Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Brief Biography

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Brief Biography

Glenn Everett, Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee at Martin

In December 1793 he left school and joined the Dragoons (under the alias Silas Tomkyn Comerbacke), but kept falling off his horse. By the following April his brothers had found out where he was, bailed him out, and convinced him to return to Cambridge. That summer (1794) he left school again and met the poet Robert Southey, with whom he planned a utopian "Pantisocracy" to be established on the banks of the Susquehanna. The plan required that each participant be married, and Southey married Edith Fricker and Coleridge married her younger sister Sara. When the plans for the Pantisocracy fell through, the two of them were trapped in an uncongenial marriage.

By now Coleridge, who was earning his keep partly as a Unitarian preacher, had begun seriously to write poetry. He became close friends to William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, who moved to Alfoxden in 1797 to be near the Coleridges at Nether Stowey, and the two poets planned Lyrical Ballads, which appeared in 1798. Coleridge's most important contribution was "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." That same September the three of them visited Germany, a visit much more important to Coleridge than to Wordsworth. In Germany, Coleridge discovered Kant, Schiller, Schelling, A.W. Schlegel, and he came back to England imbued with the spirit of German Romantic thought.

In 1799 Coleridge joined the Wordsworths, who were staying at the Hutchinson farm in Durham. Wordsworth was waiting for an inheritance to be settled so he could wed Mary Hutchinson; and Coleridge fell in love with her sister Sara, who appears in his journals and poems as "Asra."

From the time of his marriage on, Coleridge was searching for a vocation that would pay the rent, although the annuity of £150 from the Wedgwoods eased these concerns after 1798 and meant that he did not need to take up a career as a Unitarian minister. It is interesting to speculate if he would have later returned to the Church of England without that timely annuity (see "Coleridge's religion").

Perhaps because he conceived such grand projects, he had difficulty carrying them through to completion, and he berated himself for his "indolence."  It is unclear whether his growing use of opium was a symptom or a cause of his growing depression. "Dejection: An Ode," written in 1802, expresses his despair at the loss of his creative powers. In 1804 he travelled to Sicily and Malta, working for a time as Acting Public Secretary of Malta under the Commissioner, Alexander Ball. He gave this up and returned to England in 1806; Dorothy Wordsworth was shocked at his condition upon his return. His opium addiction (he was using as much as two quarts of laudanum a week) now began to take over his life: he separated from his wife in 1808, quarrelled with Wordworth in 1810, lost part of his annuity in 1811, put himself under the care of Dr. Daniel in 1814, and finally moved in with Dr. Gilman in Highgate, London, where the doctor and his family managed for the next 18 years to keep his demon under control.

At this same time he was establishing himself as the most intellectual of the English Romantics, delivering an influential series of lectures on Shakespeare in the winter of 1811-12 and bringing out his Biographia Literaria in 1817. Among his contemporaries, he was best known as a talker, in the tradition of Samuel Johnson: his "Highgate Thursdays" became famous. He died July 25, 1834.

Kubla Khan (AUDIO-NORTON)

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. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round : And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover ! A savage place ! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover ! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced : Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail : And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean : And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war ! The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves ; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice ! A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw : It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome ! those caves of ice ! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware ! Beware ! His flashing eyes, his floating hair ! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.

( MANDATORY READING- DR, JEKYLL & MR.HYDE) Are you finished yet?