Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Did You Know?

• Coleridge was born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, the youngest of ten children by his father's second wife.
• He was sent to Christ's Hospital charity school in London after his father died in 1781, where he became friends with Charles Lamb.
• Coleridge's remains were moved to St Michael's Church, Highgate, in 1961 after an international fundraising appeal.

Pantisocracy and marriage

At Jesus College, Coleridge encountered radical political and theological ideas, including those of Robert Southey, with whom he wrote the play The Fall of Robespierre. Coleridge and Southey planned a utopian commune called Pantisocracy in Pennsylvania, but the plan was abandoned. In 1795, the two friends became engaged to sisters Sara and Edith Fricker; Coleridge married Sara that year at St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, and she became the subject of his poem The Eolian Harp. The marriage proved unhappy, and by 1804 they were separated. Coleridge blamed Sara in a letter to his brother, though later biographers have not agreed with his negative view. A third sister, Mary, married poet Robert Lovell, who introduced Coleridge and Southey to their patron Joseph Cottle; Lovell died of a fever in April 1796, with Coleridge present. In 1796, Coleridge published his first volume, Poems on Various Subjects, which included works by Charles Lamb, a collaboration with Southey, and a poem suggested by schoolfriend Robert Favell. A second edition in 1797 added an appendix by Lamb and Charles Lloyd, a young poet Coleridge tutored. That year he also privately printed Sonnets from Various Authors, featuring sonnets by Lamb, Lloyd, Southey, himself, and older poets. Coleridge launched a short-lived journal, The Watchman, in March 1796, which ceased by May.

Later life and increasing drug use

He returned to England in 1806, and Dorothy Wordsworth was shocked by his condition. From 1807 to 1808, he went back to Malta and traveled in Sicily and mainland Italy, hoping a drier climate would improve his health and reduce his opium consumption. Thomas De Quincey later claimed Coleridge became a full-blown opium addict during this period, though some suggest De Quincey's account reflects his own experiences more. Coleridge's opium addiction, involving as much as two quarts of laudanum a week, increasingly dominated his life: he separated from his wife Sara in 1808, quarreled with Wordsworth in 1810, lost part of his annuity in 1811, and placed himself under Dr. Daniel's care in 1814. The addiction caused severe constipation requiring regular enemas. In 1809, Coleridge launched a weekly journal, The Friend, written and edited almost entirely by himself. Despite selling over five hundred subscriptions, including over two dozen to members of Parliament, a financial crisis crippled publication in late 1809, forcing him to seek emergency loans from wealthy friends. The Friend covered law, philosophy, morals, politics, history, and literary criticism.

Poetry

Coleridge is a major figure in English poetry, and his poems deeply influenced all major poets of his era. He was known as a meticulous craftsman who reworked his poems more rigorously than any contemporary, and both Southey and Wordsworth relied on his professional advice. Many critics credit Coleridge with originating the idea of 'Conversational Poetry'—using everyday language for profound poetic images—which became central to Wordsworth's work; it is difficult to imagine Wordsworth's The Excursion or The Prelude without Coleridge's influence. As a critic, Coleridge developed a philosophy of poetry that deeply influenced literary criticism, seen in critics such as A. O. Lovejoy and I. A. Richards. He is best known for longer poems like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. The Rime gave English the metaphor of an albatross around one's neck, the quotation 'water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink,' and the phrase 'a sadder and a wiser man.' The phrase 'All creatures great and small' may derive from the poem's lines. Millions know the story through Iron Maiden's 1984 song 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner.' Christabel is noted for its musical rhythm, language, and Gothic tale. 'Kubla Khan,' though shorter, is widely known, and both it and Christabel carry a Romantic aura because they were never finished. Stopford Brooke characterized both poems as having no rival due to their 'exquisite metrical movement' and 'imaginative phrasing.'

Sources and Further reading

Barfield, Owen. What Coleridge Thought (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1971). Barth, J. Robert. Coleridge and Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Harvard, 1969). Barth, J. Robert. The Symbolic Imagination (New York: Fordham, 2001). Beer, John B. Coleridge the Visionary (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970). Berkeley, Richard. Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Bloom, Harold (2010). Samuel Taylor Coleridge. ISBN 9781604138092. Boulger, J. D. Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969). Cheyne, Peter. Coleridge's Contemplative Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Class, Monika. Coleridge and the Kantian Ideas in England, 1796–1817 (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). Coffman, Ralph J. 'The Working Library of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.' The Journal of Library History. 21, no. 2 (1986): 277–299. Cutsinger, James S. The Form of Transformed Vision (Macon GA: Mercer, 1987). Engell, James. The Creative Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard, 1981). Engell, James (2023). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Then & Now: Romantic-Era Poets in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1910-1911. Hough, Barry, and Davis, Howard. Coleridge's Laws: A Study of Coleridge in Malta (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2010). Leadbetter, Gregory. Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Lefebure, Molly (1987). The Bondage of Love: a life of Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Repr., 1. American ed.). New York: Norton. ISBN 9780393024432. Lefebure, Molly (2013). Private Lives of the Ancient Mariner: Coleridge and his children. Cambridge: Lutterworth Press. ISBN 071889300X. Lowes, John Livingston. The Road to Xanadu (London: Constable, 1930). Magnuson, Paul. Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988).