by Elsa Hammond ‘What has Coleridge got to do with Wales?’ This was the question most frequently posed by interested audience members, participants, walkers, and passers-by during the Coleridge in Wales events at the Hay Literary Festival this year. In June 1794 Coleridge departed Cambridge to spend the summer on a walking tour of Wales. […]

by Andrew Ray By the early 1820s Robert Southey, Poet Laureate, was writing serious historical books, reading Montaigne, teaching himself Danish and remarking that ‘my career as a poet is almost at an end’. But in 1823 he published ‘The Cataract of Lodore’, a poem that illustrates a more playful side of his personality. He […]

by Simon Court One of the more spectacular experiments to emerge from the early Romantic movement was the idea of “Pantisocracy” which was the brain-child of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, assisted by his fellow poet and friend Robert Southey, who with youthful enthusiasm devised in 1794 a highly ambitious utopian scheme for an egalitarian society. Akin […]