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:
“Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree,”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise,
And the door stood open at our feast,
When there passed us a woman with the West in her eyes,
And a man with his back to the East.”
—Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861–1907)