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.

The final, two-part chapter treats the arc of Wordsworth’s poetry after 1820 up to his final volume of original poetry, Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years, in 1842. Treating explicitly the issue of Wordsworth’s age and the issue of the “late Wordsworth,” the first part of this chapter takes up his process of retrospection – looking back at his life – and re-collection – changing, reordering, and recombining his literary corpus. It touches upon the Ecclesiastical Sketches and Yarrow Revisited, And Other Poems.The second part treats “Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837,” an account Wordsworth’s long-delayed tripto Italy. Ironically, during the period of Wordsworth’s life when his poetry strikes us as being the least compelling aesthetically, he was probably at his most persuasive as a force within his own culture and society. Cox shows that the Italian memorials are an opportunity for Wordsworth to assert the power of his poetry in confronting not only a powerful cultural Other in Catholic Italy but also an Other Italy found or invented by Keats, Shelley, Hunt, and particularly Byron, ironically his younger precursors on this ground. Taking up topics from Wordsworth’s relationship to tourism to the religious valence of these last poems, this chapter concludes the overall argument that “late” Wordsworth developed in response to his younger contemporaries.

Wordsworth’s sonnets on the River Duddon appeared in 1820 to almost universal applause and marked a shift in his reputation and status as a poet. What has not been understood is how imbricated these poems are in a dialogue with Coleridge, whom Wordsworth alludes to, and with Shelley, whose “Mont Blanc” appears to be echoed throughout the series. This chapter provides a key instance of the complex interactions between these writers, as Shelley in “Mont Blanc” echoes in order to critique both Wordsworth and Coleridge and as Wordsworth then responds in these sonnets. Various paratexts, including the notes to the poems and Wordsworth’s postscripts, help us see how Wordsworth explicitly alludes to minor poets and to Coleridge’s unfinished “The Brook” while masking his debt to his younger competitor, whom Wordsworth would later call “one of the best artists of us all.” Offering readings of individual poems as well as the series as a whole, this chapter shows how Wordsworth, in answering Shelley, the famous agnostic, resituates his earlier nature poetry in a more clearly religious frame.

Wordsworth published his Excursion in 1814 to stake his claim to being the Milton of his day: the poem was seen as the period’s most serious attempt at an epic poem. After briefly taking up Wordsworth’s goals in writing this long narrative poem, this chapter focuses on Hazlitt’s critique of the epic and on the efforts of Keats, Shelley, Byron, Peacock, Reynolds, and Hunt to rewrite it. Recognizing the power of The Excursion, the younger writers found it embracing a turn inward to the self rather than outward to sexual relations and also abandoning the attempt to reform society, whether through revolution or other means. These poets also contested the style of The Excursion, which they saw as abandoning the experimental turn of Wordsworth’s earlier poetry. The very mode of these responses to Wordsworth – the fantastic pagan romances of Endymion and Rhododaphne, the eastern quests of “Alastor” and Laon and Cythna, even the “romaunt” of Childe Harold – announce their distance from The Excursion. A "Coda" to the chapter shows how Wordsworth’s classicizing poems, particularly "Laodamia" and "Dion," can be read as a rebuke to young writers’ revolutionary take on politics and sexuality.

The postscript to the book turns briefly to Wordsworth’s Prelude, published in 1850 after his death. Wordsworth, in publishing The Prelude, addressed to Coleridge and offering an account of his life up until 1805, engages in a kind of time travel, creating not so much spots of time as a time warp where he can leap over the younger Cockney poets who shaped his later work to recover his early life with close associates such as Coleridge, his fellow Laker. The reviews of Wordsworth’s poem already show how he would become the central figure in a version of romanticism that turned from narrative to lyric and from public, political poetry to private, philosophical verse on the relationship between the poet and nature.

While written in the 1790s, Wordsworth’s Peter Bell was only published in 1819 as part of his effort to contest the dominance of Scott and Byron in narrative poetry. As contemporary responses make clear, the poem could be read as a rebuke to Byron’s celebration of villain-heroes: what came to be known as Byronic heroes, morally mixed but charismatic men. Wordsworth’s earlier participation in a collective satire on Byron suggests how Peter Bell responds to Byron and helps make sense of the ways in which Byron, Shelley, and Hunt saw the poem as a rejection of their ongoing work. While Wordsworth offered the poem as an example of the ways in which natural experiences can lead to spiritual reform, his turn to a Methodist preacher at the climax of the poem enraged his younger contemporaries, who saw Methodism as a key force in reactionary culture. In Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas and Peter Bell the Third, in Byron’s Don Juan, and in satires and reviews of Peter Bell and related works by Keats, Reynolds, and Hunt we see a collective attempt by the Cockney School to answer the challenge they heard in Peter Bell.

The “Introduction” first challenges conventional notions of influence which construct Wordsworth as a “father” to the younger poets, Keats, Shelley, and Byron. It lays out a model of mutual influence, in which Wordsworth’s post-Waterloo poetry is found to develop in a conversation with his younger contemporaries. It then establishes the intricate personal and poetic ties between Wordsworth and the “second-generation” romantics, recreating Wordsworth’s place in the post-Waterloo literary scene and how it was shaped by the developing struggle between the Lake and Cockney Schools. Our failure to understand how Wordsworth connects with “second-generation” romanticism has distorted models of his later career and created the critical commonplace of the aesthetic failure of “late” Wordsworth. The “Introduction” also supplies an overview of scholarship to date on the later Wordsworth.

Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo sparked both a spate of cultural responses and a debate over the shape of post-revolutionary Europe. Wordsworth’s “Thanksgiving Ode” volume was his entry into this conversation. Cox creates the context for Wordsworth’s poems on Waterloo, as he takes up contemporary celebrations and religious services and explores theatrical responses to the British victory.Putting Hunt in conversation with Southey and his laureate poems, Cox shows how Wordsworth’s poems on Waterloo respond to Hunt’s earlier Descent of Liberty on Napoleon’s abdication. Wordsworth’s volume inspired its own set of responses, as there was a kind of media war in 1816 over Wordsworth, Waterloo, and Wellington. The most famous of these responses comes in Byron’s Childe Harold III.