This last chapter discusses two of Wordsworth’s last poems, written when he was seventy-five – poems about old, poor men in their last days, approaching death. Written in 1846, these poems echo the sea poems of the mid-1830s in that they depict people who have been left lonely and isolated, in this case by the death of loved ones. Wordsworth shows extreme old age as a time of alienation, even when the aged person lives where he has always lived. His family having died, he has no one with whom to practise the daily rituals and routines that renew love and secure identity. Memory and recollection do not suffice to restore the missing presence; the self cannot sustain itself by enshrining the spirit of the past. Expressing this bleak view about the limitations of memorialisation, the poems are in dialogue with Wordsworth’s past work: they depict the aged like the sailor of ‘Composed by the Sea Shore’ and the heroine of ‘The Somnambulist’, but unlike the Wordsworth of The Prelude. They are also in dialogue with a large and noisy public campaign, in which the life, and the death, of the elderly poor was a controversial topic.

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.

Richard Strauss's late operatic and instrumental works exemplify a positive meaning of lateness in the context of creative production: not to be "late" in an artistic or stylistic sense, but rather a fulfillment and purification of both compositional technique and content. Discussing Strauss's lateness in the larger context of the musical and philosophical debate (considering the positions of Gottfried Benn, Theodor Adorno, and Edward Said, as well as Auguste Rodin's ideas on antiquity), the author offers a new perspective in joining that intense period of the composer with James Hillman's consideration of aging as the culmination of a creative life. Thus, Strauss's last period exemplifies what the American psychologist calls the "force of character."