Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge, leader of the British Romantic movement, was born on October 21, 1772 in Devonshire, England. His father, vicar of a parish and teacher of an elementary school, was married twice and had fourteen children.

Youngest child of the family, Coleridge He was a student at his father’s school and an avid reader. After his father’s death in 1781, he attended Christ’s Hospital School in London, where he met his longtime friend Charles Lamb. While in London, he also became friends with a classmate named Tom Evans, who introduced Coleridge to his family. CabbageandRidge fell in love with Tom’s older sister, Mary.

The father of Coleridge He had always wanted his son to be a clergyman, so when the young man entered Jesus College, Cambridge University in 1791, he focused on a future in the Church of England. The opinions of ColeridgeHowever, they began to change over the course of his first year at Cambridge. He became a supporter of William Frend, a member of the university whose unitary beliefs made him a controversial figure. While I was at Cambridge, Coleridge He also accumulated a large debt, which his brothers eventually had to pay off. Financial problems continued to haunt him throughout his life, and he was constantly dependent on the support of others.

On the way to Wales in June 1794, Coleridge met a student named Robert Southey. When making an instant friendship, Coleridge he postponed his trip for several weeks, and the men shared his philosophical ideas. Influenced by Plato’s Republic, they built a vision of pantisocracy (an equal government for all), which involved emigrating to the New World with ten other families to establish a commune on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. Coleridge and Southey envisioned men sharing the workload, a large library, philosophical discussions, and the freedom of religious and political belief.

After finally visiting Wales, Coleridge He returned to England to discover that Southey was engaged to a woman named Edith Fricker. Since marriage was an integral part of the plan for community life in the New World, Coleridge decided to marry another daughter of Fricker, Sarah. He married in 1795, even though he still loved Mary Evans, who was engaged to another man. The marriage was unhappy and Coleridge much of it spent away from his wife. During that period, he and Southey collaborated on a play titled The fall of Robespierre (1795). While the pantisocracy was still in the planning stages, Southey left the project to pursue his legacy in law. Without an alternate plan Coleridge He spent the next several years beginning his writing career. He never returned to Cambridge to finish his degree.

In 1795 he became friends with William Wordsworth, who greatly influenced his work. Coleridge, whose early work was festive and conventional, began to write in a more natural style. In his “conversation poems” like “The Eolian Harp” Y “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison“, Coleridge he used his close friends and their experiences as subjects. The following year he published his first volume of poetry, Poems on various topics, and began the first of ten issues of a liberal political publication titled The Watchman. From 1797 to 1798 he lived near Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, in Somersetshire. In 1798, the two men collaborated on a joint volume of poetry entitled Lyrical Ballads. The collection is considered the first great work of the school of romantic poetry and contains the famous poem by Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner“.
That fall the two poets traveled to the mainland together. Coleridge spent most of the trip in Germany, studying the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Jakob Boehme, and Gotthold ephraim Lessing. While there, he mastered the German language and began translating. When he returned to England in 1800, he settled with family and friends in Keswick.
For the next two decades, Coleridge he lectured on literature and philosophy, wrote on religious and political theory, spent two years on the island of Malta as secretary to the governor in an effort to overcome poor health and opium addiction, and lived off financial donations and grants. Still addicted to opium, he moved in with the physician James Gillman in 1816. In 1817, he published Literary Biographia, which contained his best literary criticism. He continued to publish poetry and prose, especially Sibylline leaves (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825) and Church and State (1830).

He died in London on July 25, 1834.