the 'Pride of Speculation': Spiritual Politics and the Metaphysical Imagination, 1795-1797 * 'Not a Man, But a Monster': Organicism, Becoming and the Daemonic Imago * Transnatural Language: The 'Library-Cormorant' in the 'Vernal Wood' * 'The Dark Green Adder's Tongue': Osorio and the 'Poetry of Nature' * 'A Distinct Current of My Own': Poetry and the Uses of the Supernatural * 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' * 'Kubla Khan' * 'Christabel'

***Winner of the CCUE Book Prize 2012!***

'Leadbetter's method is to probe ideas and explore their resonance: a kind of ultrasound imaging that traces currents of emotion, thought, and morality moving within the whole span of Coleridge's writing. His new book draws on resources that have recently entered the public domain with sympathy and intelligence, and sets out clearly what so many of us have either not been able to see or not quite able to say before. He brings fresh insight to age-old questions and familiar poems, resulting in a clarified sense of the contradictions that moved a great creative mind. This is an exciting book and necessary not only for readers of Coleridge and Wordsworth but also for anyone interested in how poetry is made.' J. C. C. Mays, University College, Dublin

'This is a subtle and erudite meditation on Coleridge's poetry, making frequently brilliant connections with his notebooks, essays, and letters. The theme of the 'transnal3;