SOURCE: "The Lost Garden of Coleridge," in The Wordsworth Circle, Vol. XXII, No. 1, Winter, 1991, pp. 24-30.

In the following essay, Luther analyzes the ways in which "The Garden of Boccaccio" moves beyond the painting that is its ostensible subject to become a celebration of the creative process.

In The Dark Night of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1960) Marshall Suther praises "The Garden of Boccaccio" as "Coleridge's version of 'Sailing to Byzantium'"; and in Visions of Xanadu (1965) Suther goes so far as to call it "the last real poem [Coleridge] wrote." George Watson even more resoundingly asserts that the poem "ought to be better known; it ought, in fact, to be the poem first turned to, after the conversation poems, the 'Mariner', 'Kubla Khan' and 'Christabel', to confirm the stature of [Coleridge's] poetic art" (Coleridge the Poet [1966]). Yet "The Garden of Boccaccio" has still been virtually erased from most surveys of...