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Seamus Perry's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Seamus Perry recommends? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Seamus Perry's favorite book recommendations of all time. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.

1

Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1802

William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fiona Stafford

4.1
Wordsworth and Coleridge's joint collection of poems has often been singled out as the founding text of English Romanticism. Within this initially unassuming, anonymous volume were many of the poems that came to define their age and which have continued to delight readers ever since, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the 'Lucy' poems, Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, A Slumb
2

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

4.2
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (originally "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere") is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in 1797–98 and published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. Modern editions use a later revised version printed in 1817 and featuring a gloss. Along with other poems in Lyrical Ballads, it was a signal shift to modern poetry an
3

The Complete Poems

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Keach

4.4
4

Coleridge's Notebooks: A Selection

Seamus Perry

4.3
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the Romantic age's most enigmatic figures, a genius of astonishing diversity; author of some of the most famous poems in the English language; one of England's greatest critics and theorists of literature and imagination; as well as autobiographer, nature-writer, philosopher, theologian, psychologist, and talker. Throughout his life, he confided his thoughts and
5

Biographia Literaria: Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life & Opinions

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Engell, W. Jackson Bate

3.9
Originally conceived as a short preface to Sibylline Leaves, by the time Coleridge's Biographia Literaria was published in 1817 it had expanded into a two-volume apologia for the Romantic poet's "literary life and opinions." Coleridge here develops a theory of the poetic imagination, in which an artist's passion, will, memory, and perception intersect to engender her or his work. This unique editi