Biographia Literaria

“Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy!” At Christ’s Hospital, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s stern master could puncture a grand poetic flourish—and banish Alexander and Clytus from every essay by sheer overuse.

Writing in 1817, Coleridge looks back on the schoolroom where James Bowyer trained his pupils to weigh every word, and on the young poet whose first verses drew charges of obscurity and extravagant ornament. But this is no simple account of a literary career: Coleridge uses his own missteps to pursue larger questions about poetry, criticism, and the principles that shape our understanding. With wit, candour, and a schoolmaster’s exacting ear, he takes up a dispute over what poetic language ought to be. Can a poem’s wildest flight be governed by a logic as rigorous as science?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.