Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834, English poet and man of letters, b. Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire; one of the most brilliant, versatile, and influential figures in the English romantic movement.

Early Life

The son of a clergyman, Coleridge was a precocious, dreamy child. He attended Christ's Hospital school in London and was already formidably erudite upon entering Cambridge in 1791. His erratic university career was interrupted by his impulsive enlistment in the dragoons, from which his brothers managed to extricate him. In 1794 he met the poet Robert Southey, who shared his political and social idealism, and together they planned to establish a small utopian community, which they called a pantisocracy, on the banks of the Susquehanna River in the United States. The plan failed to materialize for practical reasons. In 1795 Coleridge married Sarah Fricker, the sister of Southey's fiancée, with whom he was never happy. They settled in Nether Stowey in 1797, and shortly thereafter William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved into a house nearby.

Works

Although Coleridge had been busy and productive, publishing both poetry and much topical prose, it was not until his friendship with Wordsworth that he wrote his best poems. In 1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth jointly published the volume Lyrical Ballads, whose poems and preface made it a seminal work and manifesto of the romantic movement in English literature.

Coleridge's main contribution to the volume was the haunting, dreamlike ballad "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." This long poem, as well as "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel," written during the same period, are Coleridge's best-known works. All three make use of exotic images and supernatural themes. "Dejection: An Ode," published in 1802, was the last of Coleridge's great poems. It shows the influence of (or affinity to) some poetic ideas of Wordsworth, notably the meditation upon self, nature, and the relationships among emotion, sense experience, and understanding. His Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit (ed. by his nephew H. N. Coleridge) was published posthumously in 1840.

Later Life

While an undergraduate Coleridge had begun to take laudanum (an opium derivative then legal and widely used) for his ailments, and he was addicted by about 1800. That year, after having traveled with Wordsworth in Germany, Coleridge moved with his family to Keswick in the Lake District. He continued his studies and writings on philosophy, religion, contemporary affairs, and literature. In 1808 he separated from his wife permanently, and from 1816 until his death he lived in London at the home of Dr. James Gilman, who brought his opium habit under control.

Assessment

Coleridge worked for many years on his Biographia Literaria (1817), containing accounts of his literary life and critical essays on philosophical and literary subjects. It presents Coleridge's theories of the creative imagination, but its debt to other writers, notably the German idealist philosophers, is often so heavy that the line between legitimate borrowing and plagiarism becomes blurred. This borrowing tendency, evident also in some of his poetry, together with Coleridge's notorious inability to finish projects—and his proposal of impractical ones—made him a problematic figure.

Coleridge's lifelong friend Charles Lamb called him a "damaged archangel." Indeed, 20th-century editorial scholarship has unearthed additional evidence of plagiarism; thus, Coleridge is still a controversial figure. However, the originality and beauty of his best poetry and his enormous influence on the intellectual and aesthetic life of his time is unquestioned. He was reputedly a brilliant conversationalist, and his lectures on Shakespeare remain among the most important statements in literary criticism.

Bibliography

See his collected letters, ed. by E. L. Griggs (6 vol., 1956–71); Notebooks: 1794–1808, ed. by K. Coburn (4 vol., 1957–61); collected works, ed. by K. Coburn (5 vol., 1969–72); biographies by E. K. Chambers (1938), L. Hanson (1938, repr. 1962), W. J. Bate (1968), and R. Holmes (2 vol., 1989, 1999); studies by J. D. Campbell (1894), C. Woodring (1961), M. Suther (1965), and N. Fruman (1972); J. L. Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (rev. ed. 1964); R. L. Brett, ed., Coleridge (1973).

Sara Coleridge

Coleridge's daughter, Sara Coleridge, 1802–52, has literary standing in her own right. Her translation of An Account of the Abipones (1822) shows a great facility in both Latin and English. Her best work is Phantasmion (1837), a fairy tale.

Bibliography

See her Memoir and Letters (1873, repr. 1974); biography by E. L. Griggs (1941, repr. 1973).

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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, detail of an oil painting by Washington Allston, 1814; in the National …

(credit: Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London)

(born Oct. 21, 1772, Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, Eng.—died July 25, 1834, Highgate, near London) English poet, critic, and philosopher. Coleridge studied at the University of Cambridge, where he became closely associated with Robert Southey. In his poetry he perfected a sensuous lyricism that was echoed by many later poets. Lyrical Ballads (1798; with William Wordsworth), containing the famous “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Frost at Midnight,” heralded the beginning of English Romanticism. Other poems in the “fantastical” style of the “Mariner” include the unfinished “Christabel” and the celebrated “Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan.” While in a bad marriage and addicted to opium, he produced “Dejection: An Ode” (1802), in which he laments the loss of his power to produce poetry. Later, partly restored by his revived Anglican faith, he wrote Biographia Literaria, 2 vol. (1817), the most significant work of general literary criticism of the Romantic period. Imaginative and complex, with a unique intellect, Coleridge led a restless life full of turmoil and unfulfilled possibilities.

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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 

Born Oct. 21, 1772, in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire; died July 25, 1834, in London. English poet, critic, and philosopher.

The son of a poor provincial clergyman, Coleridge studied for a time at Jesus College, Cambridge University. His early works show an interest in social questions. In 1789 he wrote his freedom-loving poem “Capture of the Bastille” (published in 1834), but his political outlook soon changed. He condemned revolutionary terror in The Fall of Robespierre (1794), a play he wrote with R. Southey. Repudiation of violence is also the theme of the tragedy Osario (1797), later revised and published as Remorse (1813). In 1798 he collaborated with W. Wordsworth in publishing Lyrical Ballads, the manifesto of English romanticism. Coleridge was attracted to the spirit and form of the folk ballad, which he imitated in his “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” published in Lyrical Ballads (translated into Russian by N. S. Gumilev in 1919 and by V. V. Levik in 1967). After traveling to Germany with Wordsworth in 1798 and 1799, Coleridge became an exponent of German literature and idealist philosophy in England, translating F. von Schiller’s Wallenstein. As a leading representative of the Lake Poets, Coleridge was a profound theoretician of English romanticism, whose principles he expounded in Biographia Literaria (1817). His lectures on Shakespeare, published in 1856, are outstanding examples of romantic criticism. Coleridge’s publicistic writings are imbued with political conservatism.

WORKS

Select Poetry and Prose. Edited by S. Potter. London, 1933.
Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. London, 1938.

REFERENCES

Elistratova, A. A. “Kol’ridzh.” Nasledie angliiskogo romantizma i sovremennost’. Moscow, 1960.
Istoriia angliiskoi literatury, Vol. 2, books 1–2. Moscow, 1953–55.
Logan, E. Concordance to the Poetry of S. T. Coleridge. St. Mary-of-the-Woods, Ind., 1940.
Read, H. Coleridge as Critic. London, 1949.
Fruman, N. Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel. New York [1971].
Wise, T. J. A Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of S. T. Coleridge. Folkestone-London, 1970.

A. N. NIKOLIUKIN