Poet and man of letters, born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, SE England, UK. He studied at Cambridge, imbibed revolutionary ideas, and left to enlist in the Dragoons. His plans to found a communist society in the USA with Robert Southey came to nothing, and he turned instead to teaching and journalism in Bristol. Marrying Sara Fricker (Southey's sister-in-law), he went with her to Nether Stowey, where they made close friends with William and Dorothy Wordsworth. From this connection a new English Romantic poetry emerged, in reaction against Neoclassic artificiality. The publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798), which opens with his magical Rime of the Ancient Mariner, achieved a revolution in literary taste and sensibility. After visiting Germany (17989), he developed an interest in German philosophy and was instrumental in introducing German thought to England. In 1800 he moved to the Lake District, but his career prospects were blighted by his moral collapse, partly due to the opium-based drug, laudanum. He rejected Wordsworth's animistic views of nature, and relations between them became strained. He began a weekly paper, The Friend (1809), and settled in London, writing and lecturing. In 1816 he published Christabel and the fragment, Kubla Khan, both written in his earlier period of inspiration. His small output of poetry proves his gift, but he is known also for his critical writing, and for his theological and politico-sociological works.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (October 21, 1772 – July 25, 1834) (pronounced [ˈkəʊlərɪdʒ]) 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.
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.
After the death of his father in 1781, contrary to his desires, he was sent to Christ's Hospital, a boarding school in London. Throughout life, Coleridge idealized his father as a pious innocent, but his relationship with his mother was more problematic. 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 at the University of 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 communist-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. Southey departed for Portugal, but Coleridge remained in Britain.
In 1795 Coleridge met poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy.
Around 1796, Coleridge started using opium as a pain reliever.
The years 1797 and 1798, during which Coleridge lived in Nether Stowey, Somerset, and Wordsworth, having visited him and being enchanted by the surroundings, rented Alfoxton Park, a little over three miles away, were among the most fruitful of Coleridge's life.
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. 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.
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. Coleridge studied German and, after his return to England, translated the dramatic trilogy Wallenstein by the German Classical poet Friedrich Schiller into English.
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.
From 1804 to 1806, Coleridge lived in Malta and 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.
Between 1808 and 1819 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 1816 Coleridge, with his addiction worsening, his spirits depressed, and his family alienated, took residence in the home of the physician James Gillman, in Highgate. The sections in which Coleridge expounded his definitions of the nature of poetry and the imagination are particularly important: he made a famous distinction between primary and secondary imagination on the one hand and fancy on the other.
Poetry
Coleridge is probably best known for his long narrative poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel.
Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream, A Fragment, although shorter, is also widely known and loved.
Coleridge's shorter, meditative "conversation poems," however, proved to be the most influential of his work. Wordsworth immediately adopted the model of these poems, and used it to compose several of his major poems.
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 Coleridge was a relation but not a descendant. His nephew Henry Nelson Coleridge, who was an editor of his work, married Sara.
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