Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834). Poet and polymath whose collaboration with Wordsworth laid the foundations for English Romanticism. Their Lyrical Ballads (1798) opened with his ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and, although relations became strained, Coleridge's initial contribution cannot be gainsaid. Dogged by ill-health and self-doubt, his poetic career was brief and littered with unfulfilled projects: the incomplete ‘Christabel’; ‘Kubla Khan’ famously interrupted by ‘a person from Porlock’. As literary critic, if not the originator of the philosophical method he aspired to in Biographia literaria (1817), he gives a subtler account of language and morality than his predecessors. The charge of plagiarism from Schlegel, Schelling, and the German Idealists cannot be dismissed by his airy confidence that ‘Truth is a divine ventriloquist’, but there is a continuity in his thought from before his visit to Germany in 1798, when Immanuel Kant was still ‘utterly unintelligible’. Though no friend to Pitt's ministry, his ‘baby trumpet of sedition’ was already muted, and the political journalism of the Watchman (1796) and the Friend (1809) depended on ‘placing the questions of the day in a moral point of view’. His last substantial work, On the Constitution of Church and State (1830), finds him staunchly defending them as ‘two poles of the same magnet’.
John Saunders
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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor