Born: October 21, 1772 Died: July 25, 1834
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was a poet, philosopher, theologian, and opium enthusiast who helped launch the Romantic movement in England with a little help from his more practical friend, William Wordsworth. Born in Devon, Coleridge was the youngest of ten children and spent much of his childhood buried in books, which would become a lifelong pattern—though later in life, those books would be laced with metaphysics and morphine.
In 1798, Coleridge co-published Lyrical Ballads with Wordsworth, a volume that basically lit the Romantic fireworks. While Wordsworth delivered earthy introspection and daffodils, Coleridge unleashed vivid supernatural visions and psychological depth, most famously in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner—an epic sea-haunted morality tale complete with ghosts, guilt, and an albatross necklace before it was trendy. Then there was Kubla Khan, a poem that came to him in an opium dream and which he famously left unfinished because someone knocked at the door (a missed call that literary history will never forgive).
Plagued by poor health and lifelong addiction to laudanum, Coleridge drifted through periods of intense creativity and soul-crushing inertia. He was a brilliant mind tortured by its own weight—a man who could coin philosophical terms on a whim and then forget what he was talking about halfway through the next sentence. Still, his influence on literature, criticism, and the trajectory of English poetry is monumental.
Today, Coleridge is remembered not just for his visionary verse, but for embodying the conflicted soul of the Romantic era—yearning for transcendence while stumbling through the fog of reality (and, occasionally, a drug-induced haze).
