ABSTRACT
Coleridge began writing poetry at least as early as the age of fourteen and began publishing at seventeen, published in the London World and in the Cambridge Chronicle five days later. Indiscipline, indeed, and especially an exclamatory indiscipline, is the besetting sin of Coleridge's early poems. William Wordsworth's and Coleridge's surviving schoolboy poems are largely deliberate imitations of classical models, and they include parodies as well as reverential imitations from the start. The true function of William Lisle Bowles as a stepping-stone on which Coleridge's youthful talent rose can best be seen in an evolving attitude to moral sentiments. The failure of the Romantics, and of the Victorian poets, to create a drama has been earnestly debated. But it is important to realize at the outset that in England at least what was attempted was scarcely a romantic drama at all.
