Includes index.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born in 1772, cut his creative teeth on fairy tales, although they were viewed as unhealthy confections, sugary lies, when he was growing up. He devoured the tales of Jack the Giant Killer, Tom Hickathrift, Blue Beard, Tom Thumb, Beauty and the Beast, King Arthur, The Arabian nights and the irresponsible chapbooks that brought back a Renaissance world of spirits, witches, elves, hags, satyrs, fauns, tritons, centaurs, dwarves, conjurors, changelings and hobgoblins. The magical, marvelous and mysterious engaged him early and, instead of being sealed off after childhood, ultimately found expression in 'Kubla Khan', 'The rime of the ancient mariner' and 'Christabel'.
Risking Enchantment is the first extended study of Coleridge's use of fairy-tale elements in his poetry to explore the possibilities of perceiving the Reality of spirit on which the material world is based. Jeanie Watson argues that Coleridge conceived of "Faery" or the "Land of Faery" as a metaphor for that Spirit and that his "tales of Faery" link the secular and sacred in dealing with things that are invisible, inexplicable, and mysterious in rational, everyday experience but perfectly perceivable and understood at another, equally valid level of existence. Risking Enchantment makes clear that Coleridge's tales of Faery are symbolic acts of imagination that invite the reader to participate intuitively in the Love that is God. For in a fallen world, "not to risk enchantment," writes Watson, "is extreme and ultimate folly".