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.

In a marginal note of 1807, Coleridge writes: ‘who shall dare say of yon river, such & such a wave came from such a fountain? What Scholar […] shall say—Such a conviction, such a moral feeling, I received from St John/ such & such from Seneca, or Epictetus?’1 An essay of the kind presented here – which pursues how elements of form and style in Byron’s verse manifest in British poetry since the 1940s – contends with a similar issue. Cultural currents flow mixedly in poetry, and to discover a ‘Byronic’ characteristic in modern verse may not be to prove direct readerly influence. That is why, in part, I refer to inflection – which preserves a certain agnosticism – as the more accommodating term for the Byronic traces I have recognised: those observable variations in the practice of poetry that, however obliquely, respond in some way to Byron’s own. That response may involve a deliberate engagement with Byron’s work (and often does), but it may also be more implicit: a response to the less obvious but nonetheless palpable effects that Byron’s poetry has had on the possibilities of language and poetry, as they have been perceived since the mid-twentieth century. These inflections reveal the latent presence of Byron’s poetics the way iron filings reveal the presence of a magnetic field.