Selected Poems

In this unusual selection, a poet-critic of the 20th century encounters a poet-critic of the 19th, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). William Empson, assisted by David Pirie, chooses from Coleridge's vast and uneven oeuvre the salient poems; he edits and annotates them. Here is a classic example of Empson's techniques of creative and scholarly reading, an introduction to the work of the most haunting poet in the English language. The pith of my system, says Coleridge, is to make the senses out of the mind not the mind out of the senses, as Locke did.