Coleridge On Dreaming

This book is the first in-depth investigation of Coleridge's responses to his dreams and to contemporary debates on the nature of dreaming, a subject of perennial interest to poets, philosophers and scientists throughout the Romantic period. Coleridge wrote and read extensively on the subject, but his richly diverse and original ideas have hitherto received little attention, scattered as they are throughout his notebooks, letters and marginalia. Jennifer Ford's emphasis is on analysing the ways in which dreaming processes were construed, by Coleridge in his dream readings, and by his contemporaries in a range of poetic and medical works. This historical exploration of dreams and dreaming allows Ford to explore previously neglected contemporary debates on 'the medical imagination'. By avoiding purely biographical or psychoanalytic approaches, she reveals instead a rich historical context for the ways in which the most mysterious workings of the Romantic imagination were explored and understood.

Though left uncompleted, “Kubla Khan” is one of the most famous examples of Romantic era poetry. In it, Samuel Coleridge provides a stunning and detailed example of the power of the poet’s imagination through his whimsical description of Xanadu, the capital city of Kublai Khan’s empire. Samuel Coleridge penned “Kubla Khan” after waking up from an opium-induced dream in which he experienced and imagined the realities of the great Mongol ruler’s capital city. Coleridge began writing what he remembered of his dream immediately upon waking from it, and intended to write two to three hundred lines. However, Coleridge was interrupted soon after and, his memory of the dream dimming, was ultimately unable to complete the poem. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

In November 1817, John Keats wrote to Benjamin Bailey, The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream - he awoke and found it truth. The Romantic poet's concept of the imagination was central to their poetry, becoming a persistent and powerful theme central to many works. In nine new essays by scholars commissioned in honour of Walter Jackson Bate, this collection examines the uses of the imagination in the poetry of Keats and Coleridge, and by extension in all Romantic literature.

Dreams and History contains important new scholarship on Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and subsequent psychoanalytical approaches from distinguished historians, psychoanalysts, historians of science and anthropologists.

Christabel is a long narrative poem in two parts. Coleridge planned three additional parts, but these were never completed. The story of Christabel concerns a central female character of the same name and her encounter with a stranger called Geraldine, who claims to have been abducted from her home by a band of rough men. Coleridge aimed to write Christabel using an accentual metrical system, based on the count of only accents: even though the number of syllables in each line can vary from four to twelve, the number of accents per line never deviates from four. Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. According to Coleridge's Preface the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium-influenced dream after reading a work describing Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China Kublai Khan. Upon waking, he set about writing lines of poetry that came to him from the dream until he was interrupted by a person from Porlock. The poem could not be completed according to its original 200-300 line plan as the interruption caused him to forget the lines. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834) was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets.