Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

English poet, critic, and philosopher. A friend of the poets Robert Southey and William Wordsworth, he collaborated with the latter on the highly influential collection Lyrical Ballads (1798), which expressed their theory of poetic sensation and was the spearhead of English Romanticism. His poems include ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Christabel’, and ‘Kubla Khan’ (all written 1797-98); his critical works include Biographia Literaria (1817).

Coleridge was born in Ottery St Mary, Devon. Following the death of his father in 1781, Coleridge was sent to Christ's Hospital school, London, from 1782-90 where a fellow pupil, Charles Lamb became a lifelong friend. In 1791 he took up a scholarship at Jesus College, Cambridge, and during his time there he was driven by debt to enlist in the Dragoons. In 1794 he became friends with Southey and together they formed a plan to set up a ‘Pantisocracy’, a farming commune of six families in New England, USA. The Utopian scheme never materialized. In 1795 he married Sarah Fricker (1779-1845), from whom he afterwards separated. In 1797 he moved to Nether Stowey, Somerset, and worked closely with Wordsworth on Lyrical Ballads, producing much of his finest poetry during this period. In 1798 he went to Germany where he studied philosophy and literary criticism. Returning to England, in 1800 he settled in the Lake District with Wordsworth. Suffering from rheumatic pain, Coleridge became addicted to opium. In 1802 he wrote ‘Dejection: An Ode’, one of his last important poems, which eloquently expresses his sense of frustration and waste. His opium consumption increased and, by 1803, he was restless and miserable and did little work. In 1804 he travelled to Malta, where he became secretary to the governor for ten months, going on to Naples and Rome, before returning to England in 1806. He arrived home miserably broken in mind and body, and moved from place to place; estranged from his wife, he was sometimes alone, sometimes with his family. From 1808 to 1819 gave a series of lectures on prose and drama, and, from 1816, lived in Highgate, London, under medical care, having quarrelled with Wordsworth. Here he produced his major prose work Biographia Literaria (1817), a collection of autobiographical pieces in which he develops his philosophical and critical ideas.

A brilliant talker and lecturer, Coleridge was expected to produce some great work of philosophy or criticism. His Biographia Literaria, much of it based on German ideas, is full of insight but its formlessness and the limited extent of his poetic output represents a partial failure of promise. In 1800 he produced his fine translation of Schiller's Wallenstein and was commissioned to write a series of political articles for The Morning Post. In 1809 he started a magazine, The Friend, which contained some of his finest prose. Few of his lectures have been preserved except in the shape of rough notes, but these and his Literary Remains prove him to have been a great poetical, and especially Shakespearean, critic. Aids to Reflection appeared in 1825, three volumes of Poetical Works in 1828, and the fine prose work, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, was published in 1840 (after Coleridge's death).

As a philosopher, he argued that even in registering sense perceptions the mind was performing acts of creative imagination, rather than being a passive arena in which ideas interact mechanistically. Coleridge's philosophical explorations appear in his greatest poems. ‘Kubla Khan’, with its exotic imagery and symbols, rich vocabulary and rhythms, written, by Coleridge's account, under the influence of laudanum, was often considered a brilliant work, but without any defined theme. However, despite its complexity the poem can be read as a well-constructed exposition on human genius and art. The theme of life and nature again appears in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, where the effect on nature of a crime against the power of life is presented in the form of a ballad. ‘Christabel’, an unfinished ‘Gothic’ ballad, evokes a sinister atmosphere, hinting at evil and the grotesque. In his poems Coleridge's detailed perception of nature links scene and mood, and leads to a contemplation of moral and universal concerns. In his theory of poetry Coleridge stressed the aesthetic quality as the primary consideration. The metrical theory on which ‘Christabel’ is constructed helped to break the fetters of 18th-century correctness and monotony and soon found disciples, among others Walter Scott and Lord Byron.