Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

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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.

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