Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Ottery St Mary, 1772 - Highgate, 1834) was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England alongside his friend William Wordsworth, with whom he belonged to the group known as the Lake Poets. His importance lies both in a small number of poems that are still widely read and in his influence on literary criticism, in his role in bringing German idealist philosophy to England and, through it, in the thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson and early American transcendentalism.

He was born on 21 October 1772 in Ottery St Mary, in Devon, the youngest of a large family. His father, the Reverend John Coleridge, was a highly respected vicar. After the father died in 1781, Samuel was sent to Christ's Hospital, a boarding school in London known for its strict discipline, where he befriended Charles Lamb and developed into a voracious reader. Between 1791 and 1794 he studied at Jesus College, Cambridge, but left without a degree. In 1792 he had won the Browne Medal for an ode condemning the slave trade. In 1793 he enlisted in the Light Dragoons under a false name, and his brothers secured his discharge a few months later on the grounds of supposed insanity.

At Cambridge he encountered political and theological ideas then considered radical. Initially enthusiastic about the French Revolution, he planned with Robert Southey a utopian community in Pennsylvania, known as pantisocracy, which was never founded. In 1795 the two men married sisters from the Fricker family. Coleridge's marriage proved unhappy and ended in separation. Over these years he loved, without return, Sarah Hutchinson, and he became a close friend of William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, for whom he also felt an affection that was never returned.

In 1796 he published his first volume, Poems on Various Subjects. Around this time he began taking opium to relieve pain and illness, a practice that carried no social stigma then, though little was understood about its physical and psychological effects. The years 1797 and 1798, which he spent with Wordsworth in Nether Stowey, Somerset, were the most productive of his life. There he wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the symbolic poem Kubla Khan, which he said came from an opium-induced dream, and the first part of Christabel. He also wrote his conversation poems, such as Frost at Midnight. In 1798 he and Wordsworth published Lyrical Ballads, which marked the beginning of English Romanticism. That autumn both travelled to Germany, where Coleridge studied the language and became interested in Kant, Schelling and Schlegel. On his return he translated Schiller's Wallenstein trilogy into English.

Between 1804 and 1806 he lived in Malta, working for the British administration as secretary to Governor Alexander John Ball, hoping the drier climate would improve his health and reduce his dependence on opium. Between 1808 and 1819 he gave lectures in London and Bristol, some devoted to Shakespeare, which helped renew interest in the playwright. In 1816 he moved into the home of the physician James Gillman in Highgate, where he spent his final years. That year Christabel and Kubla Khan appeared in print and made him famous. In 1817 his major prose work, Biographia Literaria, appeared, mixing autobiographical memories with reflections on poetry and imagination and distinguishing between primary imagination, secondary imagination and fancy. He died of a heart attack in Highgate on 25 July 1834.

His influence grew more after his death than during his lifetime. His Shakespeare criticism and his distinction between imagination and fancy shaped later critical thinking, and the phrase suspension of disbelief is still used to describe how readers engage with fiction. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner gave the English language phrases that entered everyday speech, and he is now regarded as one of the most influential figures in English literature.