Context
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devon in 1772. His father, a clergyman,
moved his family to London when Coleridge was young, and it was there that
Coleridge attended school (as he would later recall in poems such as
"Frost at Midnight"). He later attended Cambridge but left without completing
his studies. During the politically charged atmosphere of the late eighteenth
century--the French Revolution had sent shockwaves through Europe, and England
and France were at war--Coleridge made a name for himself both as a political
radical and as an important young poet; along with his friends Robert Southey
and William Wordsworth, he became one of the most important writers in
England. Collaborating with Wordsworth on the revolutionary Lyrical
Ballads of 1798, Coleridge helped to inaugurate the Romantic era in
England; as Wordsworth explained it in the 1802 preface to the third
edition of the work, the idea of poetry underlying Lyrical Ballads
turned the established conventions of poetry upside down: Privileging natural
speech over poetic ornament, simply stated themes over elaborate
symbolism, emotion over abstract thought, and the experience of natural beauty
over urban sophistication, the book paved the way for two generations of
poets, and stands as one of the milestones of European literature.
While Coleridge made important contributions to Lyrical Ballads, it was
much more Wordsworth's project than Coleridge's; thus, while it is possible to
understand Wordsworth's poetic output in light of his preface to the 1802
edition of the volume, the preface's ideas should not be used to analyze
Coleridge's work. Insofar as Wordsworth was the poet of nature, the purity of
childhood, and memory, Coleridge became the poet of imagination, exploring the
relationships between nature and the mind as it exists as a separate entity.
Poems such as "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan" demonstrate
Coleridge's talent for concocting bizarre, unsettling stories full of fantastic
imagery and magic; in poems such as "Frost at Midnight" and "Dejection: An Ode,"
he muses explicitly on the nature of the mind as it interacts with the
creative source of nature.
Coleridge married in 1795 and spent much of the next decade living near and
traveling with Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. In 1799, Coleridge met Sara
Hutchinson, with whom he fell deeply in love, forming an attachment that was to
last many years. Coleridge became an opium addict (it is thought that "Kubla
Khan" originated from an opium dream) and, in 1816, moved in with the surgeon
James Gillman in order to preserve his health. During the years he lived with
Gillman, Coleridge composed many of his important non-fiction works, including
the highly regarded Biographia Literaria. However, although he continued
to write until his death in 1834, Romanticism was always a movement about youth,
and today Coleridge is remembered primarily for the poems he wrote while still
in his twenties.
