Bricks Without Mortar: Selected Poems of Hartley Coleridge
Edited by Lisa Gee with an introduction by Louis de Berni&egraves;res
Picador, £7.99, pp150
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He was just over four feet tall with big eyebrows and an enormous, bushy black beard which, as Southey observed, 'a Turk might envy'. Mythologised in infancy as the 'mighty prophet, seer blest' of Wordsworth's 'Immortality Ode', Hartley cannot have found it easy being the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and it was not surprising that his life provided a melancholy coda to the Romantic age.

At first he looked like the prodigy Wordsworth and Coleridge had hoped, but at the age of 23, Hartley was thrown out of his fellowship at Oxford for drunkenness, a propensity that continued when he became a journalist, a schoolteacher in the Lake District and a hack writer of biography in Leeds. He wrote some of the most exquisite poetry, long neglected and now beautifully re-edited by Lisa Gee. This selection comes with an exemplary introduction by Louis de Bernières.

De Bernières is the ideal guide to this verse. When he tells us that Hartley's 'poetry is full of music, space and light, and these spaces are themselves full of the poet's pleasure', you know you're in the presence of a master writer with complete empathy for this literary intelligence. Deeply aware of the unworthiness, isolation and longing for love in the poetry, De Bernières nonetheless argues for its power to affirm, emphasising his 'humour and lightness of touch'. I don't think any scholar has ever written with such insight about this overlooked poet.

Whether addressing Nelly the cat or looking back on the grandiose claims made for him in the 'Immortality Ode', Hartley casts a cool eye on the world without self-pity or rancour. The sonnet with which this selection begins offers a clear-sighted account of its author's shortcomings: 'Long time a child, and still a child, when years/ Had painted manhood on my cheek, was I_' Each of these poems is a minor masterpiece, a final, haunting testimony to the delights and dangers of 'high' romanticism.