Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets.
Background
Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772 in the town of Ottery St Mary in Devon, England. Samuel's father was the Reverend John Coleridge (1718–1781), the well-respected vicar of St Mary's Church, Ottery St Mary and headmaster of the King's School, a free grammar school established by King Henry VIII (1509–1547) in the town. He had previously been Master of Hugh Squier's School in South Molton, Devon, and Lecturer of nearby Molland. John Coleridge had three children by his first wife. Samuel was the youngest of ten by the Reverend Mr. Coleridge's second wife, Anne Bowden (1726–1809), probably the daughter of John Bowden, Mayor of South Molton, Devon, in 1726.
Education
In 1782, after his father's death, he was sent as a charity student to Christ's Hospital. His amazing memory and his eagerness to imbibe knowledge of any sort had turned him into a classical scholar of uncommon ability by the time he entered Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1791. Like most young intellectuals of the day, he felt great enthusiasm for the French Revolution and took his modest share in student protest against the war with France (1793). Plagued by debts, Coleridge enlisted in the Light Dragoons in December 1793.
Discharged in April 1794, he returned to Cambridge, which he left in December, however, without taking a degree. The reason for this move, characteristic of Coleridge's erratic and impulsive character, was his budding friendship with Robert Southey. Both young men were eagerly interested in poetry, sharing the same dislike for the neoclassic tradition.
Career
In spite of his usually wretched health, the years from 1795 to 1802 were for Coleridge a period of fast poetic growth and intellectual maturation. In August 1795 he began his first major poem, "The Eolian Harp," which was published in his Poems on Various Subjects (1796). It announced his unique contribution to the growth of English romanticism: the blending of lyrical and descriptive effusion with philosophical rumination in truly symbolic poetry.
From March to May 1796 Coleridge edited the Watchman, a liberal periodical which failed after 10 issues. While this failure made him realize that he was "not fit for public life," his somewhat turgid "Ode to the Departing Year" shows that he had not abandoned his revolutionary fervor.
Perhaps the most influential event in Coleridge's career was his intimacy with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, in whose neighborhood he spent most of his life from 1796 to 1810. This friendship was partly responsible for his annus mirabilis (July 1797 to July 1798), which culminated in his joint publication with Wordsworth of the Lyrical Ballads in September 1798. As against 19 poems by Wordsworth, the volume contained only 4 by Coleridge, but one of these was "The Ancient Mariner." Coleridge later described the division of labor between the two poets - while Wordsworth was "to give the charm of novelty to things of every day by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us," it had been agreed that Coleridge's "endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic." But the underlying world view of the two poets was fundamentally similar. Like Wordsworth's "The Thorn," for example, Coleridge's "The Ancient Mariner" deals with the themes of sin and punishment and of redemption through suffering and a loving apprehension of nature.
A second, enlarged edition of Coleridge's Poems also appeared in 1798. It contained further lyrical and symbolic works, such as "This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison" and "Fears in Solitude." At this time Coleridge also wrote "Kubla Khan," perhaps the most famous of his poems, and began the ambitious narrative piece "Christabel."
In September 1798 Coleridge and the Wordsworths left for Germany, where he stayed until July 1799. In the writings of post-Kantian German philosophers such as J. G. Fichte, F. W. J. von Schelling, and A. W. von Schlegel, Coleridge discovered a world view so congenial that it is almost impossible to disentangle what, in his later thought, is properly his and what may have been derived from German influences. Sibylline Leaves (1817) contains lively, humorous accounts of his German experiences.
The dozen years following Coleridge's return to England were the most miserable in his life. In October 1799 he settled near the Wordsworths in the Lake District. The cold, wet climate worsened his many ailments, and turning to laudanum for relief, he soon became an addict. Ill health and emotional stress, combined with his intellectual absorption in abstract pursuits, hastened the decline of his poetic power. Awareness of this process inspired the last and most moving of his major poems, "Dejection: An Ode"(1802). After a stay in Malta (1804-1806) which did nothing to restore his health and spirits, he decided to separate from his wife. The only bright point in his life during this period was his friendship with the Wordsworths, but after his return to the Lake District this relationship was subject to increasing strain. Growing estrangement was followed by a breach in 1810, and Coleridge then settled in London.
Meanwhile, however, Coleridge's capacious mind did not stay unemployed; indeed, his major contributions to the development of English thought were still to come. From June 1809 to March 1810 he published the periodical the Friend. Coleridge's poetry and his brilliant conversation had earned him public recognition, and between 1808 and 1819 he gave several series of lectures, mainly on Shakespeare and other literary topics. His only dramatic work, Osorio, which was written in 1797, was performed in 1813 under the title Remorse. "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan" were published in 1816.
In April 1816 Coleridge settled as a patient with Dr. Gillman at Highgate. There he spent most of the last 18 years of his life in comparative peace and in steady literary activity, bringing out several works which were to exert tremendous influence on the future course of English thought in many fields: Biographia literaria (1817), Lay Sermons (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825), and The Constitution of Church and State (1829). His apparently rambling style was well suited to a philosophy based on an intuition of wholeness and organic unity.
When Coleridge died on July 25, 1834, he left bulky manuscript notes, which scholars of the mid-20th century were to exhume and edit.
His father was an Anglican vicar, but Coleridge was an intellectually rebellious youth, earning his bread in 1796-97 as a Unitarian preacher.
He returned to the Church of England in 1814, and his most significant writings on religion are Lay Sermons (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825), and The Constitution of Church and State (1830).
In his notebooks of 1795-97, Coleridge lists five stages of prayer, from "the pressure of immediate calamities" to "horrible solitude," "repentance and regret," "celestial delectation," and "self-annihilation." And shortly after his death in1834, his friend Thomas de Quincey wrote in Tait's Magazine, "he told me as his own particular opinion that the art of praying was the highest energy of which the human heart was capable; praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties." What sort of prayers do you find in his poetry? (Especially The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ? Who prays, and which of the above conditions apply when they do so? What relation does prayer have to subsequent events?
Religion was his overriding interest. His voracious reading was mainly directed to one end, which was already apparent in his Religious Musings (begun 1794, published 1796) - he aimed to redefine orthodox Christianity so as to rid it of the Newtonian dichotomy between spirit and matter, to account for the unity and wholeness of the universe, and to reassess the relation between God and the created world.
Although Coleridge's conservative idea of the state may appear both reactionary and utopian, his religious thought led to a revival of Christian philosophy in England.
Politics
Coleridge was a profound political thinker. While he began his life as a political radical, and an enthusiast for the French Revolution; over the years Coleridge developed a more conservative view of society, somewhat in the manner of Burke. Although seen as cowardly treachery by the next generation of Romantic poets, Coleridge’s later thought became a fruitful source for the evolving radicalism of J. S. Mill. Mill found three aspects of Coleridge’s thought especially illuminating:
First, there was Coleridge’s insistence on what he called “the Idea” behind an institution – its social function, in later terminology – as opposed to the possible flaws in its actual implementation. Coleridge sought to understand meaning from within a social matrix, not outside it, using an imaginative reconstruction of the past (‘’verstehen’’) or of unfamiliar systems.
Secondly, Coleridge explored the necessary conditions for social stability – what he termed Permanence, as distinct from Progress, in a polity - stressing the importance of a shared public sense of community, and national education.
Coleridge also usefully employed the organic metaphor of natural growth to shed light on the historical development of British history, as exemplified in the common law tradition – working his way thereby towards a sociology of jurisprudence.
Views
Quotations:
"Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink."
"He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all."
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea."
"Advice is like snow; the softer it falls the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind."
"Poetry: the best words in the best order."
"Friendship is a sheltering tree."
"Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony."
"And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from afar Ancestral voices prophesying war!"
"As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean."
"The fair breeze blew, The white foam flew, And the forrow followed free. We were the first to ever burst into the silent sea."
Membership
He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Royal Society of Literature
Personality
Coleridge was a troubled, sensitive man.
Around the year 1796, Samuel first started taking drugs like Laudanum as treatment for his toothache and other ailment which turned into addiction after he became increasingly dependent on it. It is purportedly said that he used drugs as a remedy for his reducing stamina and a substitute to his youth energy.
Quotes from others about the person
Wordsworth declared: " The only wonderful man I ever knew was Coleridge."
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
F. D. Maurice, F. J. A. Hort, F. W. Robertson, B. F. Westcott, John Oman, Thomas Erskine
Connections
On October 4, 1795, Coleridge married Sara Fricker, the sister of Southey's wife-to-be. His marriage, which had never been a success, was disintegrating, especially since Coleridge had fallen in love with Sara Hutchinson, sister of Wordsworth's wife-to-be.