A picture of you Nov. 15, 2006

A newly acquired portrait of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, saved for the nation, has so impressed the curators at Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Museum in Grasmere that it is being specially displayed in a special preview until Tuesday 21st November.

To celebrate the first public showing of the portrait since 1812, the Trust is offering a special discount of 15% off the adult entry price to Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Museum.

The portrait will be on display before it is removed from public display for conservation.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834) is one of the great Romantic writers, author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan and Frost at Midnight among other works. He was a great friend of the poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850), who wrote ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, the best-known poem in the English language. Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated on Lyrical Ballads (1798), described by David Wilson, the Robert Woof Director of the Wordsworth Trust, as “the single most important volume of poetry ever published in English”.

In my opinion “the Prelude” by Wordsworth is in fact the greatest volume of poetry and the one that found me behind Tarn Hows Hotel, book in hand, when I first arrived in the Lakes having hitchhiked here in 1985.