The Guardian and its sister newspaper, The Observer, have been running a series on the Romantic Poets. Today they feature the inimitable Samuel Taylor Coleridge who not only was a resident of Darkest Somerset and a major character in The Anubis Gates, but also someone who I think is highly likely to have written fantasy had he been around today. Go take a read.
One thought on “Coleridge in The Guardian”
Comments are closed.
Coleridge, like all the major Romantic writers also crossed over into a variant of the Gothic, and wrote several poems which are explicitly Fantastic. ‘The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner’ is the obvious one, but ‘Christabel’ also counts.
Percy Shelley even wrote a couple of Gothic novels in his teens, real pulp romps of their time.
And then there is The Rebellion Of The Beasts, usually attributed to Leigh Hunt, a savage satire in which animals take control, 125 years before Orwell.