Coleridge
Lowes's most famous work is The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Houghton Mifflin, 1927), which examines the sources of Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. Using Coleridge's notebook and other papers at the Bristol Library, Lowes put together a list of books that the poet read before and during the time he composed his poems. The trick was to connect images and ideas in the poems to images and ideas in Coleridge's reading. Though later critics have disputed both Lowe's findings and method, The Road to Xanadu remains a classic. Toby Litt, an English author, has called it a book of a lifetime: "Its argument, that Coleridge had one of the most extraordinary minds the world has ever seen, is there on every page"; it "is one of the books which helped me understand what writing is."
Read more about this topic: John Livingston Lowes
Famous quotes containing the word coleridge:
“The man’s desire is for the woman; but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it—low, vulgar, meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion—and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national. The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“Her skin was white as leprosy,
The nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)