Authors: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In the fall of 1793 Coleridge left Cambridge and enlisted in the Light Dragoons. Discharged the following spring, he traveled in England and Wales. On a visit to Oxford he met Robert Southey, who was at the time another young radical. Both were sympathetic to the principles of the French Revolution, and together they devised the idea of starting a new social settlement free from the prejudices and influences of the English political system. This settlement, to be called a “Pantisocracy,” was to be on the banks of the Susquehanna River in the United States; however, lack of funds doomed the plan. Coleridge left Cambridge without a degree in 1794. In 1795 he married Sarah Fricker because the pantisocratic plan called for married emigrants.

In 1796 he published Poems on Various Subjects and for a few weeks edited the periodical The Watchman, in which he voiced the principles of the French Revolution and Godwinism. In the next year he settled in Nether Stowey, Somerset, and formed an intimate friendship with William Wordsworth. Together they conceived the idea of publishing the Lyrical Ballads, which, appearing in 1798, is considered a landmark in English literature. In many ways the several editions of Lyrical Ballads form the center of Romanticism in England.

The original plan of Lyrical Ballads was to upset and defy the old literary standards of the didactic school of Alexander Pope, as well as to appropriate and employ heretofore “feminine” ideas of sentimentality in the service of the sublime. Wanting poetic diction that would be synonymous with ordinary speech, Wordsworth and Coleridge dropped the couplet form and adapted the ballad form from folk songs of the countryside. A new type of character, the peasant, was introduced. Lyrical Ballads is simple in language and verse forms, and the poems present simple characters. One of Coleridge’s contributions, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, is its best ballad. As Coleridge later wrote in the Biographia Literaria, he took preternatural events with the intention of making them seem natural, just as Wordsworth took natural events and put over them a screen of imaginative wonder.

During a trip with Wordsworth to Germany, Coleridge attended lectures at the universities and became a student of German literature and philosophy. He studied Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Friedrich Schiller, and Immanuel Kant, all of whom he discusses at length in the Biographia Literaria. This interest led to his introduction of German philosophy into England. After his return to England in 1799 he produced a translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein.

Because of Coleridge’s chronic stomach pains, doctors prescribed laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol). He had become heavily addicted to the substance by 1801. In 1802 he wrote “Dejection, an Ode,” in which he seems to make up his mind that he never can be a great poet; at the time he was in a state of great depression. His attempt to recover his health at Malta, where he was secretary to Governor Sir Alexander Ball, failed. At home he became estranged from his friends and separated from his wife and children. He lived with friends until his death.

In 1808 he delivered a series of lectures at the Royal Institution of London, a course on William Shakespeare and John Milton, and another on the history of literature. Most of these exist today in fragmentary form only. The Friend, a periodical he began after five months of procrastination, is characteristic of the sick and destitute Coleridge. Advertised as a “weekly” essay on philosophical questions, politics, and allied subjects, it rarely came out on time and folded with the twenty-seventh issue. Coleridge published a revised edition of The Friend in 1818.

In a spurt of literary activity during the years 1816-1818, Coleridge published perhaps the single most important piece of literary criticism ever written in England. The Biographia Literaria, comprising two volumes of brilliant analysis mixed with rambling discussions and letters, is one of the premier achievements of the Romantic period and is still a monument to great literary criticism. Contained within its leaves is perhaps the best and most acute criticism of Wordsworth’s Second Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. However, the Biographia Literaria also contains much evidence of Coleridge’s undying admiration for Wordsworth.

Considered one of the foremost literary critics of the time, in his later years Coleridge set himself up as a kind of London sage, and with partial control over his opium use he began republishing in 1816, when his two most famous unfinished poems, Christabel and“Kubla Khan,” along with “Pains of Sleep,” appeared. Christabel is an example of the pseudo-medievalism that was popular with Romantic poets. In descriptive detail and ballad meter, Coleridge creates an atmosphere of superstition and pleasing horror. He tried to develop poetry in which the intellect is consciously left out, poetry of imagination and sensibility producing sheer mood.

During his last years Coleridge published Sibylline Leaves, Aids to Reflection, and On the Constitution of the Church and State, According to the Idea of Each: With Aids Toward a Right Judgment on the Late Catholic Bill. He died in poverty at Highgate, London, in 1834. Today he is recognized as one of the most important Church of England thinkers before the Oxford Movement as well as one of the greatest literary critics England has ever produced.