COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR (I English poet and philosopher, was born on Oct. 21, 1772, at his father's vicarage of Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire. His father, the Rev. John Coleridge (1719-1 781), described by the poet as "a perfect Parson Adams," was known for his scholarship, simplicity of char acter, and affectionate interest in the pupils of the grammar school, of which he was appointed master a few months before becoming vicar of the parish (176o). The poet was the youngest child of his second wife, Anne Bowdon (d. 1809), a woman of great good sense, who saw to it that Samuel should be educated for the church as his father intended, and as three of his elder brothers had been before him. On the death of his father an old pupil of the latter secured for Samuel a presentation to Christ's Hospital, where he continued for eight years. Of these school-days Charles Lamb has given delightful glimpses in the Essays of Elia. For merly a fretful and timorous child, Samuel became a compara tively happy schoolboy, though often ailing. The headmaster, Boyer, a severe disciplinarian, pushed him watchfully. Some of his compositions in English verse written at 16 give evidence of the influence of Bowles, to which he has testified in his Biographia Literaria.
In Feb. 1791 he was entered as a sizar at Jesus college, Cam bridge, and went into residence in October. A schoolfellow who followed him to the university has told how in the evenings, in his rooms, he and his friends would put aside their work to discuss as they appeared, the new pamphlets of Burke, which Coleridge ab-. sorbed immediately. At that stage he was warmly democratic. William Frend, a fellow of Jesus, accused of sedition and Uni tarianism, was at this time tried and banished, though not technically expelled from Cambridge. Coleridge had imbibed his sentiments, and joined the ranks of his partisans. He grew dis contented with university life, and in 1793, pressed by debt, went to London. A poem in the Morning Chronicle brought him a guinea, and when that was spent he enlisted in the 15th Dragoons under the name of Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke, revealing at once an absolute unfitness for an army career. Shortly afterwards an old school-fellow (G. L. Tuckett) heard of his whereabouts, and by the intervention of his brother, Captain James Coleridge, his discharge was procured. He returned for a short time to Cam bridge, but quitted the university without a degree in 1794. In the same year he visited Oxford, and after a short tour in Wales went to Bristol, where he met Southey. The French Revo'_ution had captivated Southey, and Coleridge received with rapture his new friend's scheme of Pantisocracy. On the banks of the Susque hanna was to be founded a brotherly community, where selfishness was to be extinguished, and the virtues were to reign supreme. No funds were forthcoming; end in 1795, to the chagrin of Coleridge, who seems to have bitterly blamed Southey, the scheme was dropped. In 1794 appeared The Fall of Robespierre, of which Coleridge wrote the first act and Southey the other two. At Bristol Coleridge formed the acquaintance of Joseph Cottle, the bookseller, who offered him thirty guineas for a volume of poems. In October of 1795 Coleridge married Sarah Fricker, and took up his residence at Clevedon on the Bristol channel. A few weeks afterwards Southey married a sister of Mrs. Coleridge, and on the same day quitted England for Portugal.
One evening at Watchett on the Bristol Channel, The Ancient Mariner first took shape. Coleridge was anxious to embody a dream of a friend, and the suggestion of the shooting of the alba tross came from Wordsworth, who gained the idea from Shel vocke's Voyage (1726). A joint volume was planned. Words worth was to show the real poetry that lies hidden in common place subjects, while Coleridge was to treat supernatural subjects to illustrate the common emotions of humanity. From this sprang the Lyrical Ballads, to which Coleridge contributed The Ancient Mariner, the Nightingale and two scenes from Osorio, and after much cogitation the book was published in 1798 at Bristol by Cottle. A second edition of the Lyrical Ballads in 180o included another poem by Coleridge—Love, to which subsequently the sub title was given of An Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie. To the Stowey period belong also the tragedy of Osorio (after wards known as Remorse), Kubla Khan, and the first part of Christabel. In 1798 an annuity, granted him by the brothers Wedgwood, led Coleridge to abandon his reluctantly formed inten tion of becoming a Unitarian minister. For many years he had desired to see the continent, and in September 1798, in company with Wordsworth and his sister, he left England for Hamburg. Satyrane's Letters (republished in Biog. Lit. 1817) give an account of the tour.
In 18oi begins the period of Coleridge's life during which he sank more and more under the dominion of opium, in which he may have first indulged at Cambridge. Few things are so sad to read as the letters in which he details the consequences of his obsession. He was occasionally seen in London during the first years of the century, and wherever he appeared he was the delight of admiring circles. He toured in Scotland with the Wordsworths in 1803, visited Malta in 1804, when for ten months he acted as secretary to the governor, and stayed nearly eight months at Naples and Rome in 18o5–o6. In Rome he received a hint that his articles in the Morning Post had been brought to Napoleon's notice, and he made the voyage from Leghorn in an American ship. On a visit to Somersetshire in i8o7 he met De Quincey for the first time, and the younger man's admiration was shown by a gift of i3oo, "from an unknown friend." In 1809 he started a magazine called The Friend, which continued only for eight months. At the same time he began to contribute to the Courier. In 18o8 he lectured at the Royal Institution, but with little suc cess, and three years later he gave his lectures on Shakespeare and other poets. These lectures attracted great attention and were fol lowed by two other series. In 1812 his income from the Wedg woods was reduced, and he settled the remainder on his wife. His friends were generous in assisting him with money, and eventu ally, in 1824, some of them obtained a grant of oo a year for him during the lifetime of George IV., as one of the royal asso ciates of the Society of Literature, while his children shared Southey's home at Keswick. But between 1812 and 1817 Cole ridge made a good deal by his work, and was able to send money to his wife in addition to the annuity she received. The tragedy of Remorse was produced at Drury Lane in 1813, and met with con siderable success.
Three years after this, having failed to conquer the opium habit, he determined to enter the family of James Gillman, who lived at Highgate. For the rest of his life he hardly ever left this home. During his residence there, Christabel, written many years before, and known to a favoured few, was first published in a volume with Kubla Khan and the Pains of Sleep in 1816. In 1816 and the following year, he gave his Lay Sermons to the world. Sibylline Leaves appeared in 1817; the Biographia Literaria and a revised edition of The Friend soon followed. Eight years afterwards his most popular prose work—the Aids to Reflection—first appeared. His last publication, in 183o, was the work on Church and State. It was not till 184o that his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, his most seminal work, was posthumously published. In 1833 he appeared at the meeting of the British Association at Cambridge, but he died in the following year (July 25, 1834), and was buried in the churchyard close to the house of Gillman, where he had enjoyed every consolation which friendship and love could render. Coleridge died in the communion of the Church of England, of whose polity and teaching he had been for many years a loving admirer. An interesting letter to his god-child, written twelve days before his death, sums up his spiritual experience in a most touching form.
To the extraordinary influence which he exercised in conversa tion there are many testimonies. Many of the most remarkable among the younger men of that period resorted to Highgate as to the shrine of an oracle; and although one or two disparaging judgments, such as that of Carlyle, have been recorded, there can be no doubt that since Samuel Johnson there had been no such intellectual power in England. His nephew, Henry Nelson Cole ridge, gathered together many specimens of the Table Talk of the few last years. Four volumes of Literary Remains were published after his death, and these, along with the chapters on the poetry of Wordsworth in the Biographia Literaria, may be said to exhibit the full range of Coleridge's power as a critic of poetry. In this region he stands supreme, ranking as the creator in England of that higher criticism which had already in Germany accomplished so much in the hands of Lessing and Goethe. The fragmentary series of his Shakespearian criticisms gives evidence of the truest insight, and an original appreciation of the judicial "sanity" which raises the greatest name in literature above even the highest of the poets who approached him.
As a poet Coleridge's own place in the great gallery of English poets is secure. Of no one can it be more emphatically said that at his highest he was "of imagination all compact." The whole soul of the poet is reflected in the Ode to Dejection. The well known lines 0 Lady ! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live ; Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud, with the passage which follows, express more vividly, perhaps, than anything which Coleridge had written, the shaping and colouring function which he assigns, in the Biographia Literaria, to imagination. Christabel and the Ancient Mariner have so com pletely taken possession of the highest place, that it is needless to do more than allude to them. The supernatural has never received such treatment as in these two wonderful productions of his genius, and though the first of them remains a torso, it is the loveliest torso in the gallery of English literature. Although Coleridge had, for many years before his death, almost entirely forsaken poetry, the few fragments of work which remain, written in later years, show little trace of weakness, although they are wanting in the unearthly melody which imparts such a charm to Kubla Khan, Love and Youth and Age.
It is chiefly as a personality and as a thinker that Coleridge has incurred disparaging criticism. The infirmity of will and the "sloth" to which he sadly confessed have been the subject of many homilies; and even eulogists have to avow that his works in mass are a "collection of fragments," to say nothing of a hundred large plans never fulfilled. But in the light of the biographical study of the last generation, he can be seen as the victim of heredity and malady, his rare powers and his inefficiencies being alike innate, and the opium-eating a fatal consequence. That he laboured under a vital cardiac weakness seems certain. In his vivid accounts of his childhood he has revealed himself as a "dreamer," living in the world of his strange imagination, and singularly responsive through that faculty to every stimulus received from his manifold reading. His poetry and his philosophy are thus alike to be seen as shaped at once by his bias and his culture.
In his youth he was poetically dominated by Bowles, because Bowles was the first of the modern innovating poets who had come in his way. Of Blake and Burns, and even of Cowper, at that stage he knew nothing. An American student has latterly revealed how the Ancient Mariner was coloured in diction and in conception by his reading, and then perfected by his fine critical faculty. His philosophy may be viewed in the same fashion. All the notable ideas which came to him took possession in turn of his imgination, only to be transformed continuously. As he truly said of himself, his mind was always "energic," as distinguished from "energetic." Save in his many hours of misery or utter lassitude, it was constantly at work creatively on the material of his reading, and its uncontrolled play has yielded a remarkable harvest of criticism and speculation, couched in a prose stamped at once with intensive feeling and skill of phrase. Hence the stirring quality of his influence.
In the latter part of his life, and for the generation which fol lowed, Coleridge was ranked by many young English churchmen of liberal views as the greatest religious thinker of their time. Among those he thus fascinated was the abnormal Edward Irving. As Carlyle has told in his Life of Sterling, the poet's distinction, in the eyes of his audience, lay in his having recovered and pre served his Christian faith after having passed through periods of rationalism and Unitarianism, and faced the full results of German criticism and philosophy. His opinions, however, were at all periods mutable, and it would be difficult to state them in any form that would hold good for the whole even of his later writings. He was, indeed, too receptive of thought impressions of all kinds to be a consistent systematizer. From his early Unitarianism he gradually moved towards pantheism, a way of thought to which he had shown remarkable leanings when, as a schoolboy, he dis coursed of Neoplatonism to Charles Lamb. Early in life, too, he met with the doctrines of Jacob Behmen, of whom, in the Bio graphia Literaria, he speaks with affection and gratitude as having given him vital philosophic guidance. In the Aids to Reflection he disparages him. Between pantheism and Unitarianism he seems to have balanced till his thirty-fifth year, always tending towards the former in virtue of the recoil from "anthropomorphism," which originally took him to Unitariauism. In 1796, when he named his first child David Hartley, but would not have him bap tized, he held by the "Christian materialism" of the writer in question, whom in his Religious Musings he terms "wisest of mortal kind." When, again, he met Wordsworth in 1797, the two poets sym pathetically discussed Spinoza, for whom Coleridge always retained an admiration; and when in 1798 he gave up his Unita rian preaching, he named his second child Berkeley, signifying a new allegiance, but still without accepting Christian rites other wise than passively. Shortly afterwards he went to Germany, where he began to study Kant, and was much impressed by Les sing. In the Biographia he avows that the writings of Kant "more than any other work, at once invigorated and disciplined my understanding." But after his stay at Malta, he announced to his friends that he had given up his "Socinianism" (of which ever afterwards he spoke with asperity), professing a return to Chris tian faith, though still putting on it a mystical construction, as when he told Crabb Robinson that "Jesus Christ was a Platonic philosopher." At this stage he was in sympathy with the historico rationalistic criticism of the Old Testament, as carried on in Ger many. From about 1810 onwards, however, he openly professed Christian orthodoxy, while privately indicating views which can not be so described. And even his published speculations were such as to draw from J. H. Newman a protest that they took "a liberty which no Christian can tolerate," and carried him to "con clusions which were often heathen rather than Christian." The explanation seems to be that while on Christian grounds he repeatedly denounced pantheism as being in all its forms equivalent to atheism, he was latterly much swayed by the thought of Schelling in the pantheistic direction which was natural to him. It would seem that, in the extreme spiritual vicissitudes of his life, conscious alternately of personal weakness and of the largest speculative grasp, he often threw himself entirely on the consola tions of evangelical faith, and at times reconstructed the cosmos for himself in terms of Neo-Platonism and the philosophy of Schelling. So great were his variations, even in his latter years, that he could speak to his friend Allsop in a highly latitudinarian sense. From Schelling, whom he praised as having developed Kant where Fichte failed to do so, he borrowed much and often, not only in the metaphysical sections of the Biographic but in his aesthetic lectures, and further in the cosmic speculations of the posthumous Theory of Life. On the first score he makes but an equivocal acknowledgment, claiming to have thought on Schelling's lines before reading him; but it has been shown by Hamilton and Ferrier that besides transcribing much from Schelling without avowal he silently appropriated the learning of Maass on philo sophical history. In other directions he laid under tribute Herder and Lessing; yet all the while he cast severe imputations of plagia rism upon Hume and others. His own plagiarisms were doubtless facilitated by the physiological effects of opium.
Inasmuch as his philosophy satisfied neither the logical needs appealed to by Hegel nor the new demand for naturalistic induc tion, Coleridge, after arousing a great amount of philosophic inter est in his own country in the second quarter of the century, has ceased to "make a school." Thus his significance in intellectual history remains that of a great stimulator. He undoubtedly did much to deepen and liberalize Christian thought in England, his influence being specially marked in the school of F. D. Maurice, and in the lives of men like John Sterling.
Of Coleridge's four children, two (Hartley and Sara) are separ ately noticed. His second child, Berkeley, died in infancy. The third, Derwent (1800-1883 ), a distinguished scholar and author, was master of Helston school, Cornwall (1825-1841), first prin cipal of St. Mark's college, Chelsea (1841-1864), and rector of Hanwell (1864-188o) ; and his daughter Christabel (b. 1843) and son Ernest Hartley (q.v.), both became well known in the world of letters, the former as a novelist, the latter as a biographer, editor and critic.
After Coleridge's death several of his works were edited by his nephew, Henry Nelson Coleridge, the husband of Sara, the poet's only daughter. In 18.17 Sara Coleridge published the Biographia Literaria, enriched with annotations and biographical supplement, begun by her husband and finished by her. Three volumes of Coleridge's political writings, entitled Essays on his Own Times, were also published by Sara Coleridge in 185o. The standard life of Coleridge is that by J. Dykes Campbell (1894) ; his letters were edited by E. H. Coleridge (1895) . The Anima Poetae, edited by the latter (1895) is a compilation from Coleridge's notebooks. The Biographia Epistolaris, edited by A. Turnbull (2 vols., 1911) is a reprint of the Biog. Supp. to the Biographia Literaria, with additional letters and elucidations. Of monographs on Coleridge the most im portant are that of H. D. Traill ("English Men of Letters" series) and that of Joseph Aynard, La Vie d'un (Paris, 1907). The work of J. L. Lowes, The Road to Xanadu, a Study in the Ways of the Imagination (1927), is an important research. See also J. Char pentier, Coleridge, the Sublime Somnambulist (1929). (J. M. R.)