"Anya Taylor writes a rare book that illuminates something about Coleridge that has often been noticed but never articulated. In Erotic Coleridge, Taylor draws on the poet's newly discovered, newly ascribed, and rarely noticed love poems as well as his letters and notebooks to present him as a passionately physical man. She shows him flirting, blushing and panting. She shows him subltely attentive to women's physical bodies and deeply disturbed by his own problematic marriage. Ambitious, accomplished, and perceptive, Erotic Coleridge is a marvelous combination of meticulous scholarship and artful storytelling." - Debbie Lee, Washington State University

"Taylor makes significant contributions to a well-studied subject. George Whalley's Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson (1955), Anthony John Harding's Coleridge and the Idea of Love (1974), Molly Lefebure's The Bondage of Love (1986), and Robert Barth's Coleridge and the Power of Love (CH, Oct'89, 27-0786) all were written prior to the publication of important literary and biographical materials that bear on the topic - specifically, Richard Holmes's two-volume Coleridge (CH, Feb'91, 28-3167; 1998) and J. C. Mays's three-volume edition, Poetical Works (CH, Nov'02, 40-1383). Taylor interprets biographical facts from Holmes's books and elsewhere, and comments on poems published in Mays's edition and on long-important poems, especially "Christabel." She represents Coleridge as "relishing the particularity of young women," even "swooning" over them, but also "sympathizing with women's unique ordeals" and "forecasting a better civilization that would provide them with spheres for free agency." Taylor's argument opposes the currently influential representation of Coleridge as a misogynist, offered by Julie Carlson in In the Theatre of Romanticism (1994) and in an essay in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. by Lucy Newlyn (CH, Jun'03, 40-5646). This accessible volume is devoted to Coleridge's life as much as to his literature." -T. Hoagwood, Texas A&M University, fromChoice (9/1/2006 issue)