biography
| name: |
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1772–1834)
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| biography:
| Poet and man of letters, born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, SE England, UK. He studied at Cambridge, imbibed revolutionary ideas, and left to enlist in the Dragoons. His plans to found a communist society in the USA with Robert Southey came to nothing, and he turned instead to teaching and journalism in Bristol. Marrying Sara Fricker (Southey's sister-in-law), he went with her to Nether Stowey, where they made close friends with William and Dorothy Wordsworth. From this connection a new English Romantic poetry emerged, in reaction against Neoclassic artificiality. The publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798), which opens with his magical ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, achieved a revolution in literary taste and sensibility. After visiting Germany (1798–9), he developed an interest in German philosophy and was instrumental in introducing German thought to England. In 1800 he moved to the Lake District, but his career prospects were blighted by his moral collapse, partly due to the opium-based drug, laudanum. He rejected Wordsworth's animistic views of nature, and relations between them became strained. He began a weekly paper, The Friend (1809), and settled in London, writing and lecturing. In 1816 he published ‘Christabel’ and the fragment, ‘Kubla Khan’, both written in his earlier period of inspiration. His small output of poetry proves his gift, but he is known also for his critical writing, and for his theological and politico-sociological works. |
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