Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772 in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, in 1772; his father was the vicar of Ottery and the headmaster of the grammar school. After his father's death in 1781, Coleridge entered Christ's Hospital in London (an institution famously described in an essay by Lamb), and ten years later went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he was known for his wide reading and impressive eloquence. Financial problems, however, drove him from Cambridge, and in his third year he traveled to London and enlisted in the 15th Dragoons, using the pseudonym Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. His friends, recognizing how ill-suited he was for military life, were able to buy him out and returned him to Cambridge.
There, interested in the political and intellectual environment of the French Revolution, Coleridge and his new friend Robert Southey (at Balliol College, Oxford), who met in Bristol in 1794, proposed a utopian community which would fulfill the idealistic goals of the revolutionaries without degrading into the violence of the Terror. They settled on a community by the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania for their "pantisocracy," and traveled to Bristol to become public lecturers.
In 1795, under political pressure from Southey, Coleridge hesitantly married Sara Fricker, Southey's sister-in-law; their first son, Hartley, was born the following year. Shortly afterward, Southey abandoned the pantisocracy.
Coleridge met William Wordsworth in 1795, and the two spent much time discussing poetry, politics, and philosophy. The two collaborated on the volume of poems called Lyrical Ballads, first published in 1798. MORE!!! "Kubla Khan" Beginning in late 1797, Coleridge wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a poem which was to open the Lyrical Ballads volume. "Christabel" ??? Early in 1798 Coleridge had again found himself preoccupied with political issues. The French Revolutionary government had suppressed the states of the Swiss Confederation, and Coleridge expressed his bitterness at this betrayal of the principles of the Revolution in a poem entitled "France: An Ode." Supported by a £150 annuity from Josiah and Thomas Wedgwood, Coleridge was freed from the need to support himself financially, and toured Germany with the Wordsworths. There he became acquainted with many developments in German philosophy and scholarship which were little known in England. When he returned to England in 1799, Coleridge fell in love with Sara Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworth's future wife. The domestic trouble this occasioned is evident in his "" (1802, originally written as a verse epistle to Sara Hutchinson. Coleridge's failing health, doubtless exacerbated by his increasing dependence on laudanum, led him to accept a post in the warmer climate of Malta as secretary to the acting governor from 1804 to 1806, after which he traveled through Italy. His health, however, did not improve; nor did his peace of mind. On his return he separated from his wife and lived with the Wordsworths, leaving Southey to care for his family.
Between June 1809 and March 1810, Coleridge published a periodical, The Friend Sara Hutchinson left Coleridge in 1810, and Coleridge, suspecting Wordsworth of encouraging her departure, left the Wordsworths to settle in London. There he lived for some years in apparent misery, suffering from his dependence on opium and harboring a resentment for Wordsworth. He remained active, however, delivering a well-attended course of lectures on Shakespeare, and publishing and presenting a mildly successful drama of his own, Osorio (or Remorse), in 1813 (although it had been written long before). Not long after, Coleridge experienced a religious conversion: his reading of the seventeenth-century Anglican divine, Robert Leighton, led him to abandon the Unitarianism he practiced and to embrace instead the Church of England and its orthodoxies.
In 1817 Coleridge was involved in several minor projects: his play Zaploya appeared, and he worked briefly on the Encyclopædia Metropolitana. But in the same year came two important works: a major collection of his verse, Sibylline Leaves, and his long and influential prose work, Biographia Literaria. The latter provides a combination of literary criticism, autobiography, and philosophical speculation, and traces Coleridge's life through childhood, through his fascination and later disillusionment with the associationist philosophy of David Hartley, and his collaboration with Wordsworth. Among the most famous parts of the book are those passages in which he describes his notion of the imagination and criticizes Wordsworth's poetry.
In 1824 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, which entitled him to an annuity of £105. Another work of criticism, Aids to Reflection, appeared in 1825. His last prose work appeared in 1830: On the Constitution of the Church and State was a contribution to the debate over Catholic Emancipation. The third edition of his Poetical Works appeared in 1834 shortly before his death on 25 July.