Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the most significant figures of the Romantic period, was born in Ottery St Mary, Devon on 21 October 1772, the youngest of ten children of his father’s (Reverend John Coleridge’s) second marriage. Encouraged in his precocious reading by his father, who was the headmaster of the local grammar school (and died when his son was eight years old), Coleridge showed such promise that his mother chose to send him away to school at Christ’s Hospital, London. Despite being marked out as gifted by being made a ‘Grecian’, and befriending Charles Lamb, who would be a lifelong friend, Coleridge’s experience of school was mixed. Entering Jesus College, Cambridge in 1792, his university years were intellectually and emotionally turbulent. The terror of the French Revolution was under way, and Coleridge was also beset by debt and by an unfulfilled passion for Mary Evans. He became fascinated by the theories of Joseph Priestley and a supporter of William Frend, a fellow of Jesus College, who was being prosecuted for his advocacy of parliamentary reform and attack on the liturgy of the church. He began to live a dissipated life and moved to London to escape his difficulties before enlisting in the 15th light dragoons under the assumed name Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. Fortunately, his brother George bought him out of the army and Coleridge returned to Cambridge.
In 1794, Coleridge met Robert Southey, with whom he formed a plan to move to America and establish a pantisocracy (a settlement based on egalitarian living), marrying Sara Fricker in 1795 (Southey married her sister, Edith) despite their idea never coming to fruition. Though Sara features prominently in Coleridge’s poetry of the time, their union was ultimately unhappy, and Sara never took part in Coleridge’s intellectual life, to his despair. Moving to Bristol in 1795, Coleridge began to lecture on philosophy and religion and established a journal, The Watchman, to which he was the main contributor. He met Wordsworth and Dorothy in July 1797, and they all moved to Dorset and began an intense poetic and intellectual relationship that would alter the course of their lives. Coleridge and Wordsworth profoundly influenced one another, and Duncan Wu rightly points out that Coleridge’s poetic appreciation of nature stems from their meeting.1 Coleridge’s conversation poems date from this period, and he also wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan, poems in a very different style. In December 1797, the Wedgwood brothers sent him £100, which Coleridge returned as he sought more stable employment, and he became a Unitarian minister. At his sermon in Shrewsbury, Coleridge met William Hazlitt and made a great impression on the youth, but, again, the Wedgwoods interceded, offering Coleridge an annuity of £150 per year if he would devote himself to writing rather than remaining a minister. He accepted, and then, with the Wordsworths, developed a plan to publish Lyrical Ballads and use the proceeds to fund a tour of Germany, a centre of intellectual life. Though Coleridge would not contribute nearly as many poems as Wordsworth, the trip to Germany proved fruitful for Coleridge’s intellectual development. Learning the language, meeting with philosophers, reading German poetry, and pursuing biblical exegesis made a profound impression on him. Coleridge’s second son, Berkeley, died while Coleridge was in Germany, and the physical separation of Coleridge and his wife created a breach between the pair that never healed. On returning to England, Coleridge fell in love with Sara Hutchinson, the sister of Wordsworth’s future wife, Mary. Coleridge went to London to take the post of staff writer on the Morning Post. In April 1800, he went back to Keswick to work on the second edition of Lyrical Ballads and eventually moved back to Keswick to live in Greta Hall. Suffering health problems, Coleridge began to take laudanum to which he became addicted, and his marriage became still more troubled. Southey and his family moved to Keswick to join the Coleridges at Greta Hall, but Coleridge moved to Malta, working as a secretary for the British administration in 1804, to help his illness, but also to escape his domestic stress. After visiting Sicily and Italy, Coleridge returned to England in 1806. The relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge became strained as the latter came to envy Wordsworth’s domestic happiness and imagine an affair between Sara and Wordsworth. He began working on The Friend, a journal he wrote and published intermittently between 1808 and 1810, but his opium addiction was becoming difficult to manage along with his emotional problems. Coleridge and Wordsworth became estranged for a period after Basil Montagu informed Coleridge of Wordsworth’s slighting remarks about him, remarks Wordsworth denied. However, in January 1813, Remorse was performed at Drury Lane to good notices, and Coleridge was pleased by Byron’s support of his poetic activities. He published Biographia Literaria in 1817, and spent the rest of his life largely producing prose works, such as Aids to Reflection (1825), amongst many others. With the help of James Gillman and his wife, he sought to wean himself off laudanum. Increasingly religious in old age, Coleridge died on 25 July 1834 of longstanding cardiac problems. Coleridge’s prose and poetry reveal him as a singularly gifted thinker whose poetry continues to enchant his readers.
John Beer, ‘Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, October 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5888, accessed 7 September 2015]; Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/5888; Duncan Wu, ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)’, in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 4th edn (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), pp. 611–18.