"Coleridge and the Idea of Friendship, 1789-1804, takes us to the heart of Coleridge's concerns as both writer and friend. In analyzing the poet's most important male friendships during the 1790s, particularly in term of late-eighteenth-century ideas about friendship's social and spiritual context, it shows how Coleridge's experience of relationship was both structured by and contributed toward a broad contemporary debate about the nature of "the friend." The book examines Coleridge's epistolary relations with Poole, Southey, Lamb, Lloyd, Thelwall, Wordsworth, and Godwin during 1789-1804, and traces how each friendship negotiated issues that were being urgently discussed throughout English culture at that time. Each chapter is structured around a set of competing ideas of friendship which inform a particular Coleridgean relationship, and several chapters trace the difficult emergence of a specific idea to its practical realization in the poet's life - sometimes with disastrous consequences."--BOOK JACKET.