Through politics, religion and his relationship with Wordsworth, the book builds to a new interpretation of the poems where Coleridge's daemonic imagination produces its myths: The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan and Christabel . Re-reading the origins of Romanticism, Leadbetter reveals a Coleridge at once more familiar and more strange.

The Willing Daemon: Coleridge and the Transnatural * 'Pagan Philosophy' and the 'Pride of Speculation': Spiritual Politics and the Metaphysical Imagination, 1795-1797 * 'Not a Man, But a Monster': Organicism, Becoming and the Daemonic Imago * Transnatural Language: The 'Library-Cormorant' in the 'Vernal Wood' * 'The Dark Green Adder's Tongue': Osorio and the 'Poetry of Nature' * 'A Distinct Current of My Own': Poetry and the Uses of the Supernatural * 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' * 'Kubla Khan' * 'Christabel'