Like no other poet Coleridge was, in five short years, 'visited by the Muse'. The great flowering of his poetry happened above all, in the single year from the summer of 1797 when he first became friends with Dorothy and William Wordsworth. That was the year in which he wrote tHe Ancient Mariner, the forst part of Christabel, Kubla Khan and other poems that were, as Kathleen Raine writes, ' th…
An updated edition of Thoreau's most widely read works Self-described as "a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot," Henry David Thoreau dedicated his life to preserving his freedom as a man and as an artist. Nature was the fountainhead of his inspiration and his refuge from what he considered the follies of society. Heedless of his friends' advice to live in a more o…