Introduction: Dorothy Wordsworth, Hartley Coleridge and the Poetics of Relationship

Abstract

After the publication of Hartley Coleridge’s Poems, Songs and Sonnets in 1833, the only volume published in his lifetime, Hartley was hailed by the Quarterly Review as the most promising poet of his day: ‘we shall expect more at his hands than from any one who has made his first appearance subsequent to the death of Byron’ (‘Hartley Coleridge‘, 1833, p. 521). In 1851, upon publication of Derwent Coleridge’s posthumous edition of Hartley’s poems, The Examiner judged that Hartley’s verse would ‘largely and lastingly contribute to the rare stories of true poetry’ (Review of Memoir, 1851e, p. 237). And by 1891, in The Poets and the Poetry of the Century, after alluding to the sonnets of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats and William Wordsworth, Samuel Waddington concludes: ‘the fact must be recorded that after Shakespeare our sweetest English sonneteer is Hartley Coleridge’ (Miles, 1905, p. 136).¹