Inquiring Spirit

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was an English poet, critic, and philosopher who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the Lake Poets. In 1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads, which proved to be the starting point for the English Romantic Movement. The immediate effect on critics was modest, but it became and remains a landmark, changing the course of English literature. Coleridge is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and Kubla Khan (1816) as well as his major prose work Biographia Literaria (1817). His shorter, meditative "conversation poems, " however, proved to be the most influential of his work. These include both quiet poems like This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison and Frost at Midnight and also strongly emotional poems like Dejection and The Pains of Sleep. Amongst his other works are: The Fall of Robespierre (1794), Osorio (also titled Remorse) (1813), Zapolya (1817), The Friend (1818), Aids to Reflection (1825) and Hints Towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life (1848).