Poems on Various Subjects (1796) was the first collection by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, including also a few sonnets by Charles Lamb. A second edition in 1797 added many more poems by Lamb and by Charles Lloyd, and a third edition appeared in 1803 with Coleridge's works only. All three editions included poems in Coleridge's early Miltonic style, such as his Religious Musings and Monody on the Death of Chatterton, alongside lyrics and some of his first conversation poems, such as The Eolian Harp, in a style suggested by the works of William Cowper. The book was on the whole well received by reviewers; modern critics value it more for its shorter and lighter poems than for its formal set-pieces.
Contents
1796 edition
Four sonnets are signed "C. L.", to indicate that they are by Charles Lamb.
1797 edition
1803 edition
Compilation and publication
Poems on Various Subjects, Coleridge's first collection, was put together in 1795 and 1796 while he was living in a cottage in Clevedon, near Bristol, working as a Radical journalist, lecturer and pamphleteer. Publication was delayed while he revised his Religious Musings, but the book was eventually issued by the Bristol bookseller Joseph Cottle on 16 April 1796. In return for the copyright in the poems Cottle paid him 30 guineas, though Coleridge was more hopeful of gaining favourable notice from reviewers than large profits. This first edition of the book contained 51 poems, mostly written since Coleridge had dropped out from Cambridge University at the end of 1794. The collection was bookshelved by two substantial formal poems, Monody on the Death of Chatterton and Religious Musings; of the intervening pieces about half were sonnets, while the remainder included "The Eolian Harp" and two other conversation poems, as Coleridge was later to call them. Four of the sonnets, all signed with the initials C. L., were attributed by Coleridge himself to his friend Charles Lamb, but the truth is more complex. All were amended by Coleridge, and one, Effusion XIV "To Siddons", was included as Coleridge's in later collections of his poems and is probably best described as a collaboration. A fifth sonnet, Effusion XV, was completed by Lamb, as Coleridge acknowledged.
Within six months the book had sold out, and preparations began for a second edition with additional poems by both Coleridge and Lamb. In March 1797, when the printing was almost complete, Coleridge told Cottle that there would be a section of poems by another of his friends, Charles Lloyd, reassuring him that the increased costs of production would be offset by profits from the large number of copies, "more than a hundred", that Lloyd's family and friends would doubtless buy. This edition, retitled Poems, Second Edition, by S. T. Coleridge, to Which Are Now Added Poems by Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd, was therefore of an even more miscellaneous nature than the first. The first section, consisting of poems by Coleridge himself, omitted twenty poems from the first edition, including many of the more immature ones and all of the sonnets on political figures, but included twelve newer works. It began with a dedicatory poem to his brother, the Rev. George Coleridge, and, as before, concluded with the Religious Musings. This section comprised, Coleridge told Cottle, "my choicest fish, pick'd, gutted, and clean'd", the compound-epithets and other stylistic extravagances "pruned...with no unsparing hand". By contrast, the next two sections, by Lamb and Lloyd respectively, were in effect a Collected Works of the two young poets, occupying nearly a hundred pages. The final section, or Supplement, contains a few poems by Coleridge and his co-authors which he had, as he wrote, "reprieved from immediate oblivion". A newspaper advertisement dated 28 October 1797 announced the publication of the second edition. Coleridge almost immediately undercut his relations with his collaborators by publishing in the November 1797 number of the Monthly Magazine, under the pseudonym of Nehemiah Higginbottom, three sonnets satirising his own poems and those of Lamb and Lloyd. In consequence, when in 1798 Coleridge floated the idea of a third edition, to include The Ancient Mariner, Lloyd asked for his own poems to be withdrawn.