The majestic new Bollingen edition of Coleridge's collected works edges, with the Biographia Literaria edited by James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, a bit past its halfway point. Nine of the projected 16 volumes are now in print. In addition, three of the projected five volumes of the private Notebooks have appeared. (They are a separate Bollingen project, though Kathleen Coburn is in command of both.) Because Coleridge left a most untidy record of published, semi-published and unpublished writings, recovery of his occasional and periodical journalism, plus the enormous mass of his fascinating notebooks, his profuse marginalia, and the recent edition of his collected letters in six volumes, has been a more exciting process than for most writers of his vintage it generally is. When the two great Bollingen enterprises will have been added to Professor Grigg's monumental edition of the letters, we shall have the makings of an entire, substantially new Coleridge, whose position among the extraordinary minds of an extraordinary age will be more firmly established than ever.

LRB 17 November 1983 | PDF Download