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.
