SOURCE: “Hartley Coleridge as a Poet,” in A Poet's Children: Hartley and Sara Coleridge, Methuen and Co., 1912, pp. 273-86.

In this brief overview of Coleridge's poetry, Towle notes the influence of the Romantics on his work. Nature and memories of childhood are major themes in Coleridge's writing, according to Towle, and the majority of his poems are addressed to children.

It is not surprising to find that Hartley Coleridge's poems, collected by his brother Derwent, published in 1851 with a prefatory Memoir, and again recently reissued with some additions in the “Muse's Library,” though rich in fancy and felicitous diction, are often the meditative records of very ordinary incidents.

He belonged to a school whereof the teachers, repudiating the artificial canons and sentiments of the eighteenth century, had sought their inspiration at the shrine of truth and in the heart of nature: “and poetry could never again be content...