Samuel taylor coleridge (1772-1834)

In comparison to that of Wordsworth, his self-disciplined friend and mentor, Coleridge’s poetic output was relatively small. He did, however, write a lot of other material, including literary criticism, lectures, plays, journalistic articles, and essays on philosophy, politics and religion. He was also an accomplished translator from German.

Coleridge was born in the small town of Ottery St. Mary, in rural Devonshire, but on the death of his father he was sent to school at Christ's Hospital, in London. He was a dreamy, enthusiastic, and extraordinarily precocious schoolboy. When in 1791 Coleridge went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, he was an accomplished scholar; but he found little intellectual stimulation at the university, fell into idleness, dissoluteness, and debt, and in despair fled to London and enlisted in the Light Dragoons. Although rescued by his brothers and sent back to Cambridge, he left in 1794 without a degree.

In June 1794 Coleridge met Robert Southey, then a student at Oxford who, like himself, had poetic aspirations, was a radical in religion and politics, and sympathized with the republican experiment in France. Together the two young men planned to establish an ideal democratic community in America for which Coleridge coined the name "Pantisocracy," signifying an equal rule by all. An American real-estate agent persuaded them that the ideal location would be on the banks of the Susquchanna, in Pennsylvania. Twelve men undertook to go; and since perpetuation of the scheme required offspring, hence wives, Coleridge became engaged to Sara Fricker, the sister of Southey's fiancée. The Pantisocracy scheme collapsed, but at Southey's insistence Coleridge went through with the marriage, "resolved," as he said, "but wretched." Later Coleridge's radicalism waned, and he became a conservative in politics, and a staunch Anglican in religion.

In 1795 he met Wordsworth and at once judged him to be “the best poet of the age.” The period of intimate communication and poetic collaboration that followed was the golden time of Coleridge's life. After their joint publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Coleridge and the Wordsworths spent a winter in Germany, where Coleridge attended the University of Gottingen and began the lifelong study of Kant and the post-Kantian German philosophers and critics that helped to alter profoundly his thinking about philosophy, religion, and aesthetics.

Back in England, Coleridge in 1800 followed the Wordsworths to the Lake District. He bad become gradually disaffected from his wife, and in 1799 he fell helplessly and hopelessly in love with Sara Hutchinson, whose sister, Mary, Wordsworth married three years later. All his life Coleridge had suffered from painful physical ailments; Wordsworth has described how sometimes, in a sudden spasm of agony, Coleridge would “throw himself down and writhe like a worm upon the ground.” According to the standard medical prescription of the time, Coleridge had long been taking laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol). In 1800-01 heavy dosages taken for attacks of rheumatism made opium a necessity to him, and Coleridge soon recognized that the drug was a worse evil than the diseases it did not cure. Dejection: An Ode, published in 1802, was Coleridge's despairing farewell to health, happiness, and poetic creativity. A two-year sojourn on the Mediterranean island of Malta, intended to restore his health, instead completed his decline. When he returned to England in 1806 he was a broken man, an inveterate drug addict subject to terrifying nightmares of guilt and despair from which his own shrieks awakened him. A bitter quarrel with Wordsworth in 1810 marked the nadir of his life and expectations.

Under these conditions Coleridge's literary efforts, however sporadic and fragmentary, were little short of heroic. In 1808 he gave his first course of public lectures in London and, in the next eleven years, followed these with other series on both literary and philosophical topics. He wrote for newspapers and single-handedly undertook to write, publish, and distribute a periodical, The Friend, which lasted for some fourteen months after January 1809. A tragedy, Remorse, had in 1813 a very successful run at the Drury Lane Theatre. In 1816 he took up residence at Highgate, a northern suburb of London, under the supervision of a physician, James Gillman, who managed to control, although not to eliminate, Coleridge's consumption of opium. The next three years were Coleridge's most sustained period of literary activity: while continuing to lecture and to write for the newspapers on a variety of subjects, he published Biographia Literaria, Zapolya (a drama), a book of essays, two collections of poems, and several important treatises on philosophical and religious subjects.

The remaining years of his life, which he spent with Dr. and Mrs. Gillman, were quieter and happier than any he had known since the turn of the century. He came to a peaceful understanding with his wife and was reconciled with Wordsworth, with whom he toured the Rhineland in 1828. His rooms at Highgate became a centre for friends, for the London literati, and for a steady stream of pilgrims from England and America. They came to hear one of the wonders of the age, the Sage of Highgate's conversation, for even in his decline, Coleridge's talk never lost the almost incantatory power that Hazlitt has immortalized in My First Acquaintance with Poets. When he died, Coleridge left his friends with the sense that an incomparable intellect had vanished from the world. “The most wonderful man that 1 have ever known," Wordsworth declared, and Charles Lamb: "His great and dear spirit haunts me. Never saw I his likeness, nor probably the world can see again.”

In opposition to the prevailing British philosophy of empiricism Coleridge expounded his views of the mind as creative in perception, intuitive in its discovery of the premises of metaphysics and religion, and capable of a poetic re-creation of the world of sense by the power of the “secondary imagination”. By present consensus, Coleridge is one of the greatest and most influential of literary theorists. Coleridge's writings in verse, although small in bulk, are the work of an extraordinarily innovative poet.

In the course of a few years, he wrote his poems of mystery and demonism, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan. No less impressive in their own way are the blank-verse poems of the lonely and meditative mind that are often called "Conversation Poems". In the best of these, Frost at Midnight, Coleridge perfected the characteristic pattern of integrally related description and meditation, which Wordsworth immediately used in Tintern Abbey. Coleridge himself adapted this pattern to Dejection: An Ode. The verse epistle To William Wordsworth is at once a most insightful comment about The Prelude, a superb tribute to a friend whom Coleridge thought the greatest poet since Milton, and a moving elegy on the death of his own poetic power.

Most of Coleridge’s poetry is fragmentary, yet its influence upon the English poetry of his day can hardly be overestimated. The same is true of his literary criticism (Lectures on Shakespeare and Other Poets) delivered before a large and enthusiastic audience. His Biographia Literaria and numerous essays were important in shaping the principles of literary taste and critical thought in the 19th-century England.

In contrast to Wordsworth’s preoccupation with subjects from ordinary life, Coleridge’s own task was to write about extraordinary events in a credible way. In its mingling of the mysterious and magical with realism, Coleridge’s masterpiece, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, most successfully bears out the author’s intention.

Written in the form of a medieval verse tale, the poem is made up of several parts. The first part contains the description of the ancient mariner who stops a wedding guest outside a church to tell his dreadful tale. He tells of how he and his fellow mariners reached the equator only to be blown by a violent storm towards the polar regions. After several days trapped in the ice an albatross appeared through the fog. The mariners received it as a “Christian soul” and gave it food to eat, and very soon their fortunes changed: a south wind blew up and the ship started moving back in the direction of the equator. At this point, for some inexplicable reason –significantly, the motive is not explained –the ancient mariner commits his vile crime: he shoots the albatross with his crossbow. The second part of the poem describes the immediate aftermath of this crime, while the remaining parts deal with what happens to the mariners during the rest of the voyage. The ancient mariner is the only survivor of the disasters which befall the crew, and in penance for his crime is compelled to wander the world forever telling his story and conveying what effectively is the moral message of the poem: ”He prayeth well who loveth well /Both man and bird and beast./He prayest best who loves best, /All things great and small:/For the dear God, who loves us, /He made and loveth all”. The combination of the supernatural and the commonplace, dreamlike elements and astonishing visual realism, help to create an atmosphere of irresistible mystery in the poem. Many of the features traditionally associated with ballads – the combination of dialogue and narration, the four-line stanza, frequent repetition, alliteration and internal rhyme – are present in the poem. While frequently simple and direct, the language is also permeated with archaisms which help create the atmosphere of medieval ballads.