Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772, in Ottery St Mary, a market town in Devon, the youngest of the ten children of the Reverend John Coleridge, the town's vicar and headmaster of its grammar school, and his second wife Ann Bowden ^[1]. The boy was precocious and bookish, reading the Arabian Nights before he was six and preferring solitary reading to games. His father, who doted on him, died suddenly in 1781, and the following year the nine-year-old was sent to London as a charity pupil at Christ's Hospital school ^[1].

At Christ's Hospital he spent nearly a decade, lonely at first but eventually distinguished as a classical scholar under the demanding master James Boyer. There he formed a lifelong friendship with a fellow pupil, the essayist Charles Lamb, who later described the young Coleridge holding schoolmates spellbound with talk of Greek philosophy ^[2]. Anyone asking who was Samuel Taylor Coleridge before fame should picture this period: a fatherless provincial boy absorbing books at speed and already displaying the torrential conversation for which he became famous.

In 1791 he entered Jesus College, Cambridge, where he won the Browne Gold Medal for a Greek ode but fell into debt and restlessness. In December 1793 he abruptly enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons under the invented name Silas Tomkyn Comberbache, an episode that ended within months when his brothers arranged his discharge ^[1]. He returned to Cambridge but left in 1794 without taking a degree.

The mid-1790s turned Coleridge from a drifting undergraduate into a public figure. In 1794 he met the poet Robert Southey at Oxford, and the two young radicals devised a scheme called Pantisocracy, a plan to found an egalitarian commune on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania ^[3]. The project collapsed for lack of money, but it bound Coleridge to the Fricker family of Bristol: he married Sara Fricker in October 1795, while Southey married her sister Edith. The marriage, entered partly out of obligation to the failed scheme, proved unhappy ^[1].

Coleridge threw himself into lecturing and journalism in Bristol, publishing his first collection, Poems on Various Subjects, in 1796 and briefly running a radical periodical, The Watchman, which folded after ten issues ^[3]. He also preached in Unitarian chapels and considered the ministry as a career, a path he abandoned in 1798 when the Wedgwood family, heirs to the pottery fortune, granted him an annuity of 150 pounds a year so that he could devote himself to writing ^[1].

The decisive event of these years was his friendship with William Wordsworth, whom he had met in 1795 and grew close to in 1797, when Coleridge settled at Nether Stowey in Somerset and the Wordsworths moved to nearby Alfoxden. The daily walks and conversations of that annus mirabilis produced a joint volume, Lyrical Ballads, published anonymously in 1798, which opened with Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and is conventionally treated as the founding document of English Romanticism ^[4].

Any account of Samuel Taylor Coleridge achievements begins with the poems of 1797 and 1798. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a ballad of crime, penance and the shooting of an albatross, gave English an enduring metaphor for a burden of guilt. Kubla Khan, composed in 1797 but withheld until 1816, presented itself as a fragment recalled from an opium dream, interrupted, Coleridge claimed, by a visitor from Porlock; scholars still debate the preface, but the poem's dream architecture of Xanadu became one of the most quoted passages in English verse ^[4]. Christabel, a Gothic narrative left unfinished, pioneered a flexible accentual meter that influenced Walter Scott and Byron ^[2]. Alongside these stand the quieter conversation poems, among them Frost at Midnight and This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, which trace a mind thinking in blank verse and anticipate much later meditative poetry ^[4].

His prose proved as consequential as his verse. Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, mixed autobiography, philosophy and practical criticism. It contained his famous distinction between imagination and fancy, his account of the division of labor behind Lyrical Ballads, and the phrase describing poetic faith as a willing suspension of disbelief ^[5]. His lectures on Shakespeare, delivered in London between 1808 and 1819, helped establish the plays as objects of serious psychological criticism; his reading of Hamlet as a man of thought paralyzed for action shaped interpretation for a century ^[2].

Coleridge also worked as a transmitter of ideas. He studied in Germany in 1798 and 1799, learned the language, and brought the philosophy of Kant and Schelling into English intellectual life, though later scholarship documented his unacknowledged borrowings from German sources ^[5]. Late works such as Aids to Reflection (1825) and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830) influenced Victorian religious thought and the Broad Church movement, and John Stuart Mill named him, with Bentham, one of the two great seminal minds of the age ^[3].

Coleridge's private life was marked by affection freely given and stability rarely achieved. His marriage to Sara Fricker produced four children: Hartley, Berkeley (who died in infancy while Coleridge was in Germany), Derwent and Sara ^[1]. The couple were temperamentally mismatched, and after years of strain Coleridge separated from his wife around 1806, leaving the children largely in the care of Robert Southey's household at Keswick. His daughter Sara Coleridge became a writer and the devoted editor of his works; Hartley became a poet whose troubled life echoed his father's ^[3].

In 1799 Coleridge met Sara Hutchinson, sister of Wordsworth's future wife Mary, and conceived an intense, unfulfilled attachment that ran through years of his notebooks and inspired the verse letter that became Dejection: An Ode (1802), his great lament for lost creative joy ^[4].

The central affliction of his adult life was opium. He began taking laudanum, then a standard remedy, for rheumatic pain and other ailments in the 1790s, and by the early 1800s he was dependent ^[1]. The addiction wrecked his health, his finances and, in 1810, his friendship with Wordsworth, after an indiscreetly relayed remark caused a breach that was patched in 1812 but never fully healed ^[3]. A voyage to Malta from 1804 to 1806, taken partly for his health, ended with him returning more dependent than before.

The decade after 1806 was the low point. Coleridge lectured brilliantly but erratically, produced a one-man periodical, The Friend (1809 to 1810), and saw his tragedy Remorse succeed at Drury Lane in 1813, yet he was frequently incapacitated and at times close to despair ^[3]. In April 1816, seeking medical supervision for his addiction, he moved into the Highgate home of the surgeon James Gillman and his wife Anne. What was planned as a month's stay lasted the remaining eighteen years of his life ^[1].

Under the Gillmans' care his opium use was controlled, though never eliminated, and his productivity revived. The year 1816 brought the publication of Christabel and Kubla Khan at Byron's urging; 1817 brought Biographia Literaria and the collected poems titled Sibylline Leaves ^[5]. At Highgate he became a celebrated talker, and a stream of visitors, including Thomas Carlyle and the young Ralph Waldo Emerson, climbed the hill to hear the man Lamb called an archangel a little damaged. Records of this table talk were published after his death ^[2].

His last years brought a measure of public honor: a Royal Society of Literature pension in 1824 and a warm reunion tour of the Rhineland with Wordsworth in 1828. Samuel Taylor Coleridge died at Highgate on July 25, 1834, aged 61, of heart failure linked to his long addiction, and was buried in Highgate; his remains were moved to St Michael's Church, Highgate, in 1961 ^[1].

Few writers have mattered so much on the strength of so few finished poems. The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan and Christabel entered the permanent canon, and phrases Coleridge coined or fixed, from an albatross around the neck to the person from Porlock and the willing suspension of disbelief, live on in everyday English ^[4]. Later poets from Poe to the French Symbolists drew on his dream poetics, and every Samuel Taylor Coleridge biography since James Dykes Campbell's in 1894 has had to reckon with the gap between his vast projects and his fragmentary output. Richard Holmes's two-volume life, Early Visions (1989) and Darker Reflections (1998), renewed popular interest and won major prizes ^[6].

As a critic and thinker his influence has arguably been wider still. Biographia Literaria became a foundational text for academic literary study, and his theory of the imagination fed directly into twentieth-century criticism through I. A. Richards, who devoted a book to Coleridge on Imagination in 1934 ^[5]. In America his Aids to Reflection shaped the Transcendentalists, while in Britain his religious and political writings influenced figures as different as F. D. Maurice and John Henry Newman ^[3].

The full scale of his mind only became visible after his death. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published by Princeton University Press in sixteen titles between 1969 and 2002, together with the five volumes of his notebooks edited by Kathleen Coburn, revealed decades of observation, philosophy, theology and self-scrutiny ^[6]. Among the more surprising Samuel Taylor Coleridge facts is that this supposedly indolent dreamer left one of the largest and most searching bodies of private writing of any English author.