Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), was a poet, philosopher, and critic associated with the English Romantic movement. His poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is one of the greatest in English literature, and all his major poems are among the most original. They embody ideals of Romanticism, a literary movement that stressed imagination, passion, and the supernatural. His literary criticism has influenced most later critics.
Loading the player...Epigram by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
His life.
Coleridge was born on Oct. 21, 1772, in Devonshire. He studied at Cambridge University, where he met Robert Southey in 1794. The two young poets favored the principles of the French Revolution and planned to found a pantisocracy (a utopian society) in the United States. They also collaborated in 1794 on a drama opposing monarchy.
In 1795, Coleridge met William Wordsworth, and they became intimate friends. They published Lyrical Ballads (1798), which contains the first version of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” In 1798, Coleridge got an annuity (regular income) from Josiah and Thomas Wedgwood. It enabled him to abandon a plan to become a clergyman. Then he and Wordsworth traveled to Germany. Coleridge absorbed ideas from German philosophers, especially Immanuel Kant, who influenced his own literary theories. On his return to England, he translated two plays by German author Friedrich Schiller.
About 1800, Coleridge’s health began to fail. He had begun taking opium to relieve the pain of rheumatism. His marriage, never happy, caused him increasing distress after he fell in love with Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, Sara Hutchinson. He spent his last years under a doctor’s care, largely to control his opium addiction. He died on July 23, 1834, and is buried in the cellar of St. Michael’s Church in London.
His writing.
Coleridge’s other famous poems are “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel.” Coleridge said, possibly incorrectly, that “Kubla Khan” was inspired by an opium dream. “Christabel” is an unfinished narrative of medieval times. Both poems deal with the visionary and the supernatural, combining vivid, dreamlike images with rich literary references and intricate symbolism.
Coleridge blended keen psychological insights with precise pictures of natural scenes in his meditative lyrics, notably “Dejection: An Ode” (1802). He called many of these works “conversation poems” and addressed them to friends, including Wordsworth and essayist Charles Lamb.
Coleridge was most influential in his literary criticism. He said that a good poem has an organic (natural), not a mechanical (artificial), unity. He used this idea, among other ways, to greatly elevate the reputation of English playwright William Shakespeare. Coleridge emphasized that poetry is creative or expressive, rather than imitative, and insisted that imagination, not reason, is the foundation of the fine arts. Coleridge’s best-known critical work, Biographia Literaria (1817), contains valuable analyses of Wordsworth’s poetry. Much of Coleridge’s shrewdest criticism appears in notebooks, lectures, journalistic essays, and marginal comments on other writers. A devout man, Coleridge often discussed religion, morality, and theology.
