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Portrait of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Literature · Poets

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1772–1834 · English

Romanticism; Lake Poets

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a poet, critic and philosopher who, with Wordsworth, launched English Romanticism in Lyrical Ballads (1798). His handful of great poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan and Christabel, are among the most famous in English, and his Biographia Literaria made him a founding figure of modern literary criticism. Much of his life was shadowed by opium addiction, and his last years were spent in Highgate.

How to spot them

  • ▸The Ancient Mariner, the albatross and 'Water, water, every where'
  • ▸Kubla Khan, Xanadu and the 'person from Porlock'
  • ▸Biographia Literaria and the 'willing suspension of disbelief'
  • ▸Pantisocracy with Southey; enlisted in the dragoons as 'Silas Tomkyn Comberbache'

Key works

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)

Ballad of a sailor cursed for shooting an albatross, told to a wedding guest

Kubla Khan (1816 (written 1797 or 1798))

Visionary fragment on Xanadu and the sacred river Alph, said to have come in an opium dream

Christabel (1816)

Unfinished Gothic ballad about the mysterious Geraldine

Frost at Midnight (1798)

Conversation poem addressed to his sleeping infant son Hartley

This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison (1800 (written 1797))

Conversation poem written when an injury kept him home while friends walked

Dejection: An Ode (1802)

Ode lamenting the loss of his imaginative power

Biographia Literaria (1817)

Literary autobiography and criticism, distinguishing Imagination from Fancy

Key ideas

  • 'That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith' (Biographia Literaria)
  • Primary and secondary Imagination versus Fancy
  • Poetry as 'the best words in the best order' (Table Talk)
  • The 'conversation poem', a relaxed blank-verse meditation addressed to a listener

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, the youngest son of the vicar; schooled at Christ's Hospital with Charles Lamb
  • •Left Jesus College, Cambridge, without a degree and briefly enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons under a false name
  • •Planned with Robert Southey a utopian community ('Pantisocracy') on the Susquehanna River
  • •Married Sara Fricker, sister of Southey's wife Edith
  • •Claimed Kubla Khan was interrupted by 'a person on business from Porlock'
  • •From 1816 lived with the surgeon James Gillman in Highgate, where he died
  • •The Ancient Mariner's shooting of the albatross gives the phrase 'an albatross around one's neck'

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources