Hartley Coleridge (PDF)

ANDREW KEANIE is Lecturer at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland.

"Andrew Keanie's Hartley Coleridge: A Reassessment of His Life and Work is a timely study of a largely forgotten poet." - Doomsday: Journal of the Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society

"Andrew Keanie s book is a significant achievement in scholarship, and a real delight to read: erudite and incisive, judicious and forthright, it is written with finely perceptive sympathy, and a committed conviction of Hartley s originality. Hartley emerges, therefore, as a striking individualist: the first flaneur (167), anticipating the morbid psychology of Baudelairean disillusion (170); a writer as deliberately and disconcertingly idiosyncratic as the Marcel Proust who did not belong to the same world as the publishers who rejected Du Cote de Chez Swann; and who, like Hartley, wrote like nobody else .[1] Keanie regrets that Hartley has never been anywhere near inclusion in the English Romantic canon ; and that his work has not been revisited with the same sense of excitement and humility as that of other minor Romantics (110). This book, however, should be a significant influence in redressing the balance in Hartley s favour, and will surely stimulate further research. In particular, modern scholarly editions of Hartley s poetry and prose are now required if we are to appreciate his work as fully as it deserves.[2] Keanie s splendid reassessment will undoubtedly prove indispensable for those who follow: a truly pioneering and inspirational study." - Robin Schofield, The Coleridge Bulletin