Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834), youngest son of the vicar of Ottery St Mary, Devon, was destined for the church. He was educated at Christ's Hospital school, London, where he attracted a circle of young admirers including Leigh Hunt and Lamb. At Jesus College, Cambridge (1792–4), a brilliant career in classics was diverted by French revolutionary politics, heavy drinking, and an unhappy love affair, which led Coleridge to enlist in desperation in the 15th Light Dragoons under the name of Comberbache. He met Southey in 1794 and together they invented Pantisocracy, a scheme to set up a commune in New England. Coleridge now published his first poetry in the Morning Chronicle, a series of sonnets to eminent radicals including Godwin and J. Priestley. To finance Pantisocracy, he and Southey gave political lectures in Bristol and collaborated on a verse-drama, The Fall of Robespierre (1794); they also simultaneously courted and married two sisters, Sara and Edith Fricker. After quarrelling with Southey, Coleridge retired with Sara to a cottage at Clevedon where their first son Hartley (above), named after the philosopher David Hartley, was born. Here Coleridge edited a radical Christian journal, the Watchman, and published Poems on Various Subjects (1796).

In June 1797 Coleridge met Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. The intense friendship that sprang up between the three shaped their lives for the next 14 years and proved one of the most creative partnerships in English Romanticism. Between July 1797 and Sept. 1798 they lived and worked intimately together; the Coleridges at Nether Stowey, Somerset, and the Wordsworths two miles away at Alfoxden. Here Coleridge wrote a moving series of blank verse ‘conversation’ poems, addressed to his friends: ‘Fears in Solitude’, ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’, ‘The Nightingale’, and ‘Frost at Midnight’. He also composed ‘Kubla Khan’, and at Wordsworth's suggestion wrote ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, and started three other ballads including ‘Christabel’. A selection from their work appeared as the Lyrical Ballads (1798), intended as an ‘experiment’ in English poetry, which achieved a revolution in literary taste and sensibility.

Disenchanted with political developments (‘France: an Ode’), Coleridge now turned towards Germany, where he spent ten months (1798–9), partly in the company of the Words-worths, studying Kant, Schiller, and Schelling. Returned to London, he translated Schiller's verse play Wallenstein and engaged in journalism for D. Stuart of the Morning Post. In 1800 he moved to the Lake District with the Wordsworths, but his marriage was increasingly unhappy and he had fallen in love with Wordsworth's future sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson, as recorded in ‘Love’ (1799) and other ‘Asra’ poems. His use of opium now became a crippling addiction. Many of these difficulties are examined in ‘Dejection: an Ode’ (1802). During these years he also began to compile his Notebooks, daily meditations on his life, writing, and dreams, which have proved among his most enduring and moving works. In 1804 Coleridge went abroad; he worked for two years as secretary to the governor of wartime Malta, and later travelled through Sicily and Italy. In 1807 he separated from his wife and went to live again with the Wordsworths and Sara Hutchinson at Coleorton, Leicestershire. In 1808, though ill, Coleridge began his series of Lectures on Poetry and Drama, which as his Shakespearian Criticism introduced new concepts of ‘organic’ form and dramatic psychology. In 1809–10 he wrote and edited with Sara Hutchinson's help a second periodical, the Friend. The intellectual effort, combined with the struggle against opium, shattered his circle of friends: Sara left for Wales, Dorothy grew estranged, he quarrelled irrevocably with Wordsworth. Coleridge fled to London, where between 1811 and 1814 he was on the verge of suicide, sustained only by his friends the Morgans, who took him to live in Calne, Wiltshire. His play Remorse had a succès d'estime at Drury Lane (1813). After a physical and spiritual crisis in the winter of 1813–14, Coleridge achieved a rebirth of his Christian beliefs, submitted himself to a series of medical regimes, and began slowly to write again. To this period belong his essay ‘on the Principles of Genial Criticism’, adapted from Kant, and his Biographia Literaria (1817).

In the spring of 1816 Coleridge found permanent harbour in the household of Dr James Gillman. Christabel and Other Poems, which included ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Pains of Sleep’, was published in 1816; Sibylline Leaves, the first edition of his collected poems, in 1817 (expanded 1828 and 1834); Zapolya in 1817. His Aids to Reflection (1825) had a fruitful influence on Sterling, Kingsley, and the young Christian Socialists; while his Church and State (1830), a short monograph on the concept of a national ‘Culture’ and the ‘clerisy’ responsible for it, was taken up by M. Arnold and Newman. Coleridge also gave lectures on general literature and philosophy, which have survived in the form of notes and shorthand reports.

These later works develop Coleridge's leading critical ideas, concerning Imagination and Fancy; Reason and Understanding; Symbolism and Allegory; Organic and Mechanical Form; Culture and Civilization. The dialectical way he expresses them is one of his clearest debts to German Romantic philosophy; his final position is that of a Romantic conservative and Christian radical. He also wrote some haunting late poems, ‘Youth and Age’, ‘Limbo’, ‘Work Without Hope’, and ‘Constancy to an Ideal Object’. He died of heart failure at 3 The Grove, Highgate. The last echoes of his inspired conversation were captured in Table Talk (1836).

Coleridge has been variously criticized as a political turncoat, a drug addict, a plagiarist, and a mystic humbug, whose wrecked career left nothing but a handful of magical early poems. But the shaping influence of his highly imaginative criticism is now generally accepted, and his position (with Wordsworth) as one of the two great progenitors of the English Romantic spirit is assured. There is a recent biography by Richard Holmes (2 vols, 1989, 1998).