Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination / Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters (PDF)

Gregory Leadbetter is a Lecturer in the School of English at Birmingham City University, UK.

***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 'transnatural' running throughout Coleridge's work (what we might also call the pagan, the transgressive, or the subversive erotic) is explored with zest and confidence, most particularly so in the ballads. Altogether this is an excellent academic study, fully alive to previous Coleridge criticism, but not afraid to strike out on its own, and even to adventure into mysterious and forbidden territory, the 'far countree' of Coleridge's imagination.' Richard Holmes, biographer of Coleridge and author of The Age of Wonder

"Leadbetter's book offers us a new way into Coleridge, presenting a writer and thinker who repeatedly found his truest genius in the experiences that made him most uneasy. It is a compelling and encompassing account of a powerfully heterodoxical mind. Leadbetter has penetrating things to say across the whole range of the great career.' Seamus Perry, Balliol College, Oxford