Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1796 notebook contains eight of his poems.
The opening lines of Coleridge’s “Lines on a Friend Who Died of a Frenzy Fever Induced by Calumnious Reports.” This is one of four extant manuscripts of the poem.
Extensive revisions and corrections throughout show that this was a working notebook, and Ernest Hartley Coleridge, the poet’s grandson, refers to it as the “MS quarto copy-book” in his 1912 The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The first portion of the copy-book contains two fragments and six complete poems, including “Songs of the Pixies,” “Lines to a Beautiful Spring in a Village,” and “Lines on a Friend Who Died of a Frenzy Fever Induced by Calumnious Reports.”
Here, at the center of the notebook, he turned it upside down and began writing from the back. Midway down the page on the left, you can see where Coleridge has fully crossed out and reworked the final lines of “To a Young Lady, with a Poem on the French Revolution.”
Coleridge’s copy-book shows extensive revisions to his poems. Here, he has reworked the final lines of his poem “To a Young Lady, with a Poem on the French Revolution.”
This notebook also apparently functioned as a commonplace book, as Coleridge included a fragment of a Robert Southey poem and a poem by Thomas Dermody. He also copied out a number of prose pieces, some of them likely from Anthologia Hibernica (Dublin, 1793), probably in preparation for his own short-lived periodical, The Watchman (1796).
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