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Samuel Taylor Coleridge

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Poetry & Opera; Writers
and critics

   CAPTION: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

         Born:        October 21, 1772
                      Flag of England Ottery St Mary, England
         Died:        July 25, 1834
                      Flag of England Highgate, England
      Occupation:     Poet, critic, philosopher
   Literary movement: Romanticism

   Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( October 21, 1772 – July 25, 1834) (
   pronounced [ˈkəʊlərɪdʒ]) 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. He is
   probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and
   Kubla Khan, as well as his major prose work Biographia Literaria.

Early life and education

   Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772 in the rural town
   of Ottery St Mary, Devonshire. He was the youngest of ten children, and
   his father, the Reverend John Coleridge, was a well respected vicar.
   Coleridge suffered from constant ridicule by his older brother Frank,
   partially due to jealousy, as Samuel was often praised and favoured by
   his parents. To escape this abuse from critics, he frequently sought
   refuge at a local library, which led him to discover his passion for
   poetry.

   He later wrote in his Biographia Literaria:

     At six years old I remember to have read Belisarius, Robinson
     Crusoe, and Philip Quarll - and then I found the Arabian Nights'
     Entertainments - one tale of which (the tale of a man who was
     compelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so deep an impression on
     me (I had read it in the evening while my mother was mending
     stockings) that I was haunted by spectres whenever I was in the dark
     - and I distinctly remember the anxious and fearful eagerness with
     which I used to watch the window in which the books lay - and
     whenever the sun lay upon them, I would seize it, carry it by the
     wall, and bask, and read.

   After the death of his father in 1781, contrary to his desires, he was
   sent to Christ's Hospital, a boarding school in London. The school was
   notorious for its unwelcoming atmosphere and strict regimen under The
   Rev. James Bowyer, many years Head Master of the Grammar-School, which
   fostered thoughts of guilt and depression in young Samuel's maturing
   mind.

   However, Coleridge seems to have appreciated his teacher, as he wrote
   in detailed recollections of his schooldays in Biographia Literaria:

     I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at
     the same time, a very severe master...At the same time that we were
     studying the Greek Tragic Poets, he made us read Shakspeare and
     Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons too, which required
     most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I
     learnt from him, that Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and,
     seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as
     severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle,
     more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes....

     In our own English compositions (at least for the last three years
     of our school education) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or
     image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might
     have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words...
     In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen
     and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? your Nurse's daughter, you
     mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose! ... Be
     this as it may, there was one custom of our master's, which I cannot
     pass over in silence, because I think it ... worthy of imitation. He
     would often permit our theme exercises, ... to accumulate, till each
     lad had four or five to be looked over. Then placing the whole
     number abreast on his desk, he would ask the writer, why this or
     that sentence might not have found as appropriate a place under this
     or that other thesis: and if no satisfying answer could be returned,
     and two faults of the same kind were found in one exercise, the
     irrevocable verdict followed, the exercise was torn up, and another
     on the same subject to be produced, in addition to the tasks of the
     day.

   Throughout life, Coleridge idealized his father as pious and innocent,
   but his relationship with his mother was more problematic. His
   childhood was characterized by attention-seeking, which has been linked
   to his dependent personality as an adult. He was rarely allowed to
   return home during the school term, and this distance from his family
   at such a turbulent time proved emotionally damaging. He later wrote of
   his loneliness at school in the poem Frost at Midnight: "With unclosed
   lids, already had I dreamt/Of my sweet birthplace"

   From 1791 until 1794 Coleridge attended Jesus College at the University
   of Cambridge. In 1792 he won the Browne Gold Medal for an Ode that he
   wrote on the slave trade. In November, 1793, he left the college and
   enlisted in the Royal Dragoons, perhaps because of debt or because the
   girl that he loved had rejected him. His brothers arranged for his
   discharge a few months later (ironically because of supposed insanity)
   and he was readmitted to Jesus College, though he would never receive a
   degree from Cambridge.

Pantisocracy and marriage

   At the university he was introduced to political and theological ideas
   then considered radical, including those of the poet Robert Southey.
   Coleridge joined Southey in a plan, soon abandoned, to found a utopian
   commune-like society, called pantisocracy, in the wilderness of
   Pennsylvania. In 1795 the two friends married sisters Sarah and Edith
   Fricker, but Coleridge's marriage proved unhappy. He grew to detest his
   wife, whom he only married because of social constraints, and
   eventually divorced her. During and after his failed marriage, he came
   to love a woman named Sara Hutchinson, who did not share this passion
   and consequentially caused much distress. Sara departed for Portugal,
   but Coleridge remained in Britain. In 1796 he published Poems on
   Various Subjects.

   In 1795 Coleridge met poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy.
   They became immediate friends.

   Around 1796, Coleridge started taking opium as a pain reliever. His and
   Dorothy Wordsworth's notebooks record that he suffered from a variety
   of medical complaints, including toothache and facial neuralgia. There
   was no stigma associated with taking opium then, but also little
   understanding of the physiological or psychological aspects of
   addiction.

   The years 1797 and 1798, during which he lived in Nether Stowey,
   Somerset, Coleridge and Wordsworth, having visited him and being
   enchanted by the surroundings, rented Alfoxton Park, a little over
   three miles away, were among the most fruitful of Coleridge's life.
   Besides the Rime of The Ancient Mariner, he composed the symbolic poem
   Kubla Khan, written—Coleridge himself claimed—as a result of an opium
   dream, in "a kind of a reverie"; and the first part of the narrative
   poem Christabel. During this period he also produced his much-praised
   "conversation" poems This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Frost at Midnight,
   and The Nightingale.

   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. Though the productive Wordsworth contributed more
   poems to the volume, Coleridge's first version of The Rime of the
   Ancient Mariner was the longest poem and drew more immediate attention
   than anything else.

   In the spring of 1798, Coleridge temporarily took over for Rev. Joshua
   Toulmin at Taunton's Mary Street Unitarian Chapel while Rev. Toulmin
   grieved over the drowning death of his daughter Jane. Poetically
   commenting on the strength of Rev. Toulmin, Coleridge wrote in a 1798
   letter to John Prior Estlin,

     I walked into Taunton (eleven miles) and back again, and performed
     the divine services for Dr. Toulmin. I suppose you must have heard
     that his daughter, (Jane, on April 15, 1798) in a melancholy
     derangement, suffered herself to be swallowed up by the tide on the
     sea-coast between Sidmouth and Bere (sic. Beer). These events cut
     cruelly into the hearts of old men: but the good Dr. Toulmin bears
     it like the true practical Christian, - there is indeed a tear in
     his eye, but that eye is lifted up to the Heavenly Father.

   In the autumn of 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth left for a stay in
   Germany; Coleridge soon went his own way and spent much of his time in
   university towns. During this period he became interested in German
   philosophy, especially the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant,
   and in the literary criticism of the 18th-century dramatist Gotthold
   Lessing. Coleridge studied German and, after his return to England,
   translated the dramatic trilogy Wallenstein by the German Classical
   poet Friedrich Schiller into English.

   Coleridge was critical of the literary taste of his contemporaries, and
   a literary conservative insofar as he was afraid that the lack of taste
   in the ever growing masses of literate people would mean a continued
   desecration of literature itself.

   In 1800 he returned to England and shortly thereafter settled with his
   family and friends at Keswick in the Lake District of Cumberland to be
   near Grasmere, where Wordsworth had moved. Soon, however, he was beset
   by marital problems, illnesses, increased opium dependency, tensions
   with Wordsworth, and a lack of confidence in his poetic powers, all of
   which fueled the composition of Dejection: An Ode and an
   intensification of his philosophical studies.

   From 1804 to 1806, Coleridge lived in Malta and travelled in Sicily and
   Italy, in the hope that leaving Britain's damp climate would improve
   his health and thus enable him to reduce his consumption of opium. For
   a while he had a civil-service job as the Public Secretary of the
   British administration of Malta, assisting governor Sir Alexander John
   Ball. Thomas de Quincey alleges in his Recollections of the Lakes and
   the Lake Poets that it was during this period that Coleridge became a
   full-blown opium addict, using the drug as a substitute for the lost
   vigour and creativity of his youth. It has been suggested, however,
   that this reflects de Quincey's own experiences more than Coleridge's.

   Between 1808 and 1819 this "giant among dwarfs", as he was often
   considered by his contemporaries, gave a series of lectures in London
   and Bristol – those on Shakespeare renewed interest in the playwright
   as a model for contemporary writers.

   In 1816 Coleridge, with his addiction worsening, his spirits depressed,
   and his family alienated, took residence in the home of the physician
   James Gillman, in Highgate. In Gillman's home he finished his major
   prose work, the Biographia Literaria ( 1817), a volume composed of 25
   chapters of autobiographical notes and dissertations on various
   subjects, including some incisive literary theory and criticism. The
   sections in which Coleridge expounded his definitions of the nature of
   poetry and the imagination are particularly important: he made a famous
   distinction between primary and secondary imagination on the one hand
   and fancy on the other. He published other writings while he was living
   at the Gillman home, notably Sibylline Leaves (1817), Aids to
   Reflection ( 1825), and Church and State ( 1830). He died of heart
   failure in Highgate on July 25, 1834.
   A statue of the Ancient Mariner at Watchet Harbour, Somerset, England,
   unveiled in September 2003 as a tribute to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.Ah !
   well a-day ! what evil looksHad I from old and young !Instead of the
   cross, the AlbatrossAbout my neck was hung.
   A statue of the Ancient Mariner at Watchet Harbour, Somerset, England,
   unveiled in September 2003 as a tribute to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
   Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
   Had I from old and young !
   Instead of the cross, the Albatross
   About my neck was hung.

Poetry

   Coleridge is probably best known for his long narrative poems, The Rime
   of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Even those who have never read
   the Rime have come under its influence: its words have given the
   English language the metaphor of an albatross around one's neck, the
   quotation of "water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink (almost
   always rendered as "but not a drop to drink")", and the phrase "a
   sadder and a wiser man (again, usually rendered as "sadder but wiser
   man")". Christabel is known for its musical rhythm, language, and its
   Gothic tale.

   Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream, A Fragment, although shorter, is
   also widely known and loved. It has strange, dreamy imagery and can be
   read on many levels. Both Kubla Khan and Christabel have additional
   "romantic" aura because they were never finished. Stopford Brooke
   characterised both poems as having no rival due to their "exquisite
   metrical movement" and "imaginative phrasing." It is one of history's
   tragedies that Coleridge was interrupted while writing Kubla Khan by a
   visitor and could not recall any more of the poem afterwards.

   Coleridge's 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.
   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.

   Coleridge's poetry so impressed the parents of black British composer
   Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) that they named him after the poet.

Coleridge and the influence of the Gothic

   Gothic novels like Polidori’s The Vampire, Walpole’s The Castle of
   Otranto, Mrs Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, and
   Matthew Lewis’s The Monk were the best-sellers of the end of the
   eighteenth century, and thrilled many young women (who were often
   strictly forbidden to read them). Jane Austen satirised the style
   mercilessly in Northanger Abbey.

   Coleridge wrote reviews of Mrs Radcliffe’s books and of The Mad Monk
   among others. He comments in his reviews:

     Situations of torment, and images of naked horror, are easily
     conceived; and a writer in whose works they abound, deserves our
     gratitude almost equally with him who should drag us by way of sport
     through a military hospital, or force us to sit at the
     dissecting-table of a natural philosopher. To trace the nice
     boundaries, beyond which terror and sympathy are deserted by the
     pleasurable emotions, - to reach those limits, yet never to pass
     them, hic labor, hic opus est.

   and:

     The horrible and the preternatural have usually seized on the
     popular taste, at the rise and decline of literature. Most powerful
     stimulants, they can never be required except by the torpor of an
     unawakened, or the languor of an exhausted, appetite... We trust,
     however, that satiety will banish what good sense should have
     prevented; and that, wearied with fiends, incomprehensible
     characters, with shrieks, murders, and subterraneous dungeons, the
     public will learn, by the multitude of the manufacturers, with how
     little expense of thought or imagination this species of composition
     is manufactured.

   However, Coleridge used mysterious and demonic elements in poems such
   as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Christabel and Kubla Khan
   (published 1816 but known in manuscript form before then) and certainly
   influenced other poets and writers of the time. Poems like this both
   drew inspiration from and helped to inflame the craze for Gothic
   romance.

   Mary Shelley, who knew Coleridge well, mentions The Rime of the Ancient
   Mariner twice directly in Frankenstein, and some of the descriptions in
   the novel echo it indirectly. Although William Godwin, her father,
   disagreed with Coleridge on some important issues, he respected his
   opinions and Coleridge often visited the Godwins. Mary Shelley later
   recalled hiding behind the sofa and hearing his voice chanting The Rime
   of the Ancient Mariner.

Family connections

   Coleridge was the father of Hartley Coleridge, Sara Coleridge, and
   Derwent Coleridge and grandfather of Herbert Coleridge, Ernest Hartley
   Coleridge and Christabel Coleridge. He was the uncle of the first Baron
   Coleridge. The poet Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861 - 1907) was his
   great-great niece. His nephew Henry Nelson Coleridge, who was an editor
   of his work, married Sara.
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