Nature Imagined in S. T. Coleridge's "Meditative Poems" and Miguel de Unamuno's Poesías : A Study on Reception

Abstract

This paper aims at exploring some aspects of Miguel de Unamuno’s engagement with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry. The Spanish author wrote in 1907 his first collection of poems, Poesías. To me, a non-negligible number of the poems in the collection bear significant resemblances with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “meditative” poems. It is my purpose here to analyse these similarities so as to prove that they are not mere chance, but the result of Unamuno’s attentive reading of Coleridge’s poems, which he frequently praised. Hence, a study of the Spanish author’s readings of the 1893 edition of The Works of S. T. Coleridge, now held in Unamuno’s private library in Salamanca, and the annotations he penned on its pages, will be offered first.