Samuel Taylor Coleridge (21
October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic and
philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the
Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He wrote the
poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major
prose work Biographia
Literaria. His critical work, especially on
Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German
idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture.
Throughout his adult life Coleridge had crippling bouts of
anxiety and depression; it has been speculated that he had bipolar disorder, He
was treated for these conditions with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium
addiction.
He 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,Cambridge. In
1792, he won the Browne Gold Medal for an ode that he wrote on the slave trade. In December 1793, he left the
college and enlisted in the Royal Dragons using the false name "Silas
Tomkyn Comberbache".
The Watchman,
to be printed every eight days to avoid a weekly newspaper tax. The first
issue of the short-lived journal was published in March 1796.
In 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth published a joint volume
of poetry, Lyrical
Ballads, which proved to be the starting
point for the English romantic age. Wordsworth may have contributed more poems,
but the real star of the collection was Coleridge's first version of The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner.
Coleridge died in Highgate, London on 25 July 1834 as a
result of heart failure compounded by an unknown lung disorder, possibly linked
to his use of opium. Coleridge had spent 18 years under the roof of the Gillman
family, who built an addition onto their home to accommodate the poet.
The Conversation poems
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Collected works
A current standard edition is The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited
by Kathleen Coburn and many other editors (1969–2002),
which appeared (from Princeton University Press and Routledge and Kegan Paul)
in Bollingen Series 75, in 16 volumes, broken down as follows into further
volumes and parts, to a total of 34 separate printed volumes:
- 1. Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion (1971);
- 2. The Watchman (1970);
- 3. Essays on his Times in the Morning Post and the Courier (1978) in 3 vols;
- 4. The Friend (1969) in 2 vols;
- 5. Lectures, 1808–1819, on Literature (1987) in 2 vols;
- 6. Lay Sermons (1972);
- 7. Biographia Literaria (1983) in 2 vols;
- 8. Lectures 1818–1819 on the History of Philosophy (2000) in 2 vols;
- 9. Aids to Reflection (1993);
- 10. On the Constitution of the Church and State (1976);
- 11. Shorter Works and Fragments (1995) in 2 vols;
- 12. Marginalia (1980 and following) in 6 vols;
- 13. Logic (1981);
- 14. Table Talk (1990) in 2 vols;
- 15. Opus Maximum (2002);
- 16. Poetical Works (2001) in 6 vols (part1 Reading Edition in 2 vols; part
2 Variorum Text in 2 vols; part 3 Plays in 2 vols).
