Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

English author and mystic. Coleridge was born October 21, 1772, in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire. He was the son of John Coleridge, a clergyman and schoolmaster who enjoyed considerable reputation as a theological scholar and was author of a Latin grammar. Samuel's childhood was spent mostly at the native village. During his youth he showed a marked aversion to games and even avoided the company of other children instead giving his time chiefly to varied reading.

"At six years of age," he writes in one of his letters to his friend, Thomas Poole, "I remember to have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarll, and then I found the Arabian Nights Entertainments. " In this same letter he told how the boys around him despised him for his eccentricity, the result being that he soon became a confirmed dreamer, finding in his mind a haven of refuge from the scorn leveled at him.

By the time he was nine years old, Coleridge showed a predilection for mysticism. Consequently, his father decided to make him a clergyman, and in 1782 the boy left home to go to Christ's Hospital, London. There he found among his fellow pupils at least one who shared his literary tastes—Charles Lamb—and a warm friendship quickly sprang up between the two, while a little later Coleridge developed affection for a young girl called Mary Evans. The progress of the love affair was soon arrested, the poet leaving London in 1790 to go to Cambridge.

Beginning his university career as a sizar (undergraduate receiving an allowance from the college) at Jesus College, he soon became known as a brilliant conversationalist. He made enemies by his extreme views on politics and religion, however, and in 1793, finding himself in various difficulties, he went back to London where he enlisted in the fifteenth Dragoons. Bought out soon afterward by his relations, he returned to Cambridge, and in 1794 he published his drama The Fall of Robespierre. At Cambridge he met his lifelong friend Robert Southey, through whom he became acquainted with Sara Fricker, his future wife. Through her he made the necessary contacts to issue Poems (1796).

He began to preach occasionally in Unitarian chapels, and in 1797 he met William Wordsworth, with whom he speedily became a close friend. He joined Wordsworth in publishing Lyrical Ballads, which contains some of Coleridge's finest poems, notably "The Ryme of the Ancient Mariner." Scarcely before it was finished, he composed two other poems of comparable worth, "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan."

In 1798 he was appointed Unitarian minister at Shrewsbury; after holding this post for a little while, he went to travel in Germany, the requisite funds having been given him by Josiah and Thomas Wedgwood, both keen admirers of Coleridge's philosophical powers. They believed that study on the Continent would be of material service to him.

Among Coleridge's first acts on returning from Germany was to publish his translation of Schiller's "Wallenstein." At the same time he used a cottage at Keswick, intending to live there quietly for many years. But peace and quiet are benefits usually sought in vain by poets, and Coleridge was no exception. Early in life he had begun to take occasional doses of laudanum (opium), and now this practice developed into a habit that ruled his whole life.

In 1804, he sought relief by going to Malta, and afterward he visited Rome. On returning to England, he was happy to find that a small annuity had been left him by the Wedgwoods. He was quite incapable of shaking off the deadly drug habit, though it had not yet begun to weaken his gifts. After staying for awhile with Wordsworth at Grasmere, he delivered a series of lectures on poetry at Bristol and in London. His genius was quickly recognized in London, and he was made a pensioner of the Society of Literature, enabling him to take a small house at Highgate, where he spent most of his declining years. His remains were interred in Highgate Cemetery after his death in 1834.

Coleridge is representative of the romantic movement of the early nineteenth century, whose literary exponents wished to penetrate the mysteries of the inner self, and in pursuit of their goal often became mystics. That search was many times aided by the use of mind-altering drugs such as the laudanum to which Coleridge became addicted. Everything written by Coleridge is permeated with the romantic flavor. Apart from his metaphysical works, of which the most notable are Aids to Reflection and Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit, his Biographia Literaria and other fine contributions to critical literature are all of a mystical temper. Coleridge (more, perhaps, than any other critic, not even excepting Goethe and Walter Pater) was never content with handling the surface of things, but always reflected a striving to understand the mysterious point where artistic creation begins. For him, literature was a form of life—one of the most mysterious forms of life—and while he is supremely quick at noticing purely aesthetic merit and equally quick at marking defect, it is really the philosophical element in his criticism that gives it its transcendent value and interest.

Coleridge's metaphysical tendencies are equally marked in both his prose and his verse. In a singularly beautiful poem, "To the Evening Star," he tells that he gazes thereon, "Till I, myself, all spirit seem to grow." And in most of his poems, indeed, he is "all spirit," while often he spellbounds the reader into feeling something of his own spirituality. Waiving Cole-ridge's metaphysical poems altogether, it might be justly said that he introduced the occult into verse with a mastery rarely equaled in English literature.

The romantic had its dark side as well. Not only was the spiritual world explained, but often, in opening the unconscious, the world of nightmare and evil was also opened to the poets and novelists. Coleridge was no exception. Along with his mystical bent, Coleridge wrote the first vampire poem in the English language. "Christabel" tells the story of the invasion of a castle by the vampire figure Geraldine, who not only attacks the title character, but as the unfinished poem ends, has attached herself to her father.

Coleridge died on July 25, 1834 in Highgate, England.

Sources:

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Selected Poems. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Doughty, Oswald. Perturbed Spirit: The Life and Personality of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981.

Nethercot, Arthur H. The Road to Trye: A Study of the History, Background, and Purposes of Coleridge's "Christabel." Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939. Reprint, New York: Russell & Russell, 1962.