[DOWNLOAD] "Coleridge's Sonnets from Various Authors (1796): a Lost Conversation Poem?" by Studies in Romanticism # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Coleridge's Sonnets from Various Authors (1796): a Lost Conversation Poem?
- Author : Studies in Romanticism
- Release Date : January 22, 2002
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 216 KB
Description
IN AUTUMN 1796, SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE PUT TOGETHER A MODEST little pamphlet (so modest it has no title) which offers a case-history of how texts can gather new and even urgent meanings through the circumstances of their transmission. Hitherto largely ignored by Coleridge scholars, and only once considered as a literary artifact, (1) Sonnets from Various Authors (a title of convenience) is, I want to show, a carefully shaped collection with both a structured argument and a directed message. It is simultaneously a text and a context; it makes meaning in both space and time--through the particular contained circumstances of the sonnet form and of a few weeks during September-November 1796--and under this joint spatial and temporal pressure it creates a Coleridgean text from the individual voices of others. The result is virtually a "lost" Conversation Poem: a dramatic "converse" meditating on themes of self and society, friendship and social action, and moving from single lonely thoughts to a more integrated sense of the "one Life within us and abroad." (2) Coleridge wrote to Tom Poole on 7 November This little collection of sixteen pages, an octavo printed in half-sheets, consists of a first leaf containing a prefatory essay on the sonnet (signed "Editor"), followed by fourteen pages of sonnets (printed two to a page). It has no title-page, just a short opening paragraph: "I have selected the following SONNETS from various Authors for the purpose of binding them up with the Sonnets of the Rev. W. L. BOWLES." This "sheaf of sonnets," as it is sometimes known, consists of three by William Lisle Bowles, two by Charlotte Smith, one each by John Bampfylde, Thomas Warton, Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, William Sotheby, Thomas Russell, Thomas Dermody, and Anna Seward, and four each by Coleridge himself, Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd. Not surprisingly, it is a scarce bibliographic item, and of the seven copies known three are indeed bound up with Bowles's sonnets as Coleridge hoped: Stella Thelwall's copy in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and that of Sophia Pemberton (later Mrs Charles Lloyd) at Cornell, are bound with the fourth edition of 1796; and in the Huntington Library Charles Lloyd's own copy accompanies the third edition of 1794. (4)