Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was an English poet, essayist, critic, and renowned conversationalist, best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as his association with his fellow romantic poet William Wordsworth. He is also remembered for his Biographia Literaria and his championing of German literature and philosophy.

Life

Coleridge was born in 1772, in Ottery St Mary in Devon and educated at Christ's Hospital before going up to Jesus College, Cambridge in 1791. After two years he left and enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons under the name of Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. Thanks to the efforts of his brothers he was discharged as "insane", and returned to Cambridge, but left without taking a degree. Introduced to Robert Southey, they together developed the utopian notion of Pantisocracy, but soon fell out. In 1795 Coleridge married Sara Fricker, with whom he had an unhappy relationship.

He first met William Wordsworth in 1795, but it was not until 1797 that his friendship with him and his sister Dorothy became intense, providing the stimulus for the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, 1798. This revolutionary volume included the first version of the Ancient Mariner and three other poems by Coleridge. In 1797 he had also written Kubla Khan and the first part of Christabel, which were not published at that time. This year is usually regarded as the summit of his poetic achievement. In 1801 he wrote the second part of Christabel. When he came to publish both parts, together with Kubla Khan in 1816, he attached an introduction to each. In that to Christabel he was at pains to point out the actual date of composition, for fear that he might be seen to be copying another writer, whom he did not name, but who was almost certainly Walter Scott. In the introduction to Kubla Khan, he related how the writing down of an opium-engendered poem was interrupted by a "person on business from Porlock", with the result that the remainder was forgotten.

Thereafter his work and friendships were much affected by his opium addiction. He had a post in Malta 1804-6, and in 1809-10 edited and largely wrote a periodical called The Friend; but a rift with Wordsworth and his family began soon after, and although they were superficially reconciled in 1812, the element of friendship had been lost. He gave lectures, which were afterwards published, and produced other writings, including Biographia Literaria. In 1813 his opium addiction resulted in a health crisis, but in 1816 he found a stable home in the house of a young Highgate surgeon, James Gillman. He died there of heart failure in in 1834.

Major works

Poetry
Poems included in Lyrical Ballads, including The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere (1798)
Christabel: Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep (1816)
Sybilline Leaves (collected poems) (1817, expanded 1828, 1834)

Prose
Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions (1817)
Shakespearean Criticism (collected lectures)
Specimens of the Table Talk of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1835)

Drama
The Fall of Robespierre. An Historic Drama (with Robert Southey)(1794)
Remorse, A Tragedy, in Five Acts (1813)

Periodicals
The Watchman: A Periodical Publication (1796)
The Friend: A Literary, Moral, and Political Weekly Paper (1810)(later collected)

Translation
Wallenstein by Friedrich Schiller

Reputation

After Coleridge's death, Wordsworth described him as the most wonderful man he had ever known - wonderful for the originality of his mind, and the power he possessed of throwing out in profusion grand central truths from which might be evolved the most comprehensive systems.

His Table Talk, transcribed by his nephew, Henry Nelson Coleridge, was published in 1836.