Sara Coleridge's considerable efforts to rehabilitate and preserve for the Victorian period the literary reputation of her father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, have tended to overshadow her achievements as a poet in her own right. With her husband, Henry Nelson Coleridge (also her cousin), she prepared editions of all of her father's important works, often prefixing introductory essays that demonstrate her critical acumen and devotion to her father's literary legacy. Like her brother Hartley, who enjoyed moderate success as a sonneteer, Sara Coleridge lived in her father's shadow but without the intense disappointment and resentment that haunted the self-destructive, alcoholic Hartley. As her biographer Bradford Keyes Mudge notes, she was an accomplished essayist as well as a competent editor. Her poetic instincts, moreover, were keen, and she recognized the passionate and even erotic nature of her father's poetry. While not prolific in comparison with many of her contemporaries, Sara...