Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1772–1834)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge had one of the most fertile and versatile minds in English literature. Only a relatively small part of his poetic output is familiar to readers today; it contains such masterpieces as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, "Kubla Khan," and "Frost at Midnight." His work as a literary critic and theorist, however, is massive; and his judgments and ideas are still enormously influential today. The fact that many of Coleridge’s most ambitious literary projects were never completed should not obscure the awesome value and scope of what he actually accomplished.
Born in rural Devonshire, Coleridge was the son of a clergyman and the youngest of fourteen children. He was ten years old when his father died, and he was sent to live and attend school in London. Coleridge was an enthusiastic and extraordinarily brilliant student. When he went on to attend Cambridge University in 1791, he was already a proficient scholar. Yet Coleridge found little at Cambridge that really interested him. He fell into idleness, carelessness, and debt, and in 1793 he left Cambridge to join the army under the wonderful pseudonym of Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke. But Coleridge was miserable as a soldier, and with the help of his brothers he was sent back to Cambridge. He left again in 1794, however, without taking a degree.
As a young man Coleridge held radical views on politics and religion. During the summer of 1794 he met the poet Robert Southey, who had similar views, and the two friends set about planning a small Utopian community in America to which Coleridge gave the name "Pantisocracy" ("equal rule by all"). In London, Coleridge met a real-estate agent who persuaded him that their community ought to settle on the banks of the Susquehanna, in Pennsylvania. To further the cause of the community, Coleridge became engaged to Sara Fricker, the sister of Southey’s own fiancée. Their hopelessly unrealistic scheme never materialized. Coleridge felt obligated, nevertheless, to go through with his marriage to Sara Fricker, although he no longer wanted to.
Coleridge and his wife, Sara, lived at Nether Stowey, in Somerset. In 1795 he met the poet William Wordsworth, who soon moved with his sister, Dorothy, to Alfoxden House only a few miles away. Thus began the great collaboration that would result in the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, and the happiest and most productive time of Coleridge’s life. Coleridge’s specific role in Lyrical Ballads, as he later described it in his Biographia Literaria, was to address the supernatural. He explained that he had this idea in mind when he wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which was the opening poem of the collection. But in fact the collaboration between Coleridge and Wordsworth was more extensive than this division of labor suggests. Not only did they discuss their poems with each other, but one poet would actually contribute ideas, lines, and even entire stanzas to poems chiefly written by the other. Thus Wordsworth suggested the shooting of the albatross and contributed lines 13–16 and 222–227 of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Coleridge contributed the first stanza of "We Are Seven" and suggested numerous other details in Wordsworth’s poems. His most significant contribution came in the manner and structure of "Frost at Midnight," where the complex relation between meditation and natural description strongly influenced Wordsworth’s technique in "Tintern Abbey."
Coleridge went with Wordsworth and Dorothy to Germany in the winter of 1798–1799. There, at the University of Göttingen, he began his lifelong study of Kant and other German philosophers. Coleridge was to become very important in introducing the advances of German philosophy to English poets and thinkers. Upon their return to England, both the Wordsworths and the Coleridges moved north to the Lake District, Coleridge and Sara settling at Greta Hall, Keswick, in 1800. This year marks the beginning of an agonizing period in Coleridge’s life. He had become increasingly distant from his wife and had fallen in love with Sara Hutchinson, whose sister, Mary, Wordsworth was to marry in 1802. Sara Hutchinson did not return Coleridge’s affections, however, and he suffered bitterly from her rejection. It was also about this time that Coleridge began taking large amounts of opium, the standard medical remedy in that day for the painful attacks of rheumatism from which he was suffering. But the effects of the drug, Coleridge soon realized, were more harmful than the disease: he became emotionally and psychologically distraught and unable to sustain his creative work.
By 1806, when he returned to London from an unsuccessful visit to the Mediterranean to restore his health, Coleridge’s unhappiness and his addiction to opium had brought him to the verge of total collapse. A quarrel with Wordsworth in 1810 seemed to be the final blow. Yet the very fact that Coleridge was able to express his sense of physical and mental failure in such a powerful and accomplished poem as the "Dejection Ode" points up the extraordinary feat of his continuing literary efforts during these years. Those efforts may have been inconsistent and far inferior to what Coleridge was ideally capable of, but they are still remarkable.
In 1808 he began his career as a public lecturer in London. Coleridge was the most eloquent speaker and conversationalist of the Romantic Age. His lectures on Shakespeare and other writers have become classics of literary criticism. During the next few years he also wrote for newspapers and magazines, began a periodical called The Friend, and wrote a successful tragedy called Remorse.
In 1816 Coleridge moved to Highgate, a northern suburb of London, and placed himself in the care of Dr. James Gillman, a wise and kind physician who was able to control Coleridge’s use of opium. Coleridge’s recovery, though never complete and always dependent on the care of Dr. Gillman and his wife, was more successful than he had ever hoped. In 1817 he finished and published the Biographia Literaria, which he had begun and worked on intermittently since 1815. The Biographia contains some of the central formulations of Romantic literary theory. It also contains some of Coleridge’s best applied criticism of the poetry of previous periods and of his own time. It includes a searching discussion of Wordsworth’s poetic ideals as they were expressed in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Through the Biographia and his public lectures, Coleridge joins Sir Philip Sidney, John Dryden, and Samuel Johnson in the select circle of great "poet-critics" in English literature.
The last years of Coleridge’s life were relatively quiet and satisfying. He finally made up his quarrel with Wordsworth, and in 1828 they toured the Rhineland area of Germany together. In Highgate, Coleridge received a steady stream of admirers from both England and abroad. (One of his American visitors was Ralph Waldo Emerson.) They came to see the great man, and to hear his fascinating, eloquent, endlessly fluent conversation. When Coleridge died in 1834, the Romantic Age lost one of its greatest minds and personalities.
