Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

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COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR

COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR (1772–1834), English poet and critic.

Born in the market town of Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, England, but largely educated at a charity school in London and then at Cambridge University, Samuel Taylor Coleridge soon made himself a poet. He is best known for "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798), a ballad about a sailor who kills an albatross during a nightmarish voyage from England to the equatorial Pacific; and "Kubla Khan" (1797 or 1798), a visionary "fragment" about a medieval Mongol emperor. Coleridge drew inspiration from many sources, both literary and natural, and particularly from William Wordsworth (1770–1850). After meeting Wordsworth in the mid-1790s, he collaborated with him on Lyrical Ballads, first published in 1798, which began with "The Rime" and became a landmark of the English Romantic movement. But most of Coleridge's poetry appeared in volumes entirely his own, beginning with Poems on Various Subjects (1796), and he wrote virtually all of his best poems by the time he was thirty. Their style and subject matter range from the supernaturalism of "The Rime" and the rhapsodic tone of "Kubla Khan" to the natural, familiar, conversational style of poems such as "The Nightingale" (1798) and the poignancy of "Dejection: An Ode" (1802), an agonized lament for the poet's incapacity to create that is paradoxically couched in a language of exquisite lyricism.

Coleridge was himself a paradox. In 1800, convinced that he "never had the essentials of poetic Genius" even after plainly demonstrating them, he roundly declared, "I abandon Poetry altogether," leaving Wordsworth to write "the higher & deeper Kinds" and himself to explain them. Though Coleridge actually did write some poetry after 1800, though he saw many editions of his poetry appear throughout his life, and though he revised one of his early plays (Osorio, later called Remorse) for a successful run at the Drury Lane in 1813, he chiefly devoted the ensuing years to prose on an astonishing variety of topics, ranging from politics and religion to philosophy and literary criticism. Indeed, given his bouts of suicidal depression and his long-term addiction to opium (beginning in the late 1790s), it is amazing that he managed to produce so much.

His writing on politics began with the radical political lectures that he delivered in Bristol in 1795, when the sparks of reform spread by the French Revolution still fired his hopes. After the bloodthirsty aggressiveness of the Revolution made him a Tory, his political theory became at once more philosophical and more religious, as exemplified by The Statesman's Manual (1816) and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830). His philosophical writings—such as Aids to Reflection (1825)—reflect the influence of German transcendentalism, which he first imbibed during a sojourn at the University of Göttingen in the late 1790s.

Coleridge's most influential work in prose, however, is his literary criticism. In 1811–1812 he delivered three series of lectures on William Shakespeare, John Milton, and drama. In 1817 he published Biographia Literaria, a book that weaves literary criticism and literary theory into the story of his life. Because several of its chapters draw without acknowledgement on the work of German philosophers, especially Friedrich Schelling and Immanuel Kant, Coleridge has been often accused of plagiarism. But whatever it owes to others, Biographia remains a singularly original expression of Coleridge's life and mind as well as a fascinating reply to Wordsworth's poetic autobiography, The Prelude, which Coleridge heard the poet read aloud in January 1807, soon after Wordsworth finished the first full-length draft of it. Besides telling the story of his own early life, just as Wordsworth had done, Coleridge recalls his first exciting discovery of Wordsworth's poetry and their intimate collaboration on Lyrical Ballads. Most remarkably, he offers Wordsworth a bouquet of roses bristling with thorns. Even while extolling the beauty and power of his old friend's poetry, Coleridge attacks his theory of poetic diction, particularly his dictum—in the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800)—that poetry should speak "the real language of men."

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware!

Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798)

Along with Wordsworth, Coleridge revolutionized English poetry and launched the movement now known as Romanticism. Equally adept at explaining the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Milton, and the originality of Wordsworth, he takes his place in the line of great English critics stretching from Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) through I. A. Richards (1893–1979). And in the history of conservative political thought, he remains a formidable successor to Edmund Burke.

See alsoConservatism; Romanticism; Wordsworth, William.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. Edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton, N.J., 1983.

Halmi, Nicholas, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano, eds. Coleridge's Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism. New York, 2004.