SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devonshire in 1772. He soon lost his father and went to school in London. Ha had a variety of interest from the classics to metaphysics and theology.

His university years were somewhat idled away: in this period he started taking laudanum, opium dissolved in alcohol, to reduce his pain. He left university and made friends with the radical poet Southey. They were enthusiastic about the French Revolution and had the idea to found a "Pantisocracy", a perfect and egalitarian community, in America; but this project had to be abandoned.

Coleridge got married and, for a period of his life, he was happy. He met Wordsworth and his sister and they became close friends. This friendship started a revolution in the English poetry. In fact, they published the "Lyrical Ballads", the manifesto of the Romanticism. In this period, Coleridge moved to the Lake District.

Coleridge wrote some of the greatest poetry by this time, like "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan". Kubla Khan is an amazing, strange poem, which reads like a poetic vision. Christabel, in the form of the mediaeval ballad, is full of Gothic features.

He increased the opium dosages and he fell into opium addiction. His married was not happy and he fell in love with Sarah Hutchinson.

A period of depression ensued and his work, "Dejection: An Ode", expresses his psychological and intellectual state of this period.

He separated from his wife and had a quarrel with Wordsworth about the opium addiction. Coleridge spent the rest his life in London and devoted himself to prose work. He published the "Biographia Literaria", which contains autobiography, literary criticism and philosophy.

His last years brought a reconciliation with Wordsworth and his wife. He died in 1834.