Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge (21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English
poet, critic and philosopher who was, along with his friend William
Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and
one of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as his major prose work
Biographia Literaria. After the death of his father in 1781, contrary to
his desires, he was sent to Christ's Hospital. The school was originally
founded in the 16th century in Greyfriars, London and Hertford. It is
now a boarding school in West Sussex. The school was notorious for its
unwelcoming atmosphere and strict regimen under the Rev. James Bowyer,
many years head master of the grammar school, which fostered thoughts of
guilt and depression in young Samuel's maturing mind.
However, Coleridge seems to have appreciated his teacher, as he wrote
in detailed recollections of his schooldays in Biographia Literaria:
“ I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at
the same time, a very severe master...At the same time that we were
studying the Greek Tragic Poets, he made us read Shakspeare and Milton
as lessons: and they were the lessons too, which required most time and
trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I learnt from him,
that Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly, that of the
wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and
more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on
more, and more fugitive causes....
In our own English compositions (at least for the last three years of
our school education) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image,
unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been
conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words... In fancy I can
almost hear him now, exclaiming Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you
mean! Muse, boy, Muse? your Nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring?
Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose! ... Be this as it may, there was
one custom of our master's, which I cannot pass over in silence, because
I think it ... worthy of imitation. He would often permit our theme
exercises, ... to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be
looked over. Then placing the whole number abreast on his desk, he would
ask the writer, why this or that sentence might not have found as
appropriate a place under this or that other thesis: and if no
satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same kind
were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, the
exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced, in
addition to the tasks of the day.
” Throughout life, Coleridge idealized his father as pious and
innocent, while his relationship with his mother was more problematic.
His childhood was characterized by attention seeking, which has been
linked to his dependent personality as an adult. He was rarely allowed
to return home during the school term, and this distance from his family
at such a turbulent time proved emotionally damaging. He later 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 November 1793, he left the college and enlisted in the Royal
Dragoons, perhaps because of debt or because the girl that he loved,
Mary Evans, had rejected him. Afterwards, he was rumored to have had a
bout with severe depression. His brothers arranged for his discharge a
few months later under the reason of "insanity" and he was readmitted to
Jesus College, though he would never receive a degree from Cambridge.
Pantisocracy and marriage
At the university, he was introduced to
political and theological ideas then considered radical, including those
of the poet Robert Southey. Coleridge joined Southey in a plan, soon
abandoned, to found a utopian commune-like society, called pantisocracy,
in the wilderness of Pennsylvania.
In 1795, the two friends married sisters Sara and Edith Fricker, but
Coleridge's marriage proved unhappy. He grew to detest his wife, whom he
only married because of social constraints. He eventually divorced her.
The years 1797 and 1798, during which he lived in what is now known
as Coleridge Cottage, in Nether Stowey, Somerset, were among the most
fruitful of Coleridge's life. In 1795, Coleridge met poet William
Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. (Wordsworth, having visited him and
being enchanted by the surroundings, rented Alfoxton Park, a little over
three miles [5 km] away.) Besides the Rime of The Ancient Mariner, he
composed the symbolic poem Kubla Khan, written—Coleridge himself
claimed—as a result of an opium dream, in "a kind of a reverie"; and the
first part of the narrative poem Christabel. The writing of Kubla Khan,
written about the Asian emperor Kublai Khan, was said to have been
interrupted by the arrival of a "Person from Porlock"—an event that has
been embellished upon in such varied contexts as science fiction and
Nabokov's Lolita. During this period, he also produced his much-praised
"conversation" poems This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Frost at Midnight,
and The Nightingale.
In 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth published a
joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads, which proved to be the starting
point for the English romantic movement. Though the productive
Wordsworth contributed more poems, Coleridge's first version of The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner was the longest poem and drew more immediate
attention than anything else in the volume.
In the spring of 1798, Coleridge temporarily took over for Rev.
Joshua Toulmin at Taunton's Mary Street Unitarian Chapel[1] while Rev.
Toulmin grieved over the drowning death of his daughter Jane. Poetically
commenting on Toulmin's strength, Coleridge wrote in a 1798 letter to
John Prior Estlin,[2]
I walked into Taunton (eleven miles) and back again, and performed
the divine services for Dr. Toulmin. I suppose you must have heard that
his daughter, (Jane, on 15 April 1798) in a melancholy derangement,
suffered herself to be swallowed up by the tide on the sea-coast between
Sidmouth and Bere (sic. Beer). These events cut cruelly into the hearts
of old men: but the good Dr. Toulmin bears it like the true practical
Christian, - there is indeed a tear in his eye, but that eye is lifted
up to the Heavenly Father.[3]
In the autumn of 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth left for a stay in
Germany; Coleridge soon went his own way and spent much of his time in
university towns. During this period, he became interested in German
philosophy, especially the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, and
in the literary criticism of the 18th century dramatist Gotthold
Lessing. Coleridge studied German and, after his return to England,
translated the dramatic trilogy Wallenstein by the German Classical poet
Friedrich Schiller into English.
In 1799, Coleridge and Wordsworth stayed at Thomas Hutchinson's farm
on the Tees at Sockburn, near Darlington. There both of them fell in
love, Coleridge with Sara Hutchinson ('Asra'), and Wordsworth with her
sister Mary, whom he married in 1802.
It was at Sockburn that Coleridge wrote his ballad-poem Love,
addressed to Sara. The knight mentioned is the mailed figure on the
Conyers tomb in ruined Sockburn church. The figure has a wyvern at his
feet, a reference to the Sockburn worm slain by Sir John Conyers (and a
possible source for Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky). The worm was
supposedly buried under the rock in the nearby pasture; this was the
'greystone' of Coleridge's first draft, later transformed into a
'mount'. The poem was a direct inspiration for John Keats' famous poem
La Belle Dame Sans Merci. [4]
Coleridge's greatest intellectual debts were first to William
Godwin's Political Justice, especially during his Pantisocratic period,
and to David Hartley's Observations on Man, which is the source of the
psychology which is found in Frost at Midnight. Hartley argued that one
becomes aware of sensory events as impressions, and that "ideas" are
derived by noticing similarities and differences between impressions and
then by naming them. Connections resulting from the coincidence of
impressions create linkages, so that the occurrence of one impression
triggers those links and calls up the memory of those ideas with which
it is associated (See Dorothy Emmet, "Coleridge and Philosophy").
Coleridge was critical of the literary taste of his contemporaries,
and a literary conservative insofar as he was afraid that the lack of
taste in the ever growing masses of literate people would mean a
continued desecration of literature itself.
In 1800, he returned to England and shortly thereafter settled with
his family and friends at Keswick in the Lake District of Cumberland to
be near Grasmere, where Wordsworth had moved. Soon, however, he was
beset by marital problems, illnesses, increased opium dependency,
tensions with Wordsworth, and a lack of confidence in his poetic powers,
all of which fueled the composition of Dejection: An Ode and an
intensification of his philosophical studies.
Drug use
In 1804, he traveled 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. From 1807 to 1808, Coleridge
returned to Malta and then traveled in Sicily and Italy, in the hope
that leaving Britain's damp climate would improve his health and thus
enable him to reduce his consumption of opium. Thomas de Quincey alleges
in his Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets that it was during
this period that Coleridge became a full-blown opium addict, using the
drug as a substitute for the lost vigour and creativity of his youth. It
has been suggested, however, that this reflects de Quincey's own
experiences more than Coleridge's.
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, quarreled with Wordsworth in 1810, lost part of his annuity in
1811, and put himself under the care of Dr. Daniel in 1814.
In 1809, Coleridge instigated his second attempt to become a
newspaper publisher with the publication of the journal entitled The
Friend. It was a weekly publication that, in Coleridge’s typically
ambitious style, was written, edited, and published almost entirely
single-handedly. Given that Coleridge tended to be highly disorganized
and had no head for business, the publication was probably doomed from
the start. Coleridge financed the journal by selling over five hundred
subscriptions, over two dozen of which were sold to members of
Parliament, but in late 1809, publication was crippled by a financial
crisis and Coleridge was obliged to approach "Conversation Sharp"[5],
Tom Poole and one or two other wealthy friends for an emergency loan in
order to continue. The Friend was an eclectic publication that drew upon
every corner of Coleridge’s remarkably diverse knowledge of law,
philosophy, morals, politics, history, and literary criticism. Although
it was often turgid, rambling, and inaccessible to most readers, it ran
for 25 issues and was republished in book form a number of times. Years
after its initial publication, The Friend became a highly influential
work and its effect was felt on writers and philosophers from J.S. Mill
to Emerson.
Between 1810 and 1820, this "giant among dwarfs", as he was often
considered by his contemporaries, gave a series of lectures in London
and Bristol – those on Shakespeare renewed interest in the playwright as
a model for contemporary writers. Much of Coleridge's reputation as a
literary critic is founded on the lectures that he undertook in the
winter of 1810-11 which were sponsored by the Philosophical Institution
and given at Scot's Corporation Hall off Fetter Lane, Fleet Street.
These lectures were heralded in the prospectus as "A Course of Lectures
on Shakespeare and Milton, in Illustration of the Principles of Poetry."
Coleridge's ill-health, opium-addiction problems, and somewhat unstable
personality meant that all his lectures were plagued with problems of
delays and a general irregularity of quality from one lecture to the
next. Furthermore, Coleridge's mind was extremely dynamic and his
personality was spasmodic. As a result of these factors, Coleridge often
failed to prepare anything but the loosest set of notes for his lectures
and regularly entered into extremely long digressions which his
audiences found difficult to follow. However, it was the lecture on
Hamlet given on 2 January 1812 that was considered the best and has
influenced Hamlet studies ever since. Before Coleridge, Hamlet was often
denigrated and belittled by critics from Voltaire to Dr. Johnson.
Coleridge rescued Hamlet and his thoughts on the play are often still
published as supplements to the text.
In August 1814, Coleridge was approached by Lord Byron's publisher,
John Murray, about the possibility of translating Goethe's infamous cult
classic Faust (1808). Coleridge was regarded by many as the greatest
living writer on the demonic and he accepted the commission, only to
abandon work on it after six weeks. Until recently, scholars have
accepted that Coleridge never returned to the project, despite Goethe's
own belief in the 1820s that Coleridge had in fact completed a long
translation of the work. In September 2007, Oxford University Press
sparked a heated scholarly controversy by publishing an English
translation of Goethe's work which purported to be Coleridge's long-lost
masterpiece. The text in question first appeared anonymously in 1821.[6]
In 1817, Coleridge, with his addiction worsening, his spirits
depressed, and his family alienated, took residence in the home of the
physician James Gillman, first at South Grove and later at the nearby 3
The Grove, Highgate, London, England. He remained there for the rest of
his life, and the house became a place of literary pilgrimage of writers
including Carlyle and Emerson. In Gillman's home, he finished his major
prose work, the Biographia Literaria (1815), a volume composed of 23
chapters of autobiographical notes and dissertations on various
subjects, including some incisive literary theory and criticism. He
composed much poetry here and had many inspirations — a few of them from
opium overdose. 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 (and
the brandy in which it was dissolved) was a symptom or a cause of his
growing depression.
He published other writings while he was living at the Gillman home,
notably Sibylline Leaves (1820), Aids to Reflection (1823), and Church
and State (1826). He died of a lung disorder including some heart
failure from the opium that he was taking in Highgate on 25 July 1834.
Coleridge had spent 18 years under the roof of the Gillman family, who
built an addition onto their home to accommodate the poet.
Poetry
Coleridge is probably best known for his long poems, The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Even those who have never read the Rime
have come under its influence: its words have given the English language
the metaphor of an albatross around one's neck, the quotation of "water,
water everywhere, nor any drop to drink (almost always rendered as "but
not a drop to drink")", and the phrase "a sadder and a wiser man (again,
usually rendered as "sadder but wiser man")". Christabel is known for
its musical rhythm, language, and its Gothic tale.
Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream, A Fragment, although shorter, is
also widely known. Both Kubla Khan and Christabel have an additional
"romantic" aura because they were never finished. Stopford Brooke
characterised both poems as having no rival due to their "exquisite
metrical movement" and "imaginative phrasing."
Coleridge's shorter, meditative "conversation poems," however, proved
to be the most influential of his work. These include both quiet poems
like This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison and Frost at Midnight and also
strongly emotional poems like Dejection and The Pains of Sleep.
Wordsworth immediately adopted the model of these poems, and used it to
compose several of his major poems. Via Wordsworth, the conversation
poem became a standard vehicle for English poetic expression, and
perhaps the most common approach among modern poets.The Eolian Harp,
Speaking symbolically in terms of harp and breeze, Coleridge's
implication is that each being is but a single part of the world-soul or
over-spirit that emanates from the One. It is interesting to note that
Coleridge for the moment feels he has ventured too far, for he then
retracts "these shapings of the unregenerate mind," and concludes the
poem vowing to forsake "vain philosophy's aye-babbling spring."
Despite not enjoying the name recognition or popular acclaim that
Wordsworth or Shelley have had, Coleridge is one of the most important
figures in English poetry. His poems directly and deeply influenced all
the major poets of the age. He was known by his contemporaries as a
meticulous craftsman who was more rigorous in his careful reworking of
his poems than any other poet, and Southey and Wordsworth were dependent
on his professional advice. His influence on Wordsworth is particularly
important because many critics have credited Coleridge with the very
idea of "Conversational Poetry". The idea of utilizing common, everyday
language to express profound poetic images and ideas for which
Wordsworth became so famous may have originated almost entirely in
Coleridge’s mind. It is difficult to imagine Wordsworth’s great poems,
The Excursion or The Prelude, ever having been written without the
direct influence of Coleridge’s originality.
And as important as Coleridge was to poetry as a poet, he was equally
important to poetry as a critic. Coleridge's philosophy of poetry, which
he developed over many years, has been deeply influential in the field
of literary criticism. This influence can be seen in such critics as
A.O. Lovejoy and I.A. Richards.
Coleridge and the influence of the Gothic
Gothic novels like Polidori’s The Vampire, Walpole’s The Castle of
Otranto, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, and
Matthew Lewis’s The Monk were the best-sellers of the end of the
eighteenth century, and thrilled many young women (who were often
strictly forbidden to read them). Jane Austen satirized the style
mercilessly in Northanger Abbey.
Coleridge wrote reviews of Mrs Radcliffe’s books and The Mad Monk,
among others. He comments in his reviews:
“ Situations of torment, and images of naked horror, are easily
conceived; and a writer in whose works they abound, deserves our
gratitude almost equally with him who should drag us by way of sport
through a military hospital, or force us to sit at the dissecting-table
of a natural philosopher. To trace the nice boundaries, beyond which
terror and sympathy are deserted by the pleasurable emotions, - to reach
those limits, yet never to pass them, hic labor, hic opus est. ”
and:
“ The horrible and the preternatural have usually seized on the
popular taste, at the rise and decline of literature. Most powerful
stimulants, they can never be required except by the torpor of an
unawakened, or the languor of an exhausted, appetite... We trust,
however, that satiety will banish what good sense should have prevented;
and that, wearied with fiends, incomprehensible characters, with
shrieks, murders, and subterraneous dungeons, the public will learn, by
the multitude of the manufacturers, with how little expense of thought
or imagination this species of composition is manufactured. ”
However, Coleridge used these elements in poems such as The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner (1798), Christabel and Kubla Khan (published in
1816, but known in manuscript form before then) and certainly influenced
other poets and writers of the time. Poems like this both drew
inspiration from and helped to inflame the craze for Gothic romance.
Mary Shelley, who knew Coleridge well, mentions The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner twice directly in Frankenstein, and some of the descriptions in
the novel echo it indirectly. Although William Godwin, her father,
disagreed with Coleridge on some important issues, he respected his
opinions and Coleridge often visited the Godwins. Mary Shelley later
recalled hiding behind the sofa and hearing his voice chanting The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner.
