Samuel Taylor Coleridge (October 21, 1772 – July
25, 1834) was an English poet, critic, and
philosopher who was, along with his friend William
Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic
Movement in England and as one of the Lake Poets.
He is probably best known for his poems The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as
his major prose work Biographia Literaria.

Life

Coleridge was born in Ottery St Mary, the son of a
vicar. After the death of his father, he was sent
to Christ\'s Hospital, a boarding school in West
Sussex. In later life, Coleridge idealised his
father as a pious innocent, but his relationship
with his mother was difficult. His childhood was
characterised by attention-seeking, which has been
linked with his dependent personality as an adult,
and he was rarely allowed to return home during
his schooldays. From 1791 until 1794 he attended
Jesus College at the University of Cambridge,
except for a short period when he enlisted in the
royal dragoons. At the university he met political
and theological ideas then considered radical. He
left Cambridge without a degree and joined the
poet Robert Southey in a plan, soon abandoned, to
found a utopian communist-like society, called
pantisocracy, in the wilderness of Pennsylvania.
In 1795 the two friends married Sarah and
Elizabeth Fricker (who were sisters), but
Coleridge\'s marriage proved unhappy. Southey
departed for Portugal, but Coleridge remained in
England. In 1796 he published Poems on Various
Subjects.

In 1795 Coleridge met poet William Wordsworth and
his sister Dorothy. They became immediate
friends.

Around 1796, Coleridge started using opium as a
pain reliever. His and Dorothy Wordsworth\'s
notebooks record that he suffered from a variety
of medical complaints, including toothache and
facial neuralgia. There appears to have been no
stigma associated with taking opium then, but also
little understanding of the physiological or
psychological aspects of addiction. He also was
reported to have been, according to Dorothy
Wordsworth, a \"terrible lover\" and \"one whose
realm is not that of the land twixt the sheets,\"
alluding to the fact that opium caused him to have
terrible gynecomastia and erectile dysfunction.

The years 1797 and 1798, during which the friends
lived in Nether Stowey, Somerset, were among the
most fruitful of Coleridge\'s life. Besides the
Ancient Mariner, he composed the symbolic poem
Kubla Khan, written—Coleridge himself claimed—as a
result of an opium dream, in \"a kind of a
reverie\"; and the first part of the narrative
poem Christabel. During this period he also
produced his much-praised \"conversation\" poems
This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Frost at Midnight,
and The Nightingale.

In 1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth published a joint
volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads, which proved to
be the starting-point for the English romantic
movement. Though the productive Wordsworth
contributed more poems to the volume, Coleridge\'s
first version of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
was the longest poem and drew more immediate
attention than anything else.

In the autumn of 1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth
left for a stay in Germany; Coleridge soon went
his own way and spent much of his time in
university towns. During this period he became
interested in German philosophy, especially the
transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, and in
the literary criticism of the 18th-century
dramatist Gotthold Lessing. Coleridge studied
German and, after his return to England,
translated the dramatic trilogy Wallenstein by the
German Classical poet Friedrich Schiller into
English.

In 1800 he returned to England and shortly
thereafter settled with his family and friends at
Keswick in the Lake District of Cumberland. Soon,
however, he fell into a vicious circle of lack of
confidence in his poetic powers, ill-health, and
increased opium dependency.

From 1804 to 1806, Coleridge lived in Malta and
travelled in Sicily and Italy, in the hope that
leaving Britain\'s damp climate would improve his
health and thus enable him to reduce his
consumption of opium. For a while he had a
civil-service job as the Public Secretary of the
British administration of Malta, assisting
governor Sir Alexander John Ball. Thomas de
Quincey alleges in his Recollections of the Lakes
and the Lake Poets that it was during this period
that Coleridge became a full-blown opium addict,
using the drug as a substitute for the lost vigour
and creativity of his youth. It has been
suggested, however, that this reflects de
Quincey\'s own experiences more than
Coleridge\'s.

Between 1808 and 1819 this \"giant among dwarfs\",
as he was often considered by his contemporaries,
gave a series of lectures in London and Bristol –
those on Shakespeare renewed interest in the
playwright as a model for contemporary writers.

In 1816 Coleridge, his addiction worsening, his
spirits depressed, and his family alienated, took
residence in the home of the physician James
Gillman, in Highgate. ln Gillman\'s home he
finished his major prose work, the Biographia
Literaria (1817), a volume composed of 25 chapters
of autobiographical notes and dissertations on
various subjects, including some incisive literary
theory and criticism. The sections in which
Coleridge expounded his definitions of the nature
of poetry and the imagination are particularly
important: he made a famous distinction between
primary and secondary imagination on the one hand
and fancy on the other. He published other
writings while he was living at the Gillman home,
notably Sibylline Leaves (1817), Aids to
Reflection (1825), and Church and State (1830). He
died in Highgate on July 25, 1834.

Poetry

Coleridge is probably best known for his long
narrative poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
and Christabel. Even those who have never read the
Rime have come under its influence: its words have
given the English language the metaphor of an
albatross around one\'s neck, the (mis)quote of
\"water, water everywhere, but not a drop to
drink\", and the phrase \"a sadder but wiser
man\". Christabel is known for its musical rhythm
and language and its Gothic tale.

Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream, A Fragment,
although shorter, is also widely known and loved.
It has strange, dreamy imagery and (like most good
poems) can be read on many levels. The name of Ted
Nelson\'s Project Xanadu comes from the first line
of Kubla Khan. Both Kubla Khan and Christabel have
additional \"romantic\" aura because they were
never finished.

Coleridge\'s shorter, meditative \"conversation
poems,\" however, proved to be the most
influential of his work. These include both quiet
poems like This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison and
Frost at Midnight and also strongly emotional
poems like Dejection and The Pains of Sleep.
Wordsworth immediately adopted the model of these
poems, and used it to compose several of his major
poems. Via Wordsworth, the conversation poem
became a standard vehicle for English poetic
expression, and perhaps the most common approach
among modern poets.


Other works

Although known today primarily for his poetry,
Coleridge also published essays and books on
literary theory, criticism, politics, philosophy,
and theology. He introduced Immanuel Kant to the
British public in his lectures and
\"Thursday-night seminars\" at Highgate.
Coleridge\'s treatment of the German idealist
philosophers in the Biographia Literaria has been
subject to the accusation of plagiarism. It is
known that he presents lengthy translations,
particularly from Schelling, as his own work. de
Quincey compares this to kleptomania, although
Coleridge\'s defenders attribute it to his poor
organisation of notes rather than dishonesty.

He wrote both political commentary and hack
journalism for several newspapers, especially
during the Napoleonic wars. He translated two of
Schiller\'s plays from the German and himself
wrote several dramas (Zapolya had successful runs
in London and Bristol). He also worked as a
teacher and tutor, gave public lectures and
sermons, and almost single-handedly wrote and
published two periodicals, the Watchman and the
Friend. During his life, he was famous as a
conversationalist.

His letters, Table Talk, and range of friends
reflect the breadth of his interests. In addition
to literary people such as William Wordsworth and
Charles Lamb, his friends included Humphry Davy
the chemist, industrialists such as the tanner
Thomas Poole and members of the Wedgwood family,
Alexander Ball the military governor of Malta, the
American painter Washington Allston, and the
physician James Gillman.

It was in all probability Charles Lamb who
introduced Coleridge to the writings of Sir Thomas
Browne. Browne\'s learning, literary style and
personality impressed Coleridge and Thomas De
Quincey and both were aware of Browne\'s drowsy
opiate imagery. Coleridge not only annotated
Browne\'s major literary works, but in his
correspondence exclaimed, \"O to write a character
of this man!\"


Family connections

Coleridge was the father of Hartley Coleridge and
Sara Coleridge, and grandfather of Herbert
Coleridge and Ernest Hartley Coleridge. He was the
uncle of the first. The poet Mary Coleridge was a
relation but not a descendant.


Further reading
By Coleridge

    * The Collected Works in 16 volumes (some are
double volumes), many editors, Routledge & Kegan
Paul and also Bollingen Series LXXV, Princeton
University Press (1971-2001)
    * The Notebooks in 5 (or 6) double volumes,
eds. Kathleen Coburn and others, Routledge and
also Bollingen Series L, Princeton University
Press (1957-1990)
    * Collected Letters in 6 volumes, ed. E. L.
Griggs, Clarendon Press: Oxford (1956-1971)


About and around Coleridge

    * Biography by Richard Holmes: Coleridge:
Early Visions, Viking Penguin: New York, 1990
(republished later by HarperC