Samuel Taylor Coleridge

English poet and literary critic

• Born: October 21, 1772
• Birthplace: Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, England
• Died: July 25, 1834
• Place of death: Highgate, London, England

Coleridge wrote several of the finest lyric poems in the English language and is considered one of the most brilliant of literary critics. As a speculative religious thinker, he had a seminal influence on many of the great minds of the nineteenth century.

Early Life

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the youngest of ten children born to Ann Bowden, the second wife of Coleridge’s father, John Coleridge, a clergyman and schoolmaster. Coleridge was an intellectually precocious child, with an early love of books and study. He was particularly enthralled by The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (c. 1450), which he read at the age of five.

In 1782, one year after the death of his father, Coleridge was enrolled in the Christ’s Hospital Grammar School in London. He was a superior student and a voracious reader, devouring everything from classics to theology, philosophy, and medical books. In 1791, when he was almost twenty years old, this sometimes untidily dressed young man with dark penetrating eyes, a fine forehead, and long black, flowing hair, received a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he continued to read extremely widely. He also gained a reputation as an enthusiastic and spellbinding talker, and his gregarious, generous, and sensitive nature won for him many friends. In spite of this, however, he tended to be dissatisfied with himself, annoyed by what he described as his own indolence. He was also beginning to experience the ill health that dogged him throughout his life.

In 1794, Coleridge became friends with fellow student Robert Southey, who was two years his junior and also destined to be a poet of distinction. Together they planned to emigrate to the United States and set up an ideal community in Pennsylvania on the banks of the Susquehanna. Coleridge was excited by the proposed venture, which he called “Pantisocracy” (meaning “equal government for all”). The plan came to nothing, but through it Coleridge became engaged to Sarah Fricker, one of several members of the Fricker family who were involved in the scheme. Coleridge married her in October, 1795; she was later to bear him four children.

Having left Cambridge without taking a degree, Coleridge and his new bride moved to the village of Nether Stowey, near Bristol, where they rented a small cottage. The marriage was not destined to be a happy one; nevertheless, Coleridge was on the threshold of several productive and creative years, in which he was to write all the poems that were to make him famous.

Life’s Work

Coleridge’s first major poem, “The Eolian Harp,” dates from his period at Nether Stowey. During this time, he also gave public lectures on political topics, preached as a Unitarian, and started a short-lived journal called The Watchman.

In 1797, following a visit by William Wordsworth to Nether Stowey, one of the most famous friendships in literary history began. Coleridge relished the acceptance and encouragement he received from Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, and he believed that he had discovered a receptive audience for his wide-ranging ideas and speculations. Wordsworth, for his part, found his conception of his own poetic task defined more clearly through his conversations with Coleridge. Coleridge, however, always generous in his admiration of others, felt inferior (although unjustifiably so) to a man of Wordsworth’s talents.

In January, 1798, Coleridge’s financial problems were eased when he received a lifetime annuity of œ150 from his friends Josiah and Tom Wedgwood. The security this provided, together with his almost daily contact with the Wordsworths, who were now living at nearby Alfoxden, stimulated Coleridge to a year of brilliant achievement. In February, he wrote the fine lyric poem “Frost at Midnight” and completed Christabel (which would be published in 1816). The next month, he finished The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , probably the greatest of all of his poems. “Kubla Khan,” a visionary dream-poem of extraordinary power and beauty, followed in May. In September, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was published in a joint collection with Wordsworth entitled Lyrical Ballads .

In the same month, Coleridge and Wordsworth traveled to Germany. Coleridge remained there, learning the language and studying German metaphysics, until July, 1799. On his return, he met and fell in love with Sarah Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworth’s wife, Mary, and in 1800 he and his wife followed the Wordsworths to live in the Lake District in the northwest of England.

Coleridge was now to enter a dark period of his life, a decade of gloom, failure, guilt, and despair. He was to write only a few more outstanding poems, notably “Dejection: An Ode” and “To William Wordsworth.” His physical health deteriorated alarmingly, aggravated by mental anxieties; his distress is readily apparent from his poem “The Pains of Sleep.” He took to opium—a drug that was frequently prescribed for medical reasons at the time—and soon became dependent on it. He could not settle down to important work. Although he had many projects in mind, he was unable to persevere with them. The greater the task he set himself, the more paralyzed he became, and he constantly lamented his inability to concentrate on one project at a time.

In an attempt to improve his health, Coleridge left England in 1804 for a two-year stay in Malta, but on his return in 1806 his condition had not improved. He formally separated from his wife, and by 1808, after a nomadic year, he went to live with the Wordsworths in the Lake District village of Grasmere. There, he managed to launch a new periodical, The Friend, which kept going for twenty-seven issues. In 1810, however, came a serious, indirect quarrel with Wordsworth, when a friend passed on to Coleridge some critical remarks that Wordsworth had made regarding his self-destructive way of life. The breach took many years to heal.

The next few years of Coleridge’s life were increasingly desperate. He was consuming larger quantities of opium than ever before (although he tried hard to break his addiction), and he wrote of his guilt and the complete paralysis of his will. At one point, he even wished to be admitted to a private lunatic asylum.

In late 1811, however, Coleridge roused himself sufficiently to give a successful series of lectures on William Shakespeare and John Milton, which established his reputation as a literary critic of genius. During this period, he also produced three excellent short critical works, collectively titled “On the Principles of Genial Criticism Concerning the Fine Arts” (1814), as well as Biographia Literaria: Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions , written in 1815 and published in 1817. The latter is notable for Coleridge’s assessment of Wordsworth’s poetry and for his own critical theories, particularly those dealing with the creative function of the imagination.

In 1816 came a rescue. James Gillman, a physician from Highgate, London, who was captivated by the power of Coleridge’s mind, took him into his house and cared for him. Initially it was intended as a temporary measure, but Coleridge was to live at Highgate with Gillman and his wife for the remaining eighteen years of his life. During these years, he gained a new lease on life. He gave more lectures on Shakespeare and other topics and also wrote the religious works that were to have such a strong impact on nineteenth century thought. These include the three lay sermons published as The Statesman’s Manual (1816), Aids to Reflection (1825), On the Constitution of the Church and State, According to the Idea of Each (1830), and the posthumously published Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840). His projected magnum opus, which was to synthesize all branches of existing knowledge into one coherent, all-embracing philosophy of nature, was never written.

During the later years, a social circle formed itself around the “Sage of Highgate”; many people were drawn to the compelling flow of Coleridge’s conversation, which ran its course, as it had always done, like a mighty, meandering river.

When Coleridge died, on July 25, 1834, worn out at the age of sixty-one, his friends were quick to pay tribute to him. Wordsworth declared him to be the most “wonderful” man he had ever known, and Coleridge’s lifelong friend Charles Lamb said, “never saw I his likeness, nor probably the world can see again.”

Significance

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s literary criticism and theory have remained influential for more than a century and a half, and although his greatness as a poet rests on only a handful of poems, his honored place in the history of English literature is unlikely ever to be challenged. His best poems are highly original; he had a marked gift, particularly noticeable in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel, for evoking an atmosphere of the strange and the supernatural. In his “conversation poems,” as they have come to be known (such as “Frost at Midnight” and “Dejection: An Ode”), he invented what is sometimes called the Greater Romantic lyric: a meditative lyric that features an isolated speaker interacting with his natural environment, resolving a problem or deepening an understanding, before the poem rounds back on itself to give a sense of resolution and wholeness.

Coleridge’s philosophical thought was central to the English Romantic movement. Highly eclectic but rooted in Neoplatonism and German idealism, his mind was dominated by a search for unity. Coleridge opposed the mechanistic philosophy, with its tendency to fragment knowledge into separate compartments, with an organicism that viewed everything in connection with everything else, “the one life within us and abroad,” as he put it in “The Eolian Harp.” The “one life” could be realized through the power of the imagination, the creative aspect of the mind, which could overcome the ultimately false division between subject and object. Coleridge’s later work is characterized by an attempt to reconcile this “dynamic philosophy” with orthodox Christianity.

Coleridge’s later religious writings elaborated an unusual, subjective approach to Christian belief, analyzed the relation between reason (including the scientific method) and faith, and discussed the Bible’s claim to authority and the role of the Church in national life. All these issues became central to Victorian religious inquiry.

Given the range of Coleridge’s achievement, it is not surprising that the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill called him “one of the great seminal minds of England,” to whom the Victorian age was indebted not only for “the greater part of the important ideas which have been thrown into circulation among its thinking men but for a revolution in its general modes of thought and investigation.”

Bibliography

Barfield, Owen. What Coleridge Thought. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971. One of the clearest and most penetrating brief expositions of Coleridge’s thought.

Bate, Walter Jackson. Coleridge. New York: Macmillan, 1968. Sound and balanced introduction to Coleridge’s life and work by a leading literary critic and scholar.

Coburn, Kathleen, ed. Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967. Distinguished literary critics present the range and brilliance of Coleridge’s achievement in poetry and literary criticism.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Portable Coleridge. Edited by I. A. Richards. New York: Penguin Books, 1977. One-volume selection from Coleridge’s voluminous works. Includes poems, letters, notebooks, literary criticism (including long extracts from Biographia Literaria), and sections of The Statesman’s Manual and Aids to Reflection.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Letters. Edited by H. J. Jackson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Extensively annotated edition, which includes letters from every phase of Coleridge’s career. Reveals his myriad-minded self as he ranges over everything from poetry to science and chronicles his tormented inner life.

Hanson, Lawrence. The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Early Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1938. Sympathetic, sometimes even rhapsodic, account of Coleridge’s life up to June, 1800.

Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Early Visions. New York: Viking Press, 1989.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Coleridge: Darker Reflections. London: HarperCollins, 1991. An extensively researched, meticulously detailed two-volume biography. Holmes analyzes Coleridge’s works and provides many quotations that demonstrate Coleridge’s legendary conversational skills.

Newlyn, Lucy, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Essays on Coleridge’s life, his poetry and notebooks, and his role as talker, journalist, critic, and political and religious thinker.

Perry, Seamus. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. London: British Library, 2003. Brief biography, intended as an introduction to Coleridge for students and general readers. Perry, who has written several other books about Coleridge, provides an overview of his life and work.

Willey, Basil. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972. Traces Coleridge’s intellectual and spiritual development, from his early Unitarianism to the Christian orthodoxy of his later years.