Coleridge's notebooks

[1] Coleridge's biographer Richard Holmes summarised the range of material covered as "travels, reading, dreams, nature studies, self-confession and self-analysis, philosophical theories, friendships, sexual fantasies, lecture notes, observations of his children, literary schemes, brewing recipes, opium addiction, horrors, puns, prayers.

"[2] Some of this vast storehouse of material found its way into Coleridge's published works, and it is also believed to have directly influenced Wordsworth's poems.

He even allowed his friend Robert Southey to use a number of extracts in their collaborative work Omniana, published in 1812 and reprinted in an expanded form in 1836.

In 1895 the poet's grandson Ernest Hartley Coleridge released a larger selection under the title Anima Poetæ, and the following year the scholar Alois Brandl published in Germany an edition of the first notebook.

Coburn began work on this in the 1930s; the first volume appeared in 1957, and the fifth and final one (completed by Anthony John Harding) in 2002, 11 years after her death.