Publisher's Synopsis
In this unusual selection, one of the great poet-critics of the twentieth century encounters and re-appraises the greatest poet-critic of the nineteenth. William Empson, assisted by David Pirie, chooses from Coleridge's vast and uneven ouevre the salient poems, and edits and annotates them. Here is a classic example of Empson's techniques of creative and scholarly reading and the best possible introduction to the work of one of the most haunting poets in the English language.
'The pith of my system,' says Coleridge, 'is to make the senses out of mind - not the mind out of the senses, as Locke did.'
