3 Poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) Born October 21, 1772 in Devon, England, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the third of three children born of his father’s second wife. His father, a vicar, had had ten children with his first wife. He died when Coleridge was eight. Coleridge attended the charity school Christ’s Hospital and then Jesus College, Cambridge. But enlisted in a British Calvary unit in 1793, a decision possibly influenced by turbulence in his life at this time of financial or romantic nature. Ill suited for the military, his brothers helped him be discharged for insanity. (1) At Jesus College Coleridge befriended another Lake poet Robert Southley. Together they planed to found an egalitarian community they called Pantisocracy in either Pennsylvania or Wales. However, they could not agree on a location and the project was abandoned. For social reasons, he married in 1795, but it proved an infelicitous marriage, and he separated. It was also that year that he met William Wordsworth. In 1798 they published a collection of both of their poetry, Lyrical Ballads, the watershed work of the English romantic movement in literature. Most of the poems were Wordsworth’s, and Wordsworth also wrote the Preface which explained the poetics of the romantic movement, but Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner garnered the most interest at publication. During his life Coleridge recorded many of his thoughts in notebooks. He was said to carry as many as five notebooks with …