Lewis Roberts, PhD candidate at St John’s College, has won a competitive Stephen Copley Award from the British Association of Romantic Studies to complete research at the Dove Cottage Archives into the manuscript history of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poems.

Lewis’s PhD project is a study of the line-ending in poetry of the long nineteenth century, and is concerned with the ways that poets compose and re-draft lineation in poems. Coleridge was notoriously fastidious and many of his most famous poems changed substantially on several occasions. This research will form a significant contribution to the field of Romantic manuscript studies, and will shed new light on the decision-making processes involved in poetic composition.

Lewis would like to record his thanks to the British Association of Romantic Studies for their generosity and their commitment towards supporting the work of early career academics. For more information, see https://www.bars.ac.uk/blog/?p=4041