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Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=299

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Samuel Taylor Coleridge including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/stc.html

This link connects you to the Samuel Taylor Coleridge Archive, created by Marjorie A. Tiefert and maintained by the Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library. It contains many resources including primary texts of the poetry, literary theory and criticism, political commentary, secondary criticism on Coleridge, a time line, and other features.

BIOGRAPHY

The youngest of fourteen children in the household of the parish vicar and master of the grammar school in Devonshire, England, Coleridge was born in 1772. Following the death of his father in 1781, Coleridge studied at Christ's Hospital School, London and ten years later entered Jesus College, University of Cambridge. It was here that Coleridge became an independent-minded philosopher and began to accumulate the debts that would dog him throughout his life. In 1794, Coleridge met Robert Southey and for a time the two planned to immigrate to America to found a commune in Pennsylvania. This utopian scheme fell through when Southey became engaged to Edith Fricker and Coleridge met and married Sarah Fricker, Edith's younger sister. The next year Coleridge began his poetic collaboration with William Wordsworth who encouraged Coleridge to write in a more direct, natural, and colloquial form in such so-called "conversation poems" as "The Eolian Harp," "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" and other works collected in his first volume Poems on Various Subjects (1796). From 1797-1798, Coleridge lived near Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, in Somersetshire. Here, the two poets co-authored Lyrical Ballads with the famous manifesto on Romantic poetics laid out in its "Preface." Coleridge not only pioneered new colloquial forms of poetry but also worked in traditional forms such as the ode and most notably the ballad in his Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Subsequently, Coleridge and Wordsworth toured Europe with Coleridge spending most of his time in Germany engaged in philosophical study of Immmanuel Kant, Jakob Boehme, A. W. Schlegel, and G. E. Lessing. After settling in Keswick in 1800, Coleridge increasingly was prone to the kind of depression recounted in his 1802 "Dejection: An Ode." Despite personal turmoil that led to his separation from his wife Sarah in 1808 and his break with Wordsworth in 1810, he turned his powers to literary criticism, philosophy, theology, and political theory until his ill health and his addiction to opium, took his life in 1834. During his final decades, Coleridge published his magnum opus Biographica Literaria (1817), Sibyline Leaves (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825) and Church and State (1830).

SECONDARY SOURCES

Ford, Jennifer. Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams, and the Medical Imagination. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Haney, David P. The Challenge of Coleridge: Ethics and Interpretation in Romanticism and Modern Philosophy. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2001.

Hedley, Douglas. Coleridge, Philosophy, and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit. New York: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Paley, Morton D. Portraits of Coleridge. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Perry, Seamus. Coleridge and the Uses of Division. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Roe, Nicholas. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Vallins, David. Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER