Samuel Taylor Coleridge (redirected from Samuel T. Coleridge)

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