Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was an English poet, critic and philosopher who, with William Wordsworth, launched the Romantic movement in England with Lyrical Ballads in 1798. He wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan and Christabel, and his lectures on Shakespeare and his Biographia Literaria made him one of the great critics of the language.
Works
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Sibylline Leaves
A vicar's son
Coleridge was born in 1772 at Ottery St Mary, in Devon, the youngest child of the vicar and schoolmaster John Coleridge. After his father's death he was sent to Christ's Hospital, a charity school in London, where he read voraciously and befriended the future essayist Charles Lamb.
At Jesus College, Cambridge, he ran up debts, briefly enlisted in the cavalry under the false name of Silas Tomkyn Comberbache, and left without a degree. With the poet Robert Southey he dreamed of founding an ideal community on the banks of the Susquehanna in America, a plan they called Pantisocracy, which never came to anything.
Lyrical Ballads
In 1797 Coleridge, then living at Nether Stowey in Somerset, became the close friend of William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, who settled nearby. In a year of intense creativity the two poets planned a joint collection: Wordsworth would write about ordinary life, Coleridge about the supernatural made believable.
Lyrical Ballads appeared anonymously in 1798, opening with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The same period produced Kubla Khan and the first part of Christabel, as well as conversation poems such as Frost at Midnight. The friends then travelled to Germany, where Coleridge studied German philosophy.
The critic and the sage
Back in England, Coleridge moved to the Lake District near Wordsworth, but his marriage failed, his friendship with Wordsworth broke down for a time, and his dependence on opium, first taken as a medicine, grew. He lectured on Shakespeare and on poetry, and published Biographia Literaria in 1817.
From 1816 he lived in Highgate, in the house of the doctor James Gillman, who helped him control his addiction. There he became a famous talker, visited by young writers who came to hear him discuss philosophy and religion. He died in 1834.
Anecdotes
The person from Porlock
Coleridge said that Kubla Khan came to him complete in an opium dream, two or three hundred lines long. On waking, he began to write it down, but was interrupted by a person on business from Porlock, and when he returned to his desk an hour later the rest of the vision had vanished. The poem was published as a fragment in 1816.
Trooper Comberbache
In 1793, deep in debt, Coleridge left Cambridge and enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons as Silas Tomkyn Comberbache, keeping his initials. He was a hopeless horseman. His brothers bought his discharge a few months later, on the grounds of insanity.
Frequently asked questions
What are Coleridge's most famous poems?
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Kubla Khan (published 1816), Christabel, Frost at Midnight and Dejection: An Ode.
What was Lyrical Ballads?
A collection of poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, published anonymously in 1798, often seen as the beginning of English Romanticism.
What is an albatross around one's neck?
The phrase comes from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in which the crew hang the dead albatross around the mariner's neck as a punishment. It now means a burden of guilt or a heavy responsibility.