Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher, whose LYRICAL BALLADS,
written with William Wordsworth, started the English Romantic
movement. Although Coleridge's poetic achievement was small in
quantity, his metaphysical anxiety, anticipating modern existentialism, has
gained him reputation as an authentic visionary. Shelley called him
"hooded eagle among blinking owls."
"The influence of Coleridge, like that of Bentham, extends far beyond those who
share in the peculiarities of his religious or philosophical creed. He has been the
great awakener in this country of the spirit of philosophy, within the bounds of
traditional opinions. He has been, almost as truly as Bentham, 'the great questioner
of things established'; for a questioner needs nor necessarily be an enemy." (John
Stuart Mill, from Coleridge, 1840)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, as the
youngest son of the vicar of Ottery St Mary. He was the youngest of ten
children, adored by his parents. His father, the Reverend John Coleridge,
was already fifty-three years old. Ann Bowdon, the daughter of a farmer,
his second wife, was forty-five at that time. Later Coleridge described his
childhood as full fantasy: "At six years old I remember to have read
Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarll - and then I found the
Arabian Nights' entertainments - one tale of which (the tale of a man who
was compelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so deep an impression on
me (I had read it in the evening while my mother was mending stockings)
that I was haunted by spectres whenever I was in the dark - and I distinctly
remember the anxious and fearful eagerness with which I used to watch
the window in which the books lay - and whenever the sun lay upon them,
I would seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask, and read."
After his father's death, Coleridge was sent away to Christ's Hospital
School in London. Coleridge studied at Jesus College. He joined in the
reformist movement stimulated by the French Revolution, and abandoned
his studies in 1793. In desperation, after an unhappy love-affair and
pressed by debt, he enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons under the name of
Silas Tomkin Comberbache. Soon he realized that he was unfit for an army
career and he was brought out under 'insanity' clause by his brother,
Captain James Coleridge. In Cambridge Coleridge met the radical, future
poet laureate Robert Southey (1774-1843) in 1794. Coleridge moved with
him to Bristol to establish a community, but the plan failed. In 1795 he
married the sister of Southey's fiancée Sara Fricker, whom he did not
really love.
Coleridge's collection POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS was published
in 1796, and in 1797 appeared POEMS. In the same year he began the
publication of a short-lived liberal political periodical The Watchman. He
started a close friendship with Dorothy and William Wordsworth, one of
the most fruitful creative relationships in English literature. From it
resulted Lyrical Ballads, which opened with Coleridge's 'Rime of the
Ancient Mariner' and ended with Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey'. These
poems set a new style by using everyday language and fresh ways of
looking at nature. 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', a 625-line ballad, is
among his essential works. It tells of a sailor who kills an albatross and for
that crime against nature endures terrible punishments. The ship upon
which the Mariner serves is trapped in a frozen sea. An albatross comes to
the aid of the ship, it saves everyone, and stays with the ship until the
Mariner shoots it with his crossbow. The motiveless malignity leads to
punishment: "And now there came both mist and show, / And it grew
wondrous cold; / And ice, mast high, came floating by, / As green as
emerald." After a ghost ship passes the crew begin to die but the mariner is
eventually rescued. He knows his penance will continue and he is only a
machine for dictating always the one story. When Mrs. Barbauld objected
to Coleridge that the poem lacked a moral, the poet told her that "in my
own judgment the poem had too much; and that the only or chief fault, if I
might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the
reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of pure imagination."
The brothers Josiah and Thomas Wedgewood granted Coleridge an annuity
of 150 pounds, thus enabling him to pursue his literary career.
Disenchanted with political developments in France, Coleridge visited
Germany in 1798-99 with Dorothy and William Wordsworth, and became
interested in the works of Immanuel Kant. He studied philosophy at
Göttingen University and mastered the German language. However, he
considered his translations of Friedrich von Schiller's plays from the
trilogy Wallenstein distasteful. At the end of 1799 Coleridge fell in love
with Sara Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworth's future wife, to whom he
devoted his work DEJECTION: AN ODE (1802). During these years
Coleridge also began to compile his NOTEBOOKS, daily meditations of
his life.
Suffering from neuralgic and rheumatic pains, Coleridge had became
addicted to opium, freely prescribed by physicians. In 1804 he sailed to
Malta in search of better health. Supplied with an ounce of opium and nine
ounces of laudanum, he wrote in his journal: "O dear God! give me
strength of soul to make one thorough Trial - If I land at Malta / spite of all
horrors to go through one month of unstimulated nature..." He worked two
years as secretary to the governor of Malta, and later traveled through
Sicily and Italy, returning then to England. In 1809-10 he wrote and edited
with Sara Hutchinson the literary and political magazine The Friend. From
1808 to 1818 he he gave several lectures, chiefly in London, and was
considered the greatest of Shakespearean critics.
According to the poet, he heard the words to his famous 'Kubla Khan' in a
dream. "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree: /
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man /
Down to a sunless sea. / So twice five miles of fertile ground / With walls
and towers were girdled round: / And there were gardens bright with
sinuous rills, / Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; / And here
were forests ancient as the hills / Enfolding sunny spots of greenery." (from
Kubla Khan, 1798) 'Christabel' and 'Kubla Khan' circulated many years in
oral form before publication, and especially 'Christabel' influenced later
the works of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. In the summer of 1797 the
author had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton. He
had taken anodyne and after three hours sleep he woke up with a clear
image of the poem. Disturbed by a visitor, he lost the vision, with the
exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images. Modern
scholarship is skeptical of this story, but it reveals Coleridge's interest in
the workings of the subconscious.
In 1810 Coleridge's friendship with Wordsworth came to crisis, and the
two poets never fully returned to the relationship they had earlier. During
the following years, Coleridge lived in London, on the verge of suicide.
REMORSE, a play which he had written many years earlier, was
succesfully produced at the Drury Lane theatre in 1813. He received £400,
which he spent in a few monts. After a physical and spiritual crisis at
Greyhound Inn, Bath, he submitted himself to a series of medical régimes
to free himself from opium. He found a permanent harbor in Highgate in
the household of Dr. James Gillman, and enjoyed almost legendary
reputation among the younger Romantics. During this time he rarely left
the house.
In 1816 the unfinished poems 'Christabel' and 'Kubla Khan' were
published, and next year appeared SIBYLLINE LEAVES. After 1817
Coleridge devoted himself to theological and politico-sociological works -
his final position was that of a Romantic conservative and Christian
radical. "Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried
to an excess, that itself will need reforming," he wrote in BIOGRAPHIA
LITERARIA (1817). Coleridge contributed to several magazines, among
them Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. In 1824 Coleridge was elected a
fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He died in Highgate, near
Londonon July 25, 1834. Coleridge's daughter Sara (1802-1852) was also
a writer and translator. She published children's verse, PRETTY
LESSONS IN VERSE FOR GOOD CHILDREN (1834) and
PHANTASMION (1837). When her husband died she took up the task of
editing her fathers works.
