COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor, English poet and critic: b. Ottery Saint Mary, near Exeter, in Devonshire, England, 21 Oct. 1772; d. Highgate, London, 25 July 1834.. It is cus tomary to divide Coleridge's life into three periods, according to the prevailing interest of each; most of his poetry was written before the close of 1798; from that year till 1818 he was chiefly interested in criticism ; and the last 16 years of his life were given mainly to meta physical studies. As in the case of De Quincey, the first part of his life usually receives by far the.more attention, and the interest of the last period resolves itself into an account of his wntings.
He was the son of the Rev. John Coleridge, vicar of Ottery Saint Mary, a man inclined to mysticism and transcendentalism, but also a pretty successful school teacher, and his second wife, Anne Bowden, a competent woman of much common-sense. Coleridge, the youngest of 10 by this marriage, was the precocious one of the family and was regarded as a prodigy for his early attainments. His amusements were reading and dreaming and he early showed a marked liking for mysterious and spiritual things. In 1782, after schooling at his native place, he was sent to Christ's Hospital for eight years, where he was subjected to a rigorous intellectual discipline at the hands of the Rev. James Boyer, of whose methods he spoke with respect in (Biographia Literaria.' At school he left a tradition, preserved by Lamb, of his intellectual and spiritual attainments. At Jesus College, Cambridge: which he entered in 1791 with a .view to taking orders, he gained some distinction as a writer of Latin and Greek, read a great deal, particularly in the philoso phers Berkeley and Hartley, and absorbed and advocated the doctrines of the French Revolu tion. This last brought him such notoriety that, in the fall of 1793, he ran away incognito to London, and enlisted in a company of dragoons, but weary of this experiment, obtained his release the following spring. The following summer he tramped about in England and Wales, made the acquaintance of Southey (q.v.), with whom he devised the uPantisocracys scheme for a social settlement on the banks of the Susquehanna, became engaged to Sarah Fricker, the sister of Southey's fiancee, and definitely terminated his university career. The
year was an active and somewhat critical one. It was followed by his addresses on political subjects 'Conciones ad Populum, or Addresses to the People' (1795), which preached liberty, praised revolutionary doctrines and condemned government. By his marriage (1795), his edi torial venture on the Watchman (March to May 1796), in which he tried to expound true opinions on such subjects as the principles of the French Revolution, Godwin's ideas and the like, and, more important, by his settlement in Nether Stowey, Somerset, in 1797, where he came in contact with Wordsworth, a new and important period in his literary life was ushered in.
The meeting with Wordsworth had import ant results in English literature, for it led, in 1798, to the publication of the Ballads.' Coleridge's own contribution to this volume, designed by its authors to change poet ical taste, was his masterpiece, 'The Ancient Mariner.' The year practically marks the end of his poetical production, though the famous Thristabel' was not finished till two years later, and remained unpublished till 1816. Cole ridge had previously written many poems; many of these were published in 1796 and 1797, under the title (Poems on Various Subjects,' and he had also tried his hand at several dramas. Aside from the masterly (Ancient Mariner,' ThristabeP and (Kubla Khan,' on which, to gether with a few others, his fame as a poet rests, the poems are chiefly interesting as show ing the tenor of Coleridge's mind. In substance they are what is generally termed romantic, and are almost always treated with a view to ex pressing some underlying mystery. In style they might be called accumulative, in that they progress by the piling up of a great number of images, and in many respects they imitate the epithetical manner of Gray, but are less suc cessful and less restrained. The great poems named are, of course, among the most original in the language. 1797-98 was the poet's golden year.