This book begins with walking, thinking about walking, walking as thinking, just walking. In part a response to what I perceived to be the incompleteness of Romantic accounts of aesthetic experience and pleasure, it began by considering decidedly un-Romantic walking: huddling in Edinburgh doorways to avoid creditors, attempting to hold panic at bay while recognizing you’re lost in the dark in dangerous terrain, suddenly recognizing that you’ve chosen the ‘wrong’ side of Scafell to descend and may die, feeling untethered by the experience of moving house, of ‘flitting’. Such experiences put pressure on ideas of aesthetic pleasure: are they pre-aesthetic, awaiting some Burkean ‘safe place’ in which to be recuperated, or are they simply unorganized, or even unorganizable – verging on what Burke calls the ‘simply terrible’? I began this project looking for the former, hoping to deploy what I was calling experiential criticism to assemble a series of fraught events, represented in a variety of genres, which escaped the recuperative logic of received aesthetic categories.

“Casting About: Thomas De Quincey in the World” begins with one of the author’s portraits of Wordsworth from his ‘The Society of the Lakes’ series for Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine. Like much of his writing, the essay is dominated by digressions, in particular his recollections of the many coach journeys he undertook with his wife Margaret along the road between Ambleside and Grasmere. Collectively, these reminiscences constitute a form of mourning for Peggy who had died the previous summer. The chapter then turns to De Quincey’s hectic, occasionally desperate, life as a debtor in 1830s Edinburgh. He wrote to support himself and his family, often from the confines of the debtor’s sanctuary in Holyrood Park. His variety and scale of output demonstrate genius and financial desperation in equal measure. The chapter concludes with readings of his canonical works Suspiria de Profundis and The English Mail-Coach. Written in a newly secure environment of managed debt, he produced complex accounts of temporality and consciousness.

“Clare and Dislocation” begins with one of Clare’s early sonnets ‘A Scene’ in which he challenged the conventional value of the presumed aesthetic power essential to picturesque landscape. He argued for an astonishing plenitude of living things, objects of all kinds, constituting what John Barrell called ‘a sense of place’. The rest of the chapter details Clare’s struggles when he was relocated from his home village of Helpston to Northborough two and a half miles away. He wrote poignantly about his sense of estrangement and loss, most famously in ‘The Flitting’. The chapter concentrates on ‘Decay: A Ballad’, and then takes up his sonnet-writing as both a complex poetic practice and as a method for negotiating a new place. The chapter ends with a reading of his prose fragment ‘Autumn’, describing a walk through the local Deeping Fen and written in the months before his final incarceration in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. Memory, estrangement and loss ultimately create a negative ‘sense of place’.

“Joseph Cottle: Recollection, Reminiscence and the Forms of Circulation” begins with Cottle’s 1795 walk from Bristol to Tintern with Coleridge, Southey and the Fricker sisters (soon to be their wives). From this particularly fraught picturesque tour (they quarrelled and became lost in the dark), the chapter discusses Cottle’s portraits of Bristol and its ‘geniuses’ as recorded in Reminiscences of S.T. Coleridge and Robert Southey, the book from which the Tintern walk is drawn, and then moves to a discussion of the activity around and production of The Cottle Album the commonplace book inscribed with poems by his friends in the upstairs room of his Bristol bookshop in 1795 – 6. The chapter concludes with analysis of Cottle’s correspondence with Southey, including on the difficult and emotional subject of Coleridge’s opium addiction, and especially of the descriptions of their unrealized future tours.

“Walking, Climbing, Descending: Negotiating the Landscape” begins with Coleridge’s 1802 tour of the Lakes, culminating with his ecstatic ascent and near-disastrous descent of Scafell. The second section of the chapter explores the 1803 Scottish Tour undertaken by William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Coleridge, which Coleridge abandoned part way through. Drawing from Dorothy’s journal, Coleridge’s notebooks, William’s manuscript poems and various correspondence, a portrait emerges of their complex and evolving understanding of their responses to Scottish landscape and to the Scots themselves. The third section of the chapter discusses William Wordsworth’s aesthetic fragment on ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful’, and his struggles to account for his shifting feelings towards the Langdale Pikes. The chapter closes with an account of the climbing and writing of Wordsworth’s neighbour Elizabeth Smith, and, to a lesser extent, his friend Thomas Wilkinson. Wilkinson’s notebook of his Scottish tour served as guidebook for the Wordsworths.

This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.