When George McLean Harper first identified Coleridge's Conversation poems in an essay published in 1925, he wrote of them in a casual, elegant, and amateurish way that one recent critic dismissed as belletristic. Harper begins by introducing a person -"a young poet whom I love"-and a problem: what should he write about Coleridge? What is more he begins with a particularity of personal reference that would amount to gross impropriety in a contemporary critical essay; the young poet, Harper says, "has just left my house and driven away in the soft darkness of a spring night, to the remote cottage in the Delaware valley where he meditates a not thankless Muse". Contemporary literary criticism is, thankfully, subject to intellectual and scholarly rigours unknown to Harper, whose genial approach arguably denied him access to the more profound and more subtle achievements of the poems.
The University of Sydney acknowledges that its campuses and facilities sit on the ancestral lands of Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander peoples, who have for thousands of generations exchanged knowledge for the benefit of all.
Learn more