contest that the Americans' attribution to Coleridge is wild, concluding: "This volume is not what it appears to be."

The attackers' principal objection is that there is too little forensic or, indeed, literary evidence to pin the work to Coleridge.

One of them, William St Clair - author of books about the 1820s Greek war of independence and the slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries - on hearing that the US editors are hurt by the onslaught, has added: "This is what scholarship is supposed to be, isn't it? Somebody writes a book with big claims, others take issue with it, and it gets tested in the forum of scholarly and public opinion."

Though the likely impact of the storm on the general reader is questionable - the book costs £85 - in academia the stakes are high.

Goethe's poem is one of the benchmarks of European culture.

Though not widely read in English - or understood - in the 19th century, today it ranks alongside Dante's Divine Comedy or Joyce's Ulysses as one of the texts key to the evolution of European literature.

Claiming that Coleridge was its first English translator is akin to an art historian saying an unattributed seascape was by Turner, or to a musicologist putting Beethoven's name to an anonymous 200-year-old musical score.

OUP remain tightlipped and, though aware of the attack by St Clair et al, have not changed the web page trailing the book. Moreover, the editors and their opponents all know each other: St Clair, somewhat "hot-headed" according to one insider, might be nursing a grudge.

Hell, as both Goethe and Coleridge surely knew, hath no fury like a piqued academic.