Personal
Born October 21, 1772, in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, England; died of complications from opium addiction July 25, 1834; son of John (a clergyman, schoolmaster, and writer) and Ann (Bowdon) Coleridge; married Sarah Fricker, October 4, 1795 (separated, 1806); children: Hartley, Berkeley, Derwent, Sara. Education: Attended Jesus College, Cambridge, 1791-94. Religion: Unitarian.
Career
English poet, journalist, literary critic, and philosopher. Unofficial private secretary for British High Commissioner Alexander Ball, Malta, beginning 1804, acting public secretary in Malta, beginning 1805; teacher of class for men aspiring to professional careers, beginning 1822. Political correspondent for Morning Star, and reporter for Courier, both London, England; lecturer on politics, religion, and philosophy. Military service: English Army, enlisted (under assumed name), 1793-94.
Awards, Honors
Elected fellow, Royal Society of Literature.
Writings
(With Robert Southey) The Fall of Robespierre: An Historic Drama, W. H. Lunn and J. & J. Merrill (Cambridge, England), 1794.
A Moral and Political Lecture, Delivered at Bristol, George Routh (Bristol, England), 1795.
Conciones ad Populum; or, Addresses to the People, [Bristol, England], 1795.1
The Plot Discovered; or, An Address to the People, against Ministerial Treason, [Bristol, England], 1795.
An Answer to "A Letter to Edward Long Fox, M.D.," [Bristol, England], 1795.
(With Robert Southey and Charles Lamb) Poems on Various Subjects, C. G. & J. Robinsons/J. Cottle (London, England), 1796, revised and enlarged as Poems (includes poems by Charles Boyd), 1797, 3rd abridged edition, T. N. Longman & O. Rees (London, England), 1803.
Fears in Solitude, Written in 1798 during the Alarm of an Invasion: To Which Are Added, "France, an Ode" and "Frost at Midnight," J. Johnson, 1798.
(With William Wordsworth) Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (includes "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"), T. N. Longman (London, England), 1798, 2nd edition, enlarged in two volumes, 1800, James Humphreys (Philadelphia, PA), 1802.
(Translator) Frederick Schiller, The Death of Wallenstein: A Tragedy in Five Acts, Longman and O. Rees (London, England), 1800.
(Translator) Frederick Schiller, The Piccolomini; or, The First Part of Wallenstein, A Drama in Five Acts, Longman and O. Rees (London, England), 1800, David Longworth (New York, NY), 1805.
The Friend; A Series of Essays (journalism), Gale & Curtis (London, England), 1812, enlarged in three volumes, Rest Fenner (London, England), 1818, revised in one volume, Chauncey Goodrich (Burlington, VT), 1831.
(With Robert Southey) Omniana; or, Horae Otiosiores, two volumes, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown (London, England), 1812.
Remorse: A Tragedy in Five Acts, D. Longworth (New York, NY), 1813.
Christabel: Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep, Wells & Lilly (Boston, MA), 1816.
The Statesman's Manual; or The Bible, the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight: A Lay Sermon, Gale & Fenner (London, England), 1816, Chauncey Goodrich (Burlington, VT), 1832.
A Lay Sermon, Addressed to the Higher and Middle Classes, on the Existing Distresses and Discontents, Gale & Fenner (London, England), 1817, Chauncey Goodrich (Burlington, VT), 1832.
Sibylline Leaves: A Collection of Poems, Rest Fenner (London, England), 1817, portions published as Selections from the Sybilline Leaves of S. T. Coleridge, True & Greene (Boston, MA), 1827.
Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, two volumes, Kirk & Mercein, 1817.
Zapolya: A Christmas Tale, Rest Fenner (London, England), 1817.
Remarks on the Objections Which Have Been Urged against the Principle of Sir Robert Peel's Bill, W. Clowes, 1818.
The Grounds of Sir Robert Peel's Bill Vindicated, W. Clowes, 1818.
Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character on the Several Grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion: Illustrated by Select Passages from Our Elder Divines, Especially Archbishop Leighton, Taylor & Hessey (London, England), 1825, Chauncey Goodrich (Burlington, VT), 1829.
The Poetical Works of S. T. Coleridge, three volumes, Pickering (London, England), 1828.
(With Robert Southey) The Devil's Walk; A Poem: By Professor Parson: Edited with a Biographical Memoir and Notes by H. W. Montagu, Marsh & Miller (London, England), 1830.
On the Constitution of Church and State, Hurst, Chance (London, England), 1830.
Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, two volumes, edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge, Harper & Brothers (New York, NY), 1835.
The Literary Remains in Prose and Verse of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, four volumes, edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge, Pickering (London, England), 1836n— 39.
Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge, Pickering (London, England), 1840, Munroe (Boston, MA), 1841.
Hints toward the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life, edited by Seth B. Watson, Lea & Blanchard (Philadelphia, PA), 1848.
Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare and Some of the Old Poets and Dramatists with Other Literary Remains, edited by Sara Coleridge, Pickering (London, England), 1849, Harper (New York, NY),1853.
Essays on His Own Times; Forming a Second Series of "The Friend" (journalism), three volumes, edited by Sara Coleridge, Pickering (London, England), 1850.
Seven Lectures upon Shakespeare and Milton, by the Late S. T. Coleridge (corrupt text), edited by J. Payne Collier, Chapman & Hall (London, England), 1856.
CORRESPONDENCE
The Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, two volumes, edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, Houghton, Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1895.
Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, two volumes, edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, Constable (London, England), 1932, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1933.
Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, six volumes, edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, Clarendon Press (Oxford, England), 1956n— 73.
Selected Letters, edited by H. J. Jackson, Clarendon Press (Oxford, England), 1987.
COLLECTIONS
The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, seven volumes, edited by William Greenough Thayer Shedd, Harper & Brothers (New York, NY), 1853.
Biographia Literaria, two volumes, edited by J. Shawcross, Clarendon Press (Oxford, England), 1907.
The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, two volumes, edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, Clarendon Press (Oxford, England), 1912.
The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Kathleen Coburn, Pilot Press (London, England), 1949.
The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Kathleen Coburn and Anthony John Harding, five volumes, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1957n—2002.
The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kathleen Coburn and Bart Winer, general editors, sixteen volumes, Princeton University Press, 1969n—.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by H. J. Jackson, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1985.
Coleridge's Writings, John Beer and John Morrow, general editors, four volumes to date, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1991n—.
OTHER
Editor and contributor of a collection of sonnets by various authors, 1796. Contributor to Encyclopedia Metropolitana, Curtis & Fenner, 1818; contributor to periodicals, including Critical Review, Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, Friend, Watchman, and Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature.
Major manuscript collections housed at the British Library, London, England; the Victoria University Library, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; and the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.
Sidelights
Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a brief fluorescence as a poet, creating between 1797 and 1798 the three major verse works that would establish his reputation: "Kubla Kahn," "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and "Christabel." Together with William Wordsworth, Coleridge is credited with giving rise to the Romantic movement in literature; the two men's work together set a new style by using common language rather than vaulted diction to celebrate nature. The three poems of Coleridge's major period were composed while the poet was living in a simple cottage in West Somerset, England, with Wordsworth housed nearby. Many of the lines of these poems were composed as the poet hiked with friends along lanes and over the fields of the then rural stretch of England. Two hundred years after the fact, Coleridge's contribution to literature was honored by the opening of a hiking trail, the Coleridge Way, in that very section of Somerset.
Though Coleridge's poetry was poorly received in his own day, readers and critics since then have taken inspiration from these flights of fantasy. A. C. Goodson, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, commented that the writer "is the premier poet-critic of modern English tradition, distinguished for the scope and influence of his thinking about literature as much as for his innovative verse."
Such innovative verse ended by the time Coleridge was thirty; the rest of his life was dedicated to criticism and philosophy, and his life was in many ways increasingly controlled by the opium he became addicted to as a pain reliever. Thus, Coleridge, as Goodson went on to note, has always been a "controversial" figure in literature. "A notorious opium addict, prevaricator, and plagiarist, he was appreciated by his contemporaries more for his talk than for his prose style, more for his vivid imagination than for the quality of his response to society in transition."
The Clergyman's Son
Born in Devonshire, England, in 1772, in the small town of Ottery St. Mary, Coleridge was the tenth and last child of a local vicar and schoolmaster. In later life, the poet would emphasize his lowly beginnings; he was not part of the gentility or aristocracy as other writers often were. As Goodson noted, "Feelings of anomie, unworthiness, and incapacity persisted throughout a life of often compulsive dependency on others."
If Coleridges's childhood circ*mstances were poor materially, they were not so in terms of education. He grew up surrounded by books, and was particularly moved by his father's explanations of the workings of the planetary systems. When Coleridge was nine years of age, his father died, and he was sent to London's Christ's Hospital grammar school, where he studied the classics and English composition. Tutored by the Reverend James Bowyer, Coleridge gained a solid grounding in composition, with a stress on clear presentation and diction and an avoidance of elaborate literary embroidery. This foundation remained with the writer his entire life and prompted him, along with Wordsworth, to promote a poetry with, as he explained in Biographia Literaria, "natural thoughts with natural diction."
The young Coleridge also gained his love of poetry at Christ's Hospital grammar school. Even as a schoolboy, he was writing sonnets, such as "To the River Otter," a verse that "has been admired for its natural detail and pensiveness," according to Goodson. Additionally, he made lasting friendships, as with fellow student Charles Lamb.
Coleridge entered Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1791 with the intention of entering the Anglican clergy. His views quickly changed, however, as he supported a Unitarian fellow at the college and began developing liberal views about England's slave trade and the government of William Pitt. He also continued to write poetry, although critics have noted that his college verse is little advanced from his juvenilia. In fact, at Cambridge, Coleridge was known more as a conversationalist and sometime-writer of poems than he was a serious student.
Gambling debts and a failed love affair caused Coleridge to leave the university in 1793 and join the army under an assumed name. This interlude lasted only six months, until his brothers were able to pay off his gambling debts and Coleridge returned to his studies in 1794. That summer, while on a walking tour, he met future English poet laureate Robert Southey, with whom he planned to establish a utopian community the two men dubbed a "pantisocracy" in Pennsylvania. A communal effort, this utopian commune would be composed of participants who would share the work and rewards of their life. Their community would enjoy freedom of religions and political thought. Together the two wrote The Fall of Robespierre, a drama about the French revolution. Though nothing more came of their utopian plans, the sense of a community of like-minded artists-philosophers was always central to Coleridge's thinking and dreams.
Meanwhile, Coleridge left Cambridge in late 1794 without a degree, set out on a tour of Wales, and returned to England to discover that his friend Southey was engaged to be married. At his friend's urging, Coleridge wed the fiancee's sister, Sara Fricker; the match, however, turned out badly. While his unhappy marriage remained a source of sadness throughout his life, Coleridge set about earning a living. Through connections of Southey's in Bristol, he began lecturing and also accepted an advance from a local publisher who brought out the collaborative volume Poems on Various Subjects in 1796. Containing verses by Coleridge, the book including an early version of the poet's breakthrough poem, "The Eolian Harp." This verse was "the real inauguration of his mature voice," according to Goodson, and presents Coleridge's belief in God-in-nature, a pantheistic sentiment, within a lyrical and descriptive symbolic poem. Coleridge's old friend, Lamb, and Southey also contributed work to this early collection.
The Wordsworth Connection
A turning point in Coleridge's career was his friendship with William Wordsworth, which would last from 1796 to 1810. At this point Coleridge edited a liberal periodical, the Watchman, which he saw through ten issues. Here he published some of his own work, including parts of what would be his 1796 work, Religious Musings, as well as the work of other friends. When the magazine failed, he settled in the small village of Nether Stowey, near Wordsworth and his sister. Coleridge was about to enter the most prolific period of his life; from July 1797 to July 1798, he wrote the major poems of his entire career. Such fecundity was in part due to a regular income bestowed upon him by manufacturers Thomas and Joshua Wedgwood, who respected Coleridge's work. His string of stunning poems begins with "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," in which he uses a conversational style in blank verse to tell of how his wife scalded his foot with hot milk and he is unable to join is friends in a ramble. Instead he is confined to a garden, but soon discovers that nature provides solace from his enforced isolation. "Kubla Kahn" came next, with its famous opening lines, "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, / A stately pleasure-dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea." Goodson described this poem as "an opium-induced, orientalizing fantasia of the unconscious." Indeed, Coleridge was, by 1797, steadily taking laudanum, an opium-based pain killer, and the poem was reportedly written after the poet fell into a drug-induced slumber. Awaking, he wrote down the verse in whole from his dreams.
The final years of the eighteenth century also saw the composition of Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight," but all this was only preparation for the longer poem of the same year. "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a gothic tale that deals with themes of sin, punishment, and redemption. Such redemption is brought about not only by repentance and suffering, but also by a love of nature. This long poem was a joint effort with Wordsworth, who helped give the story shape and form. The resulting ballad was over six hundred lines long, and tells of an old sailor who heedlessly kills an albatross that has come to the aid of his stranded vessel. All aboard die because of this crime against nature, except for the mariner, who is eventually rescued, his life from then on a penance for his thoughtless actions. During this same period, Coleridge also began the other major poem of his entire career, the dark and eerie "Christabel."
Coleridge and Wordsworth published their collaborative Lyrical Ballads, which included "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," as well as Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," in 1798. The volume has rightly been said to have given birth to the Romantic movement.
From Poet to Critic and Philosopher
Reviews of Lyrical Ballads were not favorable; Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" came in for special criticism for what reviewers saw as its archaic diction and rather incredible plot. Also, the central character, the mariner, is not a particularly strong or well-developed character. However, the poem succeeds, according to Goodson, because of its "strong local effects" and "drumming ballad meter." It was a landmark in its genre for being one of the first poems of pure imagination and of the supernatural, and as such has influenced writers from John Keats to W. H. Auden to the Surrealists. Soon after the publication of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge and Wordsworth traveled to Germany, staying for almost a year. Here Coleridge came under the influence of German philosophers such as J. G. Fichte, F. W. J. von Schelling, and A. W. von Schlegel. He would later introduce their German aesthetic theory to England through his writings.
Returning to England, Coleridge and his family settled in the Lake District near the Wordsworths.The next dozen or so years were miserable ones for Coleridge. In bad health, he continued to turn to laudanum. His marriage was also falling apart, due in no little part to his love for Sara Hutchinson, sister of Wordsworth's future bride. All of these stresses contributed to the diminution of Coleridge's poetic power. One of the last of his major poems, "Dejection: An Ode," came from this period, and was dedicated to Sara Hutchinson. More and more his writing focused on criticism, promoting the verse of Wordsworth as well as the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Schelling. From 1804 to 1806 he stayed on Malta in an attempt to regain his health. Returning to England he decided to separate from his wife; for the next few years the Wordsworths provided his only social outlet, and from 1809 to 1810 he edited the political magazine The Friend with Sara Hutchinson. When that enterprise failed, Coleridge grew more morose and anti-social. In 1810 his friendship with Wordsworth ended, perhaps because of Coleridge's jealousy at the other poet's success and productivity.
Coleridge moved to London, where he continued to work, lecturing on literature and philosophy, especially the work of William Shakespeare, and writing about religious and political theory. He had given poetry up at thirty, writing mostly in his Notebooks daily meditations of his life. In 1813 a play he had written much earlier, Remorse, was successfully staged, but Coleridge spent the not inconsiderable fees in a matter of months. In 1816 the unfinished poems "Christabel" and "Kubla Kahn" were published, and thereafter Coleridge devoted himself to theological and socio-political works such as Lay Sermons, Aids to Reflection, and The Constitution of Church and State. In the last-named work, Coleridge laid out his philosophy of the best form of government. In so doing he became, as John Ballantyne noted in Australia's NewsWeekly.com, "one of the greatest political thinkers of his time." Ballantyne was not the first to see this element in Coleridge's work; the philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill also noted Coleridge's political influenceas one of the strongest of his age. For Ballantyne, Coleridge "was the first conservative to advocate social and political reforms as a means of maintaining a stable and cohesive society. He warned against the dangers of unchecked industrialization, criticized the then prevailing ideology of the unfettered free-market, and called for far-reaching reforms to give the poor a greater stake in the economy."
After 1816, Coleridge went to live with the physician Dr. James Gilman, in Highgate, London. The last eighteen years of his life were spent in relative
If you enjoy the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, you may also want to check out the following:
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Of Experience, 1992.
William Wordsworth, The Works of William Wordsworth, 1998.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's Poetry and Prose, 2002.
seclusion but also in steady literary activity. His Biographia Literaria was dictated to a friend, and many consider it one of his greater literary achievements for its description and definition of two types of imagination, primary and secondary. When he died in 1834, he left behind volumes of manuscript notes, which editors and researchers have since put in order and publishing. "A legend in his own time," Goodson wrote, "[Coleridge] came to be seen by his friends and contemporaries as the genius who failed." Such a failure is only in light of the high expectations his early career promised, however. Disease and the use of opium, as well as his unhappy marriage, cut into his creativity, but despite that, "Coleridge can still be regarded as a ground breaking and, at his best, a powerful poet of lasting influence," according to Goodson.
Biographical and Critical Sources
BOOKS
Allsop, Thomas, Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, two volumes, Harper (New York, NY), 1836.
Ashton, Rosemary, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography, Blackwell Publishers (Cambridge, MA), 1996.
Barth, J. Robert, The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and the Romantic Tradition, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1977.
Bate, Walter Jackson, Coleridge, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1968.
Beer, J. B., Coleridge's Poetic Intelligence, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1977.
Chambers, E. K., Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Biographical Study, Clarend on Press (Oxford, England), 1938, revised edition, 1950.
Colmer, John, Coleridge: Critic of Society, Clarendon Press (Oxford, England), 1959.
Cornwell, John, Coleridge: Poet and Revolutionary, 1772-1804, Allen Lane (London, England), 1973.
Davidson, Graham, Coleridge's Career, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1990.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 93: British Romantic Prose Writers, 1789-1832, First Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1990, pp. 95-133.
Fruman, Norman, Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel, Braziller (New York, NY), 1971.
Holmes, Richard, Coleridge: Early Visions, Hodder and Stoughton (London, England), 1989, Viking Press (New York, NY), 1990.
House, Humphrey, Coleridge: The Clark Lectures, Hart-Davis (London, England), 1953.
Roe, Nicholas, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years, Oxford University Press (New York, NY),1987.
Wylie, Ian, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature, Oxford University Press (New York, NY),1988.
PERIODICALS
Europe Intelligence Wire, March 17, 2005, "In Foot-steps of Coleridge."
Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, autumn, 2003, Margaret Russett, "Meter, Identity, Voice: Untranslating Christabel," p. 773.
Studies in Romanticism, summer, 2004, Rei Terada, "Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction in Coleridge's Notebooks," p. 257; fall, 2004, William A. Ulmer, "Necessary Evils: Unitarian Teodicy in 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner,'" p. 327.
Times (London, England), February 21, 1974, A. S. Byatt, "His Only Friends, " review of The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Volume 3, p. 10.
Wordsworth Circle, fall, 2003, Adam Potkay, review of Coleridge Writings, Volume 4, p. 180, Seamus Perry, review of The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Volume 5, p. 182; winter, 2004, Eric G. Wilson, "Polar Apocalypse in Coleridge and Poe," p. 37.
ONLINE
Academy of American Poets,http://www.poets.org/ (April 30, 2005), "Samuel Taylor Coleridge."
Books and Writers,http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ (April 30, 2005), "Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)."
LiteraryHistory.com, http://www.literaryhistory.com/ (April 30, 2005), "Samuel Taylor Coleridge."
NewsWeekly.com, http://www.newsweekly.com/ (June 19, 2004), John Ballantyne, "Political Ideas: Samuel Taylor Coleridgem—Conservatism's Radical Prophet."
University of Virginia Library,http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ (April 30, 2005), "The Samuel Taylor Coleridge Archive."*
