Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1772–1834
Biography
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, critic, philosopher and theologian. With William Wordsworth he is counted among the founders of the Romantic movement in England, and the two of them, together with Robert Southey, are known as the Lake Poets. He also worked with Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd.
Much of his life was marked by poor health, anxiety and depression. He was given laudanum, a tincture of opium, as a treatment, and it left him with a dependence on the drug that lasted for the rest of his life. Despite a turbulent career, his reputation grew after his death. His best-known poems are The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the unfinished 'Kubla Khan', and his prose work Biographia Literaria is a key text of literary theory. His criticism, above all on Shakespeare, was very influential, and he helped bring German idealist philosophy into England. He is credited with coining the phrase 'suspension of disbelief', and he had a lasting effect on Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American transcendentalists.
Two of his works are on this site. Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (1798) is the joint volume he produced with William Wordsworth, and it is often treated as the beginning of English Romantic poetry. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the poem he wrote for that volume, and it opens it. The catalogue credits the book to both men.
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Books
Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems
by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The 1798 volume that began English Romantic poetry puts Coleridge's Rime of the Ancyent Marinere beside Wordsworth's ballads of country life, among them We Are Seven, The Thorn and The Idiot Boy. It closes with the lines written above Tintern Abbey, and the spelling is that of…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A sailor stops a wedding guest to tell how, becalmed on a polar sea, he killed the albatross that had guided his ship, and how his shipmates died and the dead men rose to work the rigging. The poem is in seven parts and ends on the moral that he prayeth best who loveth best.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.