Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1772-1834
English poet

He was born in Ottery St Mary, Devon. The son of a vicar, and the youngest of a very large family, he had an unhappy childhood. He was educated at Christ's Hospital and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he studied for the Church. His university career was interrupted in 1793 by a runaway enlistment in the 15th Dragoons from which he was rescued by his family. On a walking tour in 1794 he met Robert Southey, with whom he shared Romantic and revolutionary views. Together they planned, but never created, a 'Pantisocracy' or commune on the banks of the Susquehanna, in Pennsylvania. In 1795 he married Sarah Fricker, a friend of Southey's, who married her sister Edith. He had contributed some verses to the Morning Chronicle in 1793, and now he wrote, with Southey, a historical play, The Fall of Robespierre. He became immersed in lecturing and journalism in Bristol, interspersed with itinerant preaching at Unitarian chapels. The Bristol circle provided him with generous friends, including Joseph Cottle the bookseller, who published his first book of poems, Poems on Various Subjects (1796), which contained the 'Ode to France'. In 1797 the Coleridges moved to a cottage at Nether Stowey, Somerset, and later that year met William and Dorothy Wordsworth. It was a significant meeting for English poetry - their discussions produced a new poetry which represented a revulsion from neoclassic artificiality and, consequently, the renovation of the language of poetry. Lyrical Ballads (1798), which opened with Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and closed with Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey', was thus in the nature of a manifesto. A visit to Germany with the Wordsworths followed in 1798-99. German philosophy and criticism influenced Coleridge greatly and he published translations of Schiller's Piccolomini and Wallenstein. In 1800 he settled at Keswick and for a time, with the Wordsworths at Grasmere and Southey already resident at Keswick, it looked as if a fruitful career was opening out for him, but he was deeply unhappy at this time, due partly to his addiction to opium, and partly to an increasingly unhappy marriage. His 'Ode to Dejection' (1802) is both a recantation of Wordsworth's animistic view of Nature and a confession of failure. From then on his association with Wordsworth was strained; his relations with Dorothy continued only through her devotion to him. In 1809 he began a weekly paper, The Friend, which ran for 28 issues and was published as a book in 1818. In 1810 he finally broke with Wordsworth and settled in London, where he engaged in miscellaneous writing and lecturing at the Royal Institution (his lectures on Shakespeare alone are extant). He also wrote a play, Remorse (1813), which had a mild success at Drury Lane. In 1816 he published Christabel and other poems, which included 'Christabel' and the fragment, 'Kubla Khan', both written in his earlier period of inspiration. He had relinquished the idea of renewing that inspiration but became the centre of a circle of young disciples and devoted himself to philosophical speculation. His critical writing in these middle years is important as the finest creative criticism in the language, collected in Biographia Literaria (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825), and Anima Poetae (edited from his Notebooks, 1895). He also wrote some moving late poems, including 'Youth and Age' and 'Constancy to an Ideal Object.

Bibliography: J L Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (1927); T D Campbell, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: a narrative of the events of his life (1894)