SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)

LIFE.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born at Ottery St. Mary, Devon, October 21, 1772. He received
his early education at Christ’s hospital, where the reading in his seventeenth year of Bowles’s
Sonnets gave him his forst taste of poetry freed from the influences of classicism. At nineteen
he went to Cambridge; fell into debt and despondency; ran away, and under an assumed name
enlisted in the Dragoons. He soon obtained his discharge, but thiough he returned for a short
time to Cambridge, he left (1794) without taking his degree. Inspired by the Revolution he
now joined Southey in a scheme, which quickly collapsed, for the establishment of an ideal
society, to be called a Pantisocracy, on the banks of the Susquehanna river. In 1795 he
married Sarah (or Sara) Fricker, whose sister Edith a few weeks later became Southey’s wife.
In 1796 he published a volume of poems and started a periodical, which died at the tenth issue
for want of funds. His friendship with Wordsworth began in 1797. After nearly two years in
Germany (1798-9), during which time he steeped himself in German thought, he returned to
England with many designs for great philosophical treatises but no settled plans for the
immediate future. Continual ill- health and family unhappiness brought on profound
depression of spirits, and in an evil hour he sought relief from bodily pain and mental anguish
in laudanum.
This completed his undoing. Henceforth for many years his life was one vain struggle against
the fatal habit which had him in its grip, ceaseless wanderings in search of health, domestic
discord, broken promises, and vague dreaming over vast works which were never even begun.
He tried journalism, and launched a weekly paper, The Friend, which reached only twenty
seven numbers; he lectured on Shakespeare and other subjects with varying success. From
1816 to the end he lived almost entirely under the roof and care of Dr. Gillman at Highgate,
who helped him to break the chains of his slavery to laudanum and restored him to a measure
of health and happiness. In these last years he became the oracle of many pilgrims from far
and near, who returned to Highgate to listen to his marvellous talk. He died July 23, 1834.

(HIS MOST IMPORTANT) WORKS.

VERSE.
Poems (1796)
The Ancient Mariner (in Lyrical Ballads, 1798)
Translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein (1800)
Remorse (1813)
Cristabel, Kubla Khan, etc. (1816)
Sibylline Leaves (1817)
Prose.-
The Friend (1809-10)
The Statesman’s Manual (1816)
Biographia Literaria (1817)
Aids to Reflection (1825)
Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit (1844)
Essay on Method (1845)
Table Talk (1884)
Anima Poetae (1895)

Character. -
Coleridge is one of the most pathetic figures in English literature. He was a man of
stupendous and many-sided genius and fine sensitive moral nature. But he was by
temperament indolent, erratic, and visionary: ill- health and mental depression early impaired
his powers of work. The laudanum habit paralysed his intellect and will, and undermined his
sense of honour, and self- respect. For the greater part of his life he was a mere drifter, an
ineffective dreamer of dreams, a burden to his friends, and often a pensioner upon their
bounty. To complete the tragedy, the knowledge of his pitiful failure weighed heavily upon
him.

Views.-
Coleridge began life as an ardent supporter of the Revolution, and his first volume of verse
loudly proclaimed his democratic enthusiasm. But disillusion soon set in, and, like
Wordsworth, he became politically conservative. With Wordsworth, however, a profound
interest in concrete humanity survived the wreckage of his early hopes. Colerdige, though he
retained his interest in the general concerns of the nation, wanted precisely that intense
sympathy with individual men and women. His tendency to live among abstractions was
further strengthened by his devotion to metaphysics and theology.
In his theory of poetry he emphasized the aesthetic quality as the primary consideration:

Poetry is an art … of representing, in words, external nature and human thoughts and
affections, both relatively to human affections, by the production of as much immediate
pleasure in parts, as is compatible with the largest sum of pleasure in the whole. (Lectures on
Shakespeare and Milton, II.)

The poet, therefore, must convey truth indirectly through the medium of pleasure:

The communication of pleasure is the introductory means by which alone the poet must
expect to moralize his readers. (Biographia Literaria, ch. XXII)

He adopts Milton’s conception of poetry:

It is essential to poetry that it should be simple, and appeal to the elements and primary laws
of our nature. That it should be sensuous, and by its imagery elicit truth at a flash. That it
should be impassioned, and be able to move our feelings and awaken our affections. (Lectures
on Poetry)

Regarding the language of poetry, he agrees with Wordsworth’s “remonstrance in behalf of

Poems.-

Personal Poems.-
Among these are several – Dejection, Youth and Age, and Work without Hope, to name some
of the most famous ones – which have a pathetic interest as expressions of the poet’s sense of
failure and sterility. Others, like The Nightingale and The Lime-Tree Bower my Prison, are
touching memorials of friendship, dating from a time when life was still full of ahppiness and
hope. Frost at Midnight, belonging to the same period, enshrines a father’s tender love for his
infant child.
Political Poems.-
In The Destruction of the Bastille, written before he left Christ’sd Hospital, Coleridge
welcomed the Revolution in declamatory verse. The Ode on the Departing Year (1796),
begins “with an address to the Divine Providence that regulates into one vast harmony all the
events of time,” and closes by prophesying “in a spirit of anguish” the approaching downfall
of England.. In France, an Ode (1798), first printed as The Recantation, Coleridge traces his
relations with the Revolution and proclaims an ideal of individual liberty to be reached only
through obedience to the moral law. Fears in Solitude was written in the same year “during
the alarm of an invasion,” and contains an explanation of the poet’s patriotism.

Romantic Poems.-
Kubla Khan is a fragment of wonderful pictorial and verbal magic. According to Coleridge’s
own account, it represents all that he could recall of a dream. On waking, he hastened to write
down the lines which had come to him during sleep. Unfortunately he was interrupted by “a
person on business from Porlock” after which nothing remained to him but “some vague and
dim recollection of the general purport of the vision.” Christabel, a story of witchcraft, also
unfinished, is like the foregoing a creation rare and delicate beauty. Part I. was written in
1797, Part II. in 1800, after which Coleridge waited in vain for a return of the inspiration. Its
versification, though not in fact so original as he supposed, gave a fresh model to English
poetry.

The metre … is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its being
founded on a new principle, namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the
syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be
found to be only four. (Preface)

Scott, who heard Christabel recited while it was still in manuscript, was influenced by it in
The Lady of the Last Minstrel. The Ancient Mariner is the Tale of a curse which the narrator,
the Mariner himself, brings down upon himself and his companions by wantonly killing an
albatross. Coleridge’s power of handling the supernatural is, like the pure music of his verse,
as wonderful here as in Christabel. The moral involved in the story and specifically brought
out at the end, is that of all-embracing love.

Characteristics.-
Coleridge’s poetry represents the culmination of early romanticism in its purest form.
Historically he belongs to the mediaeval revival, but he is far too original to be classified as
part of a movement, and the distinctive qualities of his work ar all his own. In pictorial power,
felicity of phrasing, and word music he is one of the greatest masters. In his subtly suggestive
treatment of the supernatural he stands almost alone. It is not only that he eliminates from his
supernaturalism the crude material horrors then popular with writers of the romantic school:
he also gives it a psychological foundation. In describing the plan of Lyrical Ballads he
writes:

It was agreed that my endeavour should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or
at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a
semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of the imagination that willing
suspension of belief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. – (Biographia Literaria,
ch. XIV.)

This is particularly apparent in The Ancient Mariner, the backbone of which is provided, not
by the marvels of the narrative, but by the spiritual history of the hero. Wordsworth sought to
save naturalism from the hard literalism of Crabbe by touching reality with imagination.
Coleridge redeemed romance from coarse sensationalism by linking it with psychological
truth.
Coleridge’s best poetry is almost entirely the product of a brief period of wonderful activity
(1797-9). Yet small as it is in bulk, it ranks among the rarest treasures of literature. As a
literary critic he is unsystematic, but stimulating and suggestive. He did much to establish the
romantic attitude towards literature, and he gave an entirely new direction to English
Shakespearean criticism. Though rambling, discursive, and unsatisfying as a whole, his
Biographia Literaria contains some chapters which for penetration and grasp of fundamental
principles could not easily be surpassed. In philosophy and theology he is to be reckoned a
chief force in breaking down the rationalistic tradition of the 18th century and impregnating
English contemporary thought with German transcendentalism. By his scattered writings, and
even more by his talk, he exercised and enormous influence over many young men who were
to be spiritual leaders in the next generation.