Like no other poet Coleridge was, in five short years, "visited by the Muse". The great flowering of his poetry happened all, in the single year from the summer of 1797 when he first became friends with Dorothy and William Wordsworth. That was the year in which he wrote The Ancient Mariner, the first part of Christable, Kubla Khan and other poems that were, as Kathleen Raine writes, "the works not of his talent but of his genius".As well as Coleridge's finest poems, this Penguin edition contains selections from his letters and his main critical writings, including extracts from Biographia Literaria and several of his revolutionary essays on Shakespeare.

The narrator tells of a woman he once loved but never pursued, and a letter she wrote which he never opened, then lost.