A Day With Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A Day with Samuel Taylor Coleridge opens with the poet as a figure of mystery and radiance, then draws him into the everyday world of Nether Stowey in 1790, where poverty, domestic duty, and literary ambition struggle for balance. Through affectionate detail, it reveals his dreamy temperament, physical presence, and the tensions of a household shared with practical Sara, the young Charles Lloyd, and the steady friendship of Thomas Poole. Coleridge emerges as both charming and chronically impractical, a man whose life is shaped by companionship, money worries, and an unquiet conscience. The book celebrates the extraordinary range of his imagination: the precise beauty of rural observation, the visionary splendor of Kubla Khan, the moonlit unease of Christabel, and the haunting desolation of The Ancient Mariner. It traces the creative bond with Wordsworth and Dorothy, whose walks and conversations nourish some of the era's greatest poetry, while also showing Coleridge wrestling with preaching, unfinished projects, and the lure of the supernatural. Rich in atmosphere, it ends in a quieter, darker register, where opium, exhaustion, and devotion blur into a final dream of tenderness and spiritual peace. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.