Coleridge life

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Biography

Born: October 21, 1772 
Devonshire, England 
Died: July 25, 1834 
Highgate, England 
English poet and author

    
     Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a major poet of the English Romantic period, a literary movement characterized by imagination, passion, and the supernatural. He is also noted for his works on literature, religion, and the organization of society.

Childhood talents :

       
        Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the tenth and last child of the vicar of Ottery Saint Mary near Devonshire, England, was born on October 21, 1772. After his father's death in 1782, he was sent to Christ's Hospital for schooling. He had an amazing memory and an eagerness to learn. However, he described his next three years of school as, "depressed, moping, friendless." In 1791 he entered Jesus College, Cambridge, England. Because of bad debts, Coleridge joined the 15th Light Dragoons, a British cavalry unit, in December 1793. After his discharge in April 1794, he returned to Jesus College, but he left in December without completing a degree.

Poetic career :

    
     The years from 1795 to 1802 were for Coleridge a period of fast poetic and intellectual growth. His first major poem, "The Eolian Harp," was published in 1796 in his Poems on Various Subjects.Its verse and theme contributed to the growth of English Romanticism, illustrating a blending of emotional expression and description with meditation.

      From March to May 1796 Coleridge edited the Watchman, a periodical that failed after ten issues. While this failure made him realize that he was "not fit for public life," his next poem, "Ode to the Departing Year,"

( Coleridge fhoto )
        
     
shows that he still had poetic passion. Yet philosophy and religion were his overriding interests. In Religious Musings (published in 1796), he wrote about the unity and wholeness of the universe and the relationship between God and the created world.

Personal difficulties :

      
         After spending a year in Germany with the Wordsworths, Coleridge returned to England and settled in the Lake District. For the next twelve years Coleridge had a miserable life. The climate made his many ailments worse. For pain relief he took laudanum, a type of opium drug, and soon became an addict. His marriage was failing, especially once Coleridge fell in love with Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth's sister-in-law. Poor health and emotional stress affected his writing. However, in 1802, he did publish the last and most moving of his major poems, "Dejection: An Ode." After a two-year stay in Malta (a group of islands in the Mediterranean), he separated from his wife in 1806. The only bright point in his life was his friendship with the Wordsworths, but by 1810, after his return to the Lake District, their friendship had lessened. Coleridge then moved to London.

Later life :

          Coleridge spent the last eighteen years of his life at Highgate, near London, England, as a patient under the care of Dr. James Gillman. There he wrote several works which were to have tremendous influence on the future course of English thought in many fields: Biographia literaria (1817), Lay Sermons (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825), and The Constitution of Church and State(1829).

For More Information :

          Ashton, Rosemary. The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

     Campbell, James Dykes. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Narrative of the Events of His Life. Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1977.

Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Early Visions. New York: Viking, 1980.

User Contributions:

             So I was wondering why his place of burial is not shown in this article. I am doing a project and this is one of the only reliable sources that I could find. Where was he put 6 ft. under? Was it St Michael's Church in London or one of the many other St Michael's Church's locations.