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.

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.