Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772—1834)

1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge(1772—1834) • English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher, whose Lyrical Ballads, written with Wordsworth, started the English Romantic movement. • Although Coleridge's poetic achievement was small in quantity, his metaphysical anxiety, anticipating modern existentialism, has gained him reputation as an authentic visionary. • In Cambridge Coleridge met the radical, future poet laureate Robert Southey (1774-1843) in 1794. Coleridge moved with him to Bristol to establish a community, but the plan failed. • In 1795 he married the sister of Southey's fiancée Sara Fricker, whom he did not really love.

2. Coleridge and Wordsworth • Coleridge's collection Poems On Various Subjects was published in 1796, and in 1797 appeared Poems. In the same year he began the publication of a short-lived liberal political periodical The Watchman. • He started a close friendship with Dorothy and William Wordsworth, one of the most fruitful creative relationships in English literature. • From it resulted Lyrical Ballads, which opened with Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and ended with Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey.' • These poems set a new style by using everyday language and fresh ways of looking at nature.

3. Rime of the Ancient Mariner • This 625-line ballad is among his essential works. It tells of a sailor who kills an albatross and for that crime against nature endures terrible punishments. • The ship upon which the Mariner serves is trapped in a frozen sea. An albatross comes to the aid of the ship, it saves everyone, and stays with the ship until the Mariner shoots it with his crossbow.

4. Rime of the Ancient Mariner • The motiveless malignity leads to punishment: • And now there came both mist and show, • And it grew wondrous cold; • And ice, mast high, came floating by, • As green as emerald. • After a ghost ship passes the crew begin to die but the mariner is eventually rescued. He knows his penance will continue and he is only a machine for dictating always the one story.

5. Bitter Life • In 1810 Coleridge's friendship with Wordsworth came to crisis, and the two poets never fully returned to the relationship they had earlier. • During the following years Coleridge lived in London, on the verge of suicide. After a physical and spiritual crisis at Greyhound Inn, Bath, he submitted himself to a series of medical régimes to free himself from opium. • He found a permanent harbor in Highgate in the household of Dr. James Gillman, and enjoyed almost legendary reputation among the younger Romantics. During this time he rarely left the house.

6. The End of his Life • In 1816 the unfinished poems “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan” were published, and next year appeared Sibylline Leaves. • After 1817 Coleridge devoted himself to theological and politico-sociological works - his final position was that of a Romantic conservative and Christian radical. • He also contributed to several magazines, among them Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. • Coleridge was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1824. • He died in Highgate, near Londonon July 25, 1834.

7. Wordsworth & Coleridge • Wordsworth is clearly more entitled than Coleridge to be considered the leader in creating and also in expounding a new kind of poetry. • Until Coleridge met Wordsworth, which was probably in 1795, he wrote in the manner which had been fashionable since the death of Milton, employing without hesitation all those poetic licenses which constituted what he later termed `Gaudyverse,' in contempt. • If one reads Coleridge's early poems in chronological order, one will perceive that Gaudyverse persists till about the middle of 1795, and then quickly yields to the natural style which Wordsworth was practicing.

8. Coleridge’s Conversation Poems • Coleridge's shorter, meditative "conversation poems," proved to be the most influential of his work. • Conversation poems are poems in which the speaker addresses his lines to a listener within the poem, generally a listener who has little voice of his own. • 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. • Wordsworth immediately adopted the model of these poems, and used it to compose several of his major poems. Via Wordsworth, the conversation poem became a standard vehicle for English poetic expression, and perhaps the most common approach among modern poets.