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Samuel Taylor Coleridge (October 21, 1772 – July 25, 1834) was an English poet,
critic, and philosopher who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of
the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the Lake Poets.
He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and
Kubla Khan, as well as his major prose work Biographia Literaria.
 Early Life
and Education
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772 in the rural town of Ottery St
Mary, Devonshire. He was the youngest of ten children, and his father, the Reverend
John Coleridge, was a well respected vicar.
Coleridge suffered from constant ridicule by his older brother Frank, partially
due to jealousy, as Samuel was often praised and favoured by his parents.
To escape this abuse, he frequently sought refuge at a local library, which led
him to discover his passion for poetry.
He later wrote in his Biographia Literaria:
“ At six years old I remember to have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip
Quarll - and then I found the Arabian Nights' Entertainments - one tale of which
(the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so deep an
impression on me (I had read it in the evening while my mother was mending
stockings) that I was haunted by spectres whenever I was in the dark - and I
distinctly remember the anxious and fearful eagerness with which I used to watch
the window in which the books lay - and whenever the sun lay upon them, I would
seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask, and read. ”
After the death of his father in 1781, contrary to his desires, he was sent to
Christ's Hospital. The school was originally founded in the 16th century in
Greyfriars, London and Hertford.. The school was notorious for its unwelcoming
atmosphere and strict regimen under The Rev. James Bowyer, many years Head Master
of the grammar school, which fostered thoughts of guilt and depression in young
Samuel's maturing mind.
However, Coleridge seems to have appreciated his teacher, as he wrote in detailed
recollections of his schooldays in Biographia Literaria:
“ I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time,
a very severe master...At the same time that we were studying the Greek Tragic
Poets, he made us read Shakspeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons
too, which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure.
I learnt from him, that Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly, that of
the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more
difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more
fugitive causes....
In our own English compositions (at least for the last three years of our school
education) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound
sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and
dignity in plainer words... In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming Harp?
Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? your Nurse's daughter, you
mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose! ... Be this as it may,
there was one custom of our master's, which I cannot pass over in silence, because
I think it ... worthy of imitation. He would often permit our theme exercises, ...
to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be looked over. Then placing the
whole number abreast on his desk, he would ask the writer, why this or that
sentence might not have found as appropriate a place under this or that other
thesis: and if no satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same
kind were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, the exercise was
torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced, in addition to the tasks
of the day.
”
Throughout life, Coleridge idealized his father as pious and innocent, but his
relationship with his mother was more problematic. His childhood was characterized
by attention-seeking, which has been linked to his dependent personality as an
adult. He was rarely allowed to return home during the school term, and this
distance from his family at such a turbulent time proved emotionally damaging. He
later wrote of his loneliness at school in the poem Frost at Midnight: "With
unclosed lids, already had I dreamt/Of my sweet birthplace"
From 1791 until 1794 Coleridge attended Jesus College, Cambridge.
In 1792 he won the Browne Gold Medal for an Ode that he wrote on the slave
trade.
In November, 1793, he left the college and enlisted in the Royal Dragoons,
perhaps because of debt or because the girl that he loved, Mary Evans, had rejected
him. His brothers arranged for his discharge a few months later (ironically because
of supposed insanity) and he was readmitted to Jesus College, though he would never
receive a degree from Cambridge.
Pantisocracy
and marriage
At the university he was introduced to political and theological ideas then
considered radical, including those of the poet Robert Southey. Coleridge joined
Southey in a plan, soon abandoned, to found a utopian commune-like society, called
pantisocracy, in the wilderness of Pennsylvania.
In 1795 the two friends married sisters Sarah and Edith Fricker, but Coleridge's
marriage proved unhappy. He grew to detest his wife, whom he only married because
of social constraints, and eventually divorced her. During and after his failed
marriage, he came to love a woman named Sara Hutchinson, who did not share this
passion and consequentially caused him much distress. Sara departed for Portugal,
but Coleridge remained in Britain.
In 1796 he published Poems on Various Subjects.
In 1795 Coleridge met poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. They became
immediate friends.
Around 1796, Coleridge started taking opium as a pain-reliever. His suffering,
caused by many ailments, including toothache and facial neuralgia, is mentioned in
his own notebook as well as that of Dorothy Wordsworth.
There was no stigma associated with taking opium at the time, but also little
understanding of the dangers of addiction.
The years 1797 and 1798, during which he lived in Nether Stowey, Somerset, and
Wordsworth, having visited him and being enchanted by the surroundings, rented
Alfoxton Park, a little over three miles (5 km) away, were among the most fruitful
of Coleridge's life. Besides the Rime of The Ancient Mariner, he composed the
symbolic poem Kubla Khan, written—Coleridge himself claimed—as a result of an opium
dream, in "a kind of a reverie"; and the first part of the narrative poem
Christabel. During this period he also produced his much-praised "conversation"
poems This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Frost at Midnight, and The Nightingale.
Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
In 1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical
Ballads, which proved to be the starting point for the English romantic movement.
Though the productive Wordsworth contributed more poems to the volume, Coleridge's
first version of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was the longest poem and drew more
immediate attention than anything else.
In the spring of 1798, Coleridge temporarily took over for Rev. Joshua Toulmin at
Taunton's Mary Street Unitarian Chapel while Rev. Toulmin grieved over the drowning
death of his daughter Jane. Poetically commenting on the strength of Rev. Toulmin,
Coleridge wrote in a 1798 letter to John Prior Estlin,
I walked into Taunton (eleven miles) and back again, and performed the divine
services for Dr. Toulmin. I suppose you must have heard that his daughter, (Jane,
on April 15, 1798) in a melancholy derangement, suffered herself to be swallowed up
by the tide on the sea-coast between Sidmouth and Bere (sic. Beer). These events
cut cruelly into the hearts of old men: but the good Dr. Toulmin bears it like the
true practical Christian, - there is indeed a tear in his eye, but that eye is
lifted up to the Heavenly Father.
In the autumn of 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth left for a stay in Germany;
Coleridge soon went his own way and spent much of his time in university towns.
During this period he became interested in German philosophy, especially the
transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, and in the literary criticism of the 18th
century dramatist Gotthold Lessing. Coleridge studied German and, after his return
to England, translated the dramatic trilogy Wallenstein by the German Classical
poet Friedrich Schiller into English.
Coleridge's greatest intellectual debts were first to William Godwin's Political
Justice, especially during his Pantisocratic period, and to David Hartley's
Observations on Man, which is the source of the psychology which we find in "Frost
at Midnight." Hartley argued that we become aware of sensory events as impressions,
and that "ideas" are derived by noticing similarities and differences between
impressions and then by naming them. Connections resulting from the coincidence of
impressions create linkages, so that the occurrence of one impression triggers
those links and calls up the memory of those ideas with which it is associated (See
Dorothy Emmet, "Coleridge and Philosophy").
Coleridge was critical of the literary taste of his contemporaries, and a literary
conservative insofar as he was afraid that the lack of taste in the ever growing
masses of literate people would mean a continued desecration of literature
itself.
In 1800 he returned to England and shortly thereafter settled with his family and
friends at Keswick in the Lake District of Cumberland to be near Grasmere, where
Wordsworth had moved. Soon, however, he was beset by marital problems, illnesses,
increased opium dependency, tensions with Wordsworth, and a lack of confidence in
his poetic powers, all of which fueled the composition of Dejection: An Ode and an
intensification of his philosophical studies.
In 1804 he travelled to Sicily and Malta, working for a time as Acting Public
Secretary of Malta under the Commissioner, Alexander Ball. He gave this up and
returned to England in 1806. Dorothy Wordsworth was shocked at his condition upon
his return. From 1807 to 1808, Coleridge returned to Malta and then travelled in
Sicily and Italy, in the hope that leaving Britain's damp climate would improve his
health and thus enable him to reduce his consumption of opium. Thomas de Quincey
alleges in his Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets that it was during
this period that Coleridge became a full-blown opium addict, using the drug as a
substitute for the lost vigour and creativity of his youth. It has been suggested,
however, that this reflects de Quincey's own experiences more than Coleridge's.
His opium addiction (he was using as much as two quarts of laudanum a week) now
began to take over his life: he separated from his wife in 1808, quarrelled with
Wordsworth in 1810, lost part of his annuity in 1811, put himself under the care of
Dr. Daniel in 1814.
Between 1810 and 1820 this "giant among dwarfs", as he was often considered by his
contemporaries, gave a series of lectures in London and Bristol – those on
Shakespeare renewed interest in the playwright as a model for contemporary
writers.
In 1817 Coleridge, with his addiction worsening, his spirits depressed, and his
family alienated, took residence in the home of the physician James Gillman, at 3
The Grove, Highgate, London, England.
In Gillman's home he finished his major prose work, the Biographia Literaria
(1815), a volume composed of 23 chapters of autobiographical notes and
dissertations on various subjects, including some incisive literary theory and
criticism. He composed much poetry here and had many inspirations — a few of them
from opium overdose. Perhaps because he conceived such grand projects, he had
difficulty carrying them through to completion, and he berated himself for his
"indolence." It is unclear whether his growing use of opium was a symptom or a
cause of his growing depression.
He published other writings while he was living at the Gillman home, notably
Sibylline Leaves (1820), Aids to Reflection (1823), and Church and State (1826). He
died of a lung disorder including some heart failure from the opium that he was
taking in Highgate on July 25, 1834.
Poetry
Coleridge is probably best known for his long poems, The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner and Christabel. Even those who have never read the Rime have come under its
influence: its words have given the English language the metaphor of an albatross
around one's neck, the quotation of "water, water everywhere, ne any drop to drink
(almost always rendered as "but not a drop to drink")", and the phrase "a sadder
and a wiser man (again, usually rendered as "sadder but wiser man")". Christabel is
known for its musical rhythm, language, and its Gothic tale.
Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream, A Fragment, although shorter, is also widely
known. It has strange, dreamy imagery and can be read on many levels. Both Kubla
Khan and Christabel have an additional "romantic" aura because they were never
finished. Stopford Brooke characterised both poems as having no rival due to their
"exquisite metrical movement" and "imaginative phrasing." It is one of history's
tragedies that Coleridge was interrupted while writing Kubla Khan by a visitor and
could not recall any more of the poem afterwards. However, it is now acknowledged
that Coleridge had composed previous drafts of Kubla Khan, perhaps a reflection of
his desire to flag the 'power' of imagination.
Coleridge's shorter, meditative "conversation poems," however, proved to be the
most influential of his work. These include both quiet poems like This Lime-Tree
Bower My Prison and Frost at Midnight and also strongly emotional poems like
Dejection and The Pains of Sleep. Wordsworth immediately adopted the model of these
poems, and used it to compose several of his major poems. Via Wordsworth, the
conversation poem became a standard vehicle for English poetic expression, and
perhaps the most common approach among modern poets.
Coleridge's poetry so impressed the parents of British composer Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) that they named him after the poet.
Coleridge and
the influence of the Gothic
Gothic novels like Polidori’s The Vampire, Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Mrs
Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk
were the best-sellers of the end of the eighteenth century, and thrilled many young
women (who were often strictly forbidden to read them). Jane Austen satirised the
style mercilessly in Northanger Abbey.
Coleridge wrote reviews of Mrs Radcliffe’s books and of The Mad Monk among others.
He comments in his reviews:
“ Situations of torment, and images of naked horror, are easily conceived; and a
writer in whose works they abound, deserves our gratitude almost equally with him
who should drag us by way of sport through a military hospital, or force us to sit
at the dissecting-table of a natural philosopher. To trace the nice boundaries,
beyond which terror and sympathy are deserted by the pleasurable emotions, - to
reach those limits, yet never to pass them, hic labor, hic opus est. ”
and:
“ The horrible and the preternatural have usually seized on the popular taste, at
the rise and decline of literature. Most powerful stimulants, they can never be
required except by the torpor of an unawakened, or the languor of an exhausted,
appetite... We trust, however, that satiety will banish what good sense should have
prevented; and that, wearied with fiends, incomprehensible characters, with
shrieks, murders, and subterraneous dungeons, the public will learn, by the
multitude of the manufacturers, with how little expense of thought or imagination
this species of composition is manufactured. ”
However, Coleridge used mysterious and demonic elements in poems such as The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Christabel and Kubla Khan (published 1816 but known
in manuscript form before then) and certainly influenced other poets and writers of
the time. Poems like this both drew inspiration from and helped to inflame the
craze for Gothic romance.
Mary Shelley, who knew Coleridge well, mentions The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
twice directly in Frankenstein, and some of the descriptions in the novel echo it
indirectly. Although William Godwin, her father, disagreed with Coleridge on some
important issues, he respected his opinions and Coleridge often visited the
Godwins. Mary Shelley later recalled hiding behind the sofa and hearing his voice
chanting The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Family
connections
Coleridge was the father of Hartley Coleridge, Sara Coleridge, and Derwent
Coleridge and grandfather of Herbert Coleridge, Ernest Hartley Coleridge and
Christabel Coleridge. He was the uncle of the first Baron Coleridge. The poet Mary
Elizabeth Coleridge (1861–1907) was his great-great niece. His nephew Henry Nelson
Coleridge, who was an editor of his work, married Sara.
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Samuel Taylor
Coleridge - Manifesting Generator - Biography
