'Coleridge: Selected Poems' ed Richard Holmes is published on 21 March HarperCollins pounds 20

'Coleridge: Selected Poems' ed Richard Holmes is published on 21 March (HarperCollins pounds 20).. THE FORBIDDEN BESTSELLERS OF PRE-REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE by Robert Darnton, HarperCollins pounds 25 25 ROBERT DARNTON has drilled a peep-hole into the extraordinary world of French illegal literature before the Revolution - a world where abstract philosophy and political theory rubbed shoulders with anti-clerical satire, utopian fantasy, political slander and pornography - and something of the clandestine and scandalous quality of the books he writes about has rubbed off on his. Coleridge wasn't much of a political or occasional poet, either, but it's good to have from both Holmes and Hughes "The Devil's Thoughts", a satire which retains its topicality:"He saw a certain minister(A minister to his mind)Go up into a certain HouseWith a majority behind."Southey complained that Coleridge was always nosing for nettles in hedgerows, when he should have gone like a greyhound for the hare. In the end, though, Coleridge's shambling habits, nettled anguish and flibbertigibbet flashes of genius are precisely what endear him to us.! 'The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge' by Rosemary Ashton (Blackwell pounds 25); 'A Choice of Coleridge's Verse' ed Ted Hughes (Faber pounds 7.99). Who would have believed, for example, that Coleridge wrote over 2,000 lines of ballad (even if only three of his ballads were completed)? Another section is given over to what Holmes calls Hill Walking poems: Coleridge is not good at describing landscapes, but "the upward, striding airy quality of these poems" reminds us that he was literally as well as metaphysically a wanderer - a man who may have had a ponderous "alderman-after-dinner" gait by the time Keats met him in 1819, but who at 30 walked 263 miles through the Scottish Highlands in eight days.

Richard Holmes casts the net much wider, with 101 poems compiled over the 10 years he's been working on Coleridge's Life (the compilation began as a loose-leaf binder intended only for his own use). Some of the poems are barely worth having in themselves, but Holmes's footnotes to them, and his ordering of them into eight distinct categories, are wonderfully illuminating and enlarging. Hughes's essay is sometimes more revealing about his own shamanistic preoccupations than about Coleridge. But it's full of fascinating insights, and a kind of dramatic fable in its own right.Feeling as he does about Coleridge's fierce but narrow beam of power, Hughes allows only 15 poems into his canon, adding a further 12 as a supplement.

Only here, in this "triple exposure photograph", does his "unleavened" pagan self triumph over his fearful, intellectual, Christian self. Only in the "three- act tragic opera" of 1797-8 - "Kubla Khan", "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel" - was he able to confront his inner demons (who in his dreams take the form of grotesque women) and release his visionary power. Picking up a metaphor from the notebooks, he argues that Coleridge too often lacks solidity, or oak-like strength, because afraid of and in flight from turbulent feelings. What contemporaries saw as his spendthrift conversational eloquence ("his mind," said Hazlitt, "keeps open house, and entertains all comers"), Ms Ashton prefers to see as a valuable engagement in the intellectual climate of his day, and she patiently elucidates his debt to Kant, Schelling and other German thinkers. Her solid, respectful life makes Coleridge look more solid and respectable than he's done for many a year.Solidity is also a preoccupation of Ted Hughes, in the essay which introduces his selection of the verse. Rosemary Ashton pays particular attention to his lectures: between 1808 and 1819, he delivered some 120 of them - on Shakespeare, on education, on philosophy, on European literature. Some of these recycled his own and others' material but even so, on top of his journalism, poetry and the Biographia Literaria, it's not the record of a sluggard.

His table-talk was legendary, and as the sage of Highgate he attracted numerous visitors and disciples. "Why was I made for Love and Love denied to me?" one poem asks, but - surrounded by generous patrons, and friends who'd take him in at a moment's notice - he had little cause to feel unloved. There were fallings-out, as his admirers and supporters became exasperated by his opium- addiction, and lack of gratitude, and general failure to deliver There were astonishingly hostile ad hominem reviews. But even at the worst of times he inspired feelings of protectiveness.He also worked to more purpose than he liked to concede.

There's a touch of Beckett in some of this later work, which Richard Holmes groups as the "Confessional Poems". Limping on through the vale of tears, the poet seems at best gloomy and at worst close to suicidal despair.Though he did contemplate suicide on several occasions, the outward circumstances of his life were less crepuscular than the poetry suggests. Hope, or the lack of it, is an abiding theme: backward- looking hope in a race with blindfold time; visionary hope, which gives work a purpose beyond drone-like repetition; hope of love, without which life becomes a limbo, "the mere horror of blank Naught-at-all". Stretched out on the rack of himself, he watches happiness flitting away from him like children leaving the nest Caught in a spider-web, he feels the world close in on him. How much this affected him, for good or ill or even at all, is hard to say. The tone of his poetry, what little new there is of it, darkens after he's past 30, but solitude and depression had always been part of his temper. His gloomy introspectiveness may be one reason why he appeals to a post-Freudian age.